134 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. .500. 



exception in the Brooklyn Manual Training 

 High School. The head master of this 

 school, Mr. Larkin, has conceptions of the 

 educational possibilities which manual 

 training may afford which place him on a 

 special plane. His school at present is very 

 inadequately housed. New buildings, how- 

 ever, are to be provided, and it is to be 

 hoped that these will not be so palatial and 

 ornate as to destroy the true workshop-like 

 character and atmosphere of the cramped 

 quarters in which the work is now carried 

 on. In the first year the boys do wood- 

 work; in the second, metal work— chiefly 

 forging; in the third, printing; in the 

 fourth, machine-tool work. The second- 

 year work was in the hands of a man of 

 exceptional ability, not merely a smith, but 

 an artist, so that the imagination as well 

 as the mechanical aptitude of the boys was 

 being well developed. The printing was 

 in charge of a master who also taught chem- 

 istry in the school — an enthusiast who had 

 mastered the art of printing and was teach- 

 ing it con amore. Ocular demonstration 

 of his persuasive powers was afforded by 

 the presence in the workshop of a valuable 

 linotype machine, which he had induced 

 the makers to present to the school. "We 

 met with another man of this type teaching 

 woodwork at a high school in Washington. 

 He had been educated in the school and, 

 perceiving the importance of the subject, 

 had served for several years as a pattern- 

 maker in the Navy Yard at Washington; 

 then he had returned to the school as a 

 teacher. 



It is men such as these that are needed 

 to put manual training on a proper foot- 

 ing—and it is all important that we should 

 devise means of attracting such men into 

 schools. 



The introduction of printing as a school 

 subject may appear altogether absurd, but 

 Mr. Larkin gave us clear evidence in proof 

 of its value. Not only, he argues, is it of 



importance as a manual, mechanical ex- 

 ercise, as the means of bringing lads into 

 contact with a set of facts outside ordinary 

 experience, as well as of familiarizing them 

 with all that is involved in the production 

 of the books they read, but it is also of 

 value on the literary side. When lads are 

 called upon to set up in type and print off 

 something that they have written and to 

 correct the proof, they begin to realize, in 

 a way which is rarely done by the mere 

 writer, how careless they have been in writ- 

 ing, how poor their style. We were 

 favored with copies of a journal produced 

 in the school— printed and illustrated there 

 — which certainly gave evidence of great 

 skill. Mr. ■ Larkin has a true conception 

 of the educational possibilities afforded by 

 proper manual training: while depreci- 

 ating the attempt to train up skilled work- 

 men as tending to stereotype the teaching, 

 he sees very properly that it affords op- 

 portunities both on the mechanical and 

 artistic side for general culture and that 

 it may be made a most important adjunct 

 of the literary and scientific work. Had I 

 enjoyed no other opportunity than that of 

 meeting him and of learning his views, I 

 feel tiiat my visit would have been a fruit- 

 ful one. 



But elsewhere I found an almost abso- 

 lute lack of imagination underlying the 

 manual training work — vague ideas of pos- 

 sibilities but neither real understanding nor 

 sufficient executive power — although tech- 

 nically much of it was excellent. 



It may be hoped that manual training 

 schools— both primary and secondary — 

 will soon be established here in which at 

 least half the time will be spent at experi- 

 mental and manual work. There is no 

 more important experiment to be made in 

 education that that of determining the 

 value of sucli schools. In these schools a 

 whole floor at least should be fitted up as 

 a workshop and every kind of manual work 



