regarded as exemplifying a new movement in education, that keeps all working at high pressure. The Lancasterian craze produced wonderful results at first, we are told. We all know the marked difference between schools of every sort in which the teachers are drones, and those where they are enthusiastic and capable.

When all of these things are taken into account, it does not seem to me that any proof and hardly any evidence has been advanced by Mr. Woodward that the workshop training is of any direct intellectual value to his boys. .Would not all the educational results obtained be substantially what they are if the workshop were converted into an ordinary gymnasium, and the same interest and enthusiasm in regard to it maintained?]

I have not time now to consider the relative merits of Drawing and the Workshop, and to show that the latter is substantially a repetition of the former in these upper grades. This I have done before at different times. I believe in drawing in all the grades of the first two periods of education as firmly as I disbelieve in the workshop in the higher grades. I see in drawing, if well taught, every kind of mindactivity found in the workshop, and much that is not found there. The workshop is a wasteful repetition of what the drawing room furnishes, unless the design be to educate mechanics. But that design classes the manual training school with special schools, and not among the common schools. If the workshop is put into the school as a gymnasium there can be no serious objection. In this very mechanical age of ours in which so much attention is given to storing up energy to be expended at other times and places, it is not strange that the notion becomes prevalent that the physical energy expended in exercise for bodily health and vigor may be stored up in mechanical tools for possible future use. But all of these things are very different from the doctrine advocated by Mr. Woodward, or, at least, by the manual training apostles generally, which is that it is entitled to a place in the common schools for its direct educational value. That doctrine is not pedagogically sound.

I have been able to consider but one function of the school-that of training in intelligence-and but one point in that, which is the importance of training in reflection or general thinking. But the workshop will not be found more useful in realizing the other functions. It is only as a special school that its right to a place in a public school system can be maintained. As such special school there is not only no objection to it, but it is needed. It is to take the place of the old apprentice system now happily obsolete. Let us have trade schools and every kind of special school that our complex civilization requires. But let us see to it that we build these upon as broad a foundation of general culture and as complete an intellectual training as time and circumstance will allow the child to receive. It is the function of a common school that is common, to give this culture and training.

MR. WOODWARD: I do not propose to answer his paper; it needs very little. But I wish to say that those who are interested in the reply I had the honor to make to Dr. Brooks, will find it in the February number of the New York Teacher. I think it would have been more interesting to you if I had read my paper before you read his. I wish to say that I did read Mr. Brown's article between the lines, and saw that I was a fetich worshipper. I saw in the lines themselves a statement to this effect, that the manual training fetich is tottering to its fall; and from the profound depths of the Missouri woods I could not refrain from referring to him as a common neighbor.

MECHANIC ARTS HIGH SCHOOLS.

BY EDWIN P. SEAVER,

Superintendent of Public Schools, Boston.

The question of manual training in public schools, though yet unsettled, seems to be growing clearer. The discussion, heretofore largely theoretical, now advances in the gathering light of experience. During the last ten years have been organized schools and departments of schools in which manual training has been made the leading feature. Some of these schools are public schools, while others are supported by fees and endowments. Definite results of these experiments begin to appear, and the most interesting contributions to the discussion now are the records of such results and the means used in obtaining them. For example, perhaps the most interesting chapter in Professor Woodward's recent book is that in which the graduates of the St. Louis Manual Training School trace the effects of their training in their subsequent occupations and prospects in life. The more such evidence is gathered and published, the better. For it is not until the argument from experience has gathered considerable force that boards of education will be likely to undertake, or can reasonably be expected to undertake, new lines of instruction in the public schools. Hence, the great value of private enterprise in this as in any other movement for the improvement of public instruction.

On one branch of the general question the argument from experience seems already conclusive, proving that systematic class instruction in the mechanic arts can be given to boys of the high school age with facility, with economy, and with excellent results. This conclusion points to the general adoption of a new kind of school. The purpose of this paper is to show that a highly useful and desirable enlargement of the public school system, especially in cities and large towns, would be made by organizing schools which may be descriptively named mechanic arts high schools. This name seems preferable, although another name, manual training schools, has already obtained a wide currency.

A word now as to what is implied in the name mechanic arts high school. The new school is called a high school to mark its grade or place in the public school system, and its relation to other schools below and above it. Its pupils will usually come from the grammar schools, having finished their studies there at the age of about fourteen years. They will here pursue for three or four years a course of training, partly in book work and partly in the mechanic arts and in drawing, on a level with other boys of equal age, who take the classical or the commercial or the general course of study in other high schools. After graduation they will pass either into higher institutions, as the boys from classical high schools usually do, or into active life with most of the graduates of other high schools. But the higher institutions of learning will be schools of science or technology rather than colleges, and the active life will be led more in the industrial than in the professional pursuits.

The new school is further described as a school of mechanic arts, in order to mark its special aim and the characteristic feature of its course of instruction. Its aim, like that of any other high school, is both general and special. In general aim all high schools agree. They deal with knowledge as science, rather than with knowledge in its elements; they recognize that their pupils are at the age when the reasoning powers are developing the most rapidly; they give the beginnings of a liberal education; for their instruction rises to the region of general principles, and furnishes the mind with some effective equipment for independent thought and action. Limited and incomplete the liberal culture of the high school may indeed be; yet, so far as it goes, it may rightly be called liberal, if only the school be true to its general aim.

But high schools have also special aims, determined by various considerations of convenience or utility. These special aims are what characterize the different species of high schools. In large measure they determine the subjects to be taught and the manner of teaching them. So it happens that all high schools shape their courses of study largely with reference to the probable future occupations of their pupils. The classical high school, while pursuing its general aim of liberal culture, yet prescribes studies for its pupils with particular reference to their probable future occupations in the so-called learned professions. And this is right. Likewise the English high school, holding to the same general aim of liberal culture, chooses the particular subjects for its course of instruction, with an eye to the wants of the many of its pupils whose pursuits in after life are to be commercial. Just so will the mechanic arts high school impart a culture as truly liberal as that given by either of the others; but in so doing will select studies and exercises with the fact in view that most of its pupils will be looking forward to occupations in which an experimental acquaintance with the mechanic arts will be either highly serviceable or absolutely indispensable. A 882-No. 2--11

glance at the statistics of occupations in our cities will show that the number of boys who would naturally seek the training of the mechanic arts high school is greater than the number likely to be drawn by either or both of the other high schools, supposing all three kinds of school to have been established during a time long enough to make their respective advantages widely known.

If the foregoing be a correct analysis of the aims of high school instruction, and if experience has shown that these aims, in the case of the mechanic arts high school, can be in a satisfactory degree realized, then is the claim of the new high school to public support and to a place in the public school system, side by side, with the two older high schools clearly vindicated.

There are two points that invite a passing remark. In the first place, it seems to strike some persons as very odd that anything worthy the name of liberal culture should be imparted by a mechanic arts school. The wits treat the idea with ridicule, and the philosophers gravely wag their heads as if doubting the entire sanity of a mind possessed of such a notion. Both illustrate the vigor with which old ways of looking at things survive. Ever since the revival of learning, the habit has been to associate liberal culture with classical studies, and with classical studies alone. The liberally educated man has been taken to be a man well versed in the languages and history of Greece and Rome. No knowledge of physical nature however profound, no success in discovery or invention however brilliant, could quite make up for a lack of classical learning. Hence great naturalists, physicists, chemists, mechanicians, architects, engineers, have been supposed to be a little inferior to what they might have been if only their youth had been spent in the study of Latin and Greek. The real-schulen of Germany have never quite won that social recognition which the gymnasien have long enjoyed. The same is true of the "modern schools" and of the "modern sides" of classical schools in England. In France the recognition of non-classical culture has been less tardy. In this country our English bigh schools date back hardly more than two generations, while classical high schools date back more than two centuries. It should not be surprising, therefore, if the graduates of classical schools are popularly regarded, and are even prone to look upon themselves as members of an only true and ancient order of nobility in the kingdom of educated men. High schools, which replace Greek and Latin with science and modern languages, have hardly in two generations won an unwilling recognition. And shall it fare otherwise with the mechanic arts high school? Must not this newest comer expect to see its claim to a share in the work of liberal education questioned and ridiculed?

Yet, sooner or later, we may be sure, recognition will come. More and more are men coming to see that liberal culture depends not so much on the subject matter of study as on the method of study; not so much on the kinds of knowledge acquired as on the kind of man the

process of acquisition has turned out. In the kingdom of educated men that is to come, the ancient orders of nobility will no longer hold exclusive privileges. The distinctions of rank will turn, not on what men know, but on what they can do; not on the particular schools they have been through, but on the value of the service they are prepared to render mankind. In such a kingdom a Bessemer or an Edison would not yield precedence to a Porson or a Bentley. The liberally educated order would include all men whose training had given them free command of their faculties, together with the ability and the will to manifest their power in beneficent activity. That manual training is an educational agency well adapted to the purpose of developing mental power on a side hitherto neglected by the schools, is a conviction that is steadily gaining ground. Meanwhile let those laugh who will. But if any are earnest in the matter, let them listen to a few words of Froebel, who writes thus in his book entitled The Education of Man:

Every child, boy, and youth, whatever his condition or position in life, should devote daily at least one or two hours to some serious activity in the production of some definite external piece of work. Lessons through and by work, through and from life, are by far the most impressive and intelligible, and most continuously and intensely progressive, both in themselves and in their effect on the learner. Notwithstanding this, children-mankind indeed-are at present too much and too variously concerned with aimless and purposeless pursuits, and too little with work. Children and parents consider the activity of actual work so much to their disadvantage, and so unimportant for their future conditions in life, that educational institutions should make it one of their most constant endeavors to dispel this delusion. The domestic and scholastic education of our time leads children to indolence and laziness. A vast amount of human power thereby remains undeveloped and is lost. It would be a most wholesome arrangement in schools to establish actual working hours similar to the existing study hours, and it will surely come to this.

And in another place:

It is surely one of the greatest faults of our current school arrangements, especially of the so-called Latin and high schools, that the pupils are wholly debarred from outwardly productive work. It is futile to object that the boy at this age, if he is to reach a certain degree of skill and insight, ought to direct his whole strength to the learning of words, to verbal instruction, to intellectual culture. On the contrary, genuine experience shows that external physical, productive activity, interspersed in intellectual work, strengthens, not only the body, but in a very marked degree the mind in its various phases of development, so that the mind, after such a refreshing work bath (I can find no better name), enters upon its intellectual pursuits with new vigor and life.

Could Froebel's language be more apt, if he had written in this last quarter of the century instead of in the first; and for the America of our day instead of the Germany of his? How very largely the child's creative activity is employed and developed in the occupations of Froebel's kindergarten is well-known to all who are familiar with that beneficent system of child culture. The manual training school-or, as I have preferred to call it, the mechanic arts high school-has been very aptly described by a well-known writer, Mr. C. H. Ham, as "a kindergarten