Industrial Training and Technical Education. 29 



only be preserved by sanitary conditions ; so long as children 

 are reared in houses in which all sanitation is neglected they 

 will, with difficulty only, be taught anything. The " mens 

 Sana in corpore sane " is a first condition. If you will visit the 

 poorer elementary schools in this city you will find an aggrega- 

 tion of children with dirty clothes and dirty skins, striving, or 

 more correctly not striving, in a dirty atmosphere, to take in 

 five or six hours mental instruction. During the last two and 

 a half hours there is a total absence of receptivity. The scene 

 in the street as they scatter homewards shows how little they 

 are used to control or discipline. Every boy I have examined 

 in the Balmoral Reformatory was a pupil in an elementary 

 school. It is said that the modern epidemics of smallpox and 

 such hke diseases were unknown among the heathen until the 

 missionaries, in their ignorance of sanitary science, assembled 

 the unwashed savages in churches and congregations ; and it 

 may be suspected that the epidemics of measles, scarlatina, and 

 other children's diseases in this city are largely due to the 

 conditions thus described. During the last great epidemic of 

 Cholera in London and which raged in the East end, in a large 

 half time school in the very midst in which sanitary measures 

 were duly observed, not one instance occurred amongst the 

 inmates. Remembering, too, how indifferently many of these 

 children are fed, can any reasonable man expect them, when 

 they leave school, with all these additional drawbacks, to be fit 

 to earn an honest livelihood ? 



Contrast with these what has been proved on the other side 

 in half-time schools with industrial training. Masters have 

 reported for thirty years that the half-timers will reach a given 

 standard in the same or even less time than a full timer, for the 

 simple reason that for half-time the child's brain is fresh and 

 receptive, and after a longer period it flags. All that is learned 

 and assimilated in either school is acquired during that time. 

 On the other hand the half time spent in labour is remunerative, 

 and therefore fair to the parents as well as agreeable to the 

 child, who is at the same time learning not only what will 

 enable him to earn his bread, but habits of order, discipline 



