TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 727 
It should not be difficult to devise a curriculum for elementary schools alter- 
native to the literary and commercial curriculum generally pursued. The first 
step toward this curriculum would be to divide a school day clearly into two 
sessions, the morning session being devoted mainly to the literary and intellectual 
side, covering such subjects as English, arithmetic, writing, geography, history, 
and the laws of health, and the afternoon session to what may be called the 
practical and recreative and constructive elements—drawing, singing, physical 
training, manual work of the most varied kind—affording full scope for originality 
both in teacher and child, and housewifery for girls, It should be clearly under- 
stood that there is to be correlation between such subjects as arithmetic taken 
in the morning and such manual work, whether by boys or by girls, as is taken 
in the afternoon, and similarly between any instruction in elementary science 
and the manual occupations taken, Demands for sucha curriculum were recently 
put forward by the Physicial Deterioration Committee in its report; by Prof. 
Sadler in his Presidential Address to the Educational Science Section at the 
meeting of the British Association in 1906; and by the president of the National 
Union of Teachers at the annual conference in 1907. 
Incidentally the advantage of such a curriculum will lie in the improve- 
ment of the conditions of the classes of the population most exposed to physical 
deterioration, and in helping to counteract some of the deadening influences too 
often involved in the conditions of modern industry. For the principle at the 
root of such a curriculum high authority can be quoted. There are physiologists 
of eminence who are ready to support Mr. C. G. Leland’s contention that ‘from 
seven to fourteen years of age a certain suppleness or knack or dexterous 
familiarity with the pencil or any implement may be acquired that diminishes 
with succeeding years’; and the following maxim from Goethe is worth 
pondering: ‘In all things to serve from the lowest station upwards is neces- 
sary; to restrict yourself to a trade is best. For the narrow mind, whatever he 
attempts is still a trade; for the higher, an art; and the highest in doing one 
thing does all, or, to speak less paradoxically, in the one thing which he does 
rightly he sees the likeness of all that is done rightly.’ 
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