what Mr. Marble calls a "failure" of manual training. True, it did fail to appear after three successful years, but Mr. Marble certainly gave the impression that the experiment had shown that manual training was educationally a failure. He quoted the new superintendent as saying, "The novelty wore off and it was dropped," a statement singularly deficient in candor. The explanation for this want of candor is found in Mr. Marble's words a little farther on.

He quotes the new superintendent as saying: "I have since heard much discussion pro and con, but I am by no means convinced that the public schools should undertake this work"! There you have it! There was the failure! The new superintendent was "not convinced." The people who had seen it wanted it, and were willing to pay for it; but the new superintendent, who had not seen it, did not want it, and didn't think the public schools should undertake it. So much for Mr. Marble's first instance of failure.

The second case, at North Easton, Mass., is even more interesting. Mr. Marble quotes the principal as saying, that in consequence of the introduction of some manual work, his first Latin class went to pieces when he came to the subjunctive mood. The French class followed suit, but the physics class "suffered most." The principal then adds, with the air of a martyr: "Policy would dictate silence; but I have counted the cost. 'It is not all of life to live, nor all of death to die""! This plainly suggests a different opinion on the part of the authorities. Accordingly, I wrote to the superintendent, Mr. William C. Bates. I find that the town has the benefit of a fund which yields $4,000 a year, which is spent for manual training. They have some manual work in all the grades. It is nearly two years since the high school "went to pieces," as Mr. Marble puts it, and yet the manual training continues in all grades, and with great popular favor. The superintendent says that in the lower grades the programs were so arranged that there was no conflict of hours, but that in the high school no such arrangement was made. The principal, "with all the intensity of his being, was opposed to the union of manual training with a purely mental drill," and "he could not bring himself to give the new order of things a fair trial." Whenever the pupils went to shop or laboratory, they were absent from recitation, (half a day each week,) and the lessons must be made up. "When the girls left the room to go to the class in cooking, the principal so plainly showed his disapproval, and showed so little disposition to give the new department a fair show, that many of the girls were forced to give the work up altogether." Cooking is now taught regularly to the grammar grades, but the first year the high-school girls, who had never had cooking, were allowed to take it. The class in mechanical drawing is held on Saturdays, because no time can be found for it on other days; and yet "it is well attended." "The school committee and the superintendent know that the trouble was greatly exaggerated in the letter of the principal to Mr. Marble.”

*North Easton is a small town with a high school of about 65 pupils, and a sum total for all schools of $12,600 per year.

In his report for the year 1888 the principal says (and the manual training continues to date): "In conclusion, allow me to express my firm conviction that the Easton high school never was in a more satisfactory condition.” The superintendent indorses this statement, and adds: “At no time in the last five years has the school varied from its uniformly satisfactory condition."

So here we have a school that "went to pieces" doing splendidly, and yet the boys go to shop every week on an unaccommodating program. It is evident that the explanation of this second failure is akin to the former. There was one man who was opposed to it. He told the superintendent at the start that it would be better to burn the money than to spend it on manual training.

A fellow-teacher of many years' acquaintance writes of the principal:

"He was bound to disapprove of manual training, and will as long as he lives. It was introduced without any consultation with him. He disapproves of normal schools; never visits one, and doesn't know what they are doing, but is always 'down' on them, and on any teacher who comes from them and introduces new methods. Manual training still lives and prospers here in spite of his opposition." Here I must leave Mr. Marble. Manual training can survive many more such failures as Gloucester and North Easton.

VI.-The Views of Editor Brown and Dr. Harris.*

A careful study of the St. Louis school, the "mechanical processes it employs, and the activities they stimulate," throws much light upon the discussions of psychology. This flood of light is a result of no little importance at the present crisis.

Placed as Messrs. Brown and Harris are, without the circle of actual contact with the matter under discussion, they have no resource but that of speculation. Valuable as their discussions are, however, they do not in my judgment compare with the light thrown upon the questions at issue by actual experience. I appeal with all confidence to the school itself, to its fruits in the community, to that increasing band of students whose lives are daily witness to the three-fold benefit of manual training in their education, to the wide circle of parents who volunteer unanimous and enthusiastic approval of the system of training which they find so valuable to their sons. The tremendous strength of this public opinion is one of the results which the cause of education must feel.

I touched fully upon the intellectual and physical results in my paper read in Washington in March last. As this paper is now in print, I must refer those interested in this subject to its contents. [See Circular of Information No. 2, 1889.]

I have read and re-read several times Mr. Brown's very interesting and able presentation of the functions of observation and reflection in the growth

*See June Education for “The Educational Value of Manual Training," and May and June Education for The Psychology of Manual Training."

and development of intelligence. I should be false to my convictions if I did not cheerfully admit that I heartily indorse the greater part of what he says on this point. The parts I cannot indorse consist of conclusions drawn from false premises in regard to the nature and methods of manual training.

To begin with, he misinterprets my remark that, "I do not say that every public school should have a shop and teach the use of tools." He appears to understand from that, that I do not recommend manual training for all pupils; and yet I said ten lines farther on, "every boy in his teens should have systematic manual training, and no instrumentality, no opportunity can compare with that of the school for giving it. Moreover, the school can afford all that is generally desirable without loss of dignity or efficiency in other directions. Eventually some manual elements, duly modified, should appear in all the grades, but it is folly to insist that manual training, properly so called, should go at once into all the grades or none." Because I would not put fully-equipped shops and the severe drawing of my school into all grades, he remands manual training to special schools. Would he put Cicero's orations, quadratic equations, and practical chemistry into every public school? If not, then they must be remanded to special schools, according to Mr. Brown's method of reasoning.

Mr. Brown fails to rightly conceive the nature and methods of manual training. So long as he discourses upon the nature and educational necessity of observation and reflection, I am with him. He even makes a most important concession: "See something-then draw it-then make it. This is the sequence of steps by which the child is to come into a mastery of the world through the manual-training process. The importance of this study and construction of things in primary grades is concealed. . . While in this lower intellectual stage [of observation], objects of sense and of the imagination must command his attention. It is not probable that too much emphasis will be given to the necessity for persistent and systematic training by skillful teachers in the observation and construction of things. Mr. Woodward does not place too high an estimate upon teaching a child the meaning of a 'process.""

This would appear to be a great step forward. Once admit the educational value of such a sequence of steps, and we shall soon come to an agreement as to the proper time and place for introducing it.

But Mr. Brown italicizes the word "primary" in the above passage, and later on he gives us to understand that the period for this lower intellectual stage of what he denominates "concrete thinking" ends when the child is ten (10) years old.

"To learn to observe by observing does not seem the most economical use of time after the child has reached that maturity that makes reflection practicable... . . The workshop ought not to go into the upper grades of a general educational system, for the reason that the time of the pupils can be better employed." He speaks of the three hours devoted to manual

work (shop-work and drawing) and the "three hours to studies that train to reflection," as though there was no question about the non-reflective character of our manual features.

These extracts clearly show that Mr. Brown thinks, (1) that workshop training involves observation, but not reflection—at least, no reflection that could not be had without the shop; (2) that the intellectual operations of the workshop are within the capacity of children under ten years of age. He bases all his arguments on these premises.

TRAINING EXECUTIVE FACULTIES.

Dr. Harris makes a similar mistake, while setting up and then knocking down a theory in regard to the culture of the executive faculties in manual training. He says "that it has been claimed by some of its advocates that we have in manual training an executive action of the mind while we have only a receptive activity in the other school studies," and that "the distinction between executive and receptive activities seems to be based on" the difference between the efferent and afferent nerves, i. e., the motor and sensor nerves. "It would be assumed," he says, "in the first place, that the most essential forms of human activity are sensor and motor. The individual should be receptive of impressions from without through his nerves of sensation, or else he should be executive through using his muscles. Moreover, in order to make this theory [i. e., his theory] apply to manual training, it must be held that manual training covers the ground of the motor, or executive."

He then proceeds to demolish this theory of his as follows: "But the psychology on which this distinction of executive and receptive activities is based is not sound. It omits the elaborative faculties of the mind altogether." So down goes the theory, as it ought, for it is a very poor theory. What I object to is not that he demolishes his theory, but that he ever set it up.

I find it hard to believe that either Dr. Harris or Editor Brown ever supposed it possible that any of us could advocate as a part of secondary education a feature which involves not brains but muscles alone, which leaves out the reflective, elaborative faculties of the mind.

Now let me say to these gentlemen, that if there is no reflection in manual training, if we do leave the elaborative faculties of the mind out of the exercises of the shop and drawing-room, then there is nothing in manual training worthy of the name.

But we do not leave them out. Mental activity in the shape of thoughtful, deliberate, logical reasoning is the great characteristic of our exercises, particularly for those which call for invention and executive action. Could these men spend a single week in a manual-training school they would see how wide of the mark their assumptions are. The shop of a manual-training school properly so called is full of intellectual life. Thoughts of the

playground, the theater, the circus, the dance, the loafing rendezvous, enter less frequently into the shop than they do into the study hours. While mentally recreative, from the fact that it calls into activity parts of the brain either not employed or but little exercised in book-work, shop-work is still brain-work. Very often it is obvious that at the end of two hours the shop students are on the borderland of mental, not physical, fatigue. To actually get over into the realm of mental fatigue is harmful. For a boy of twelve, an hour or an hour and a half of shop-work at a time is a great plenty, if the object is education; at fourteen he may have two hours, but no more; at eighteen he may have three hours. These figures, which may be taken as approximately correct for average boys, are the result of long experience on the part of many men. All recognize that the limit of time. is fixed by mental and not muscular considerations.

This activity is inevitably in the nature of close attention, sharp comparison of present conditions with former conditions, generalization, and invention-in short, in the use of all the faculties. I do not hesitate to say that students engaged upon the five lines of study-mathematics, science, literature, drawing, and tool-work-reflect as much and as profitably upon their shop-work as upon any other branch.*

It is this reflection upon the force and meaning of every new step and process, this elaboration of the impressions of personal experience and the pictured experience of others into a basis for the execution of a new and untried step- I say it is this mental activity which sufficiently accounts for the rapid progress students make in mastering the secrets of tool construction and use. Competent judges declare that our boys of sixteen years learn as much of the theory and practice of iron and steel forging and tempering, for example, in 250 hours as ordinary shop apprentices do in two years, spending eight or ten hours daily in and about the shop. As a rule, the apprentice boy reflects very little upon his work; he is not taught nor stimulated to think and reason. Excepting at rare intervals when he is put at something new, what fills his hands fails to occupy his mind; his thoughts are absent, and he is learning nothing except muscular automatism. In a well-conducted school, shop instruction and practice stop short of the point where the mind would tire of the work in hand and fly for relief to other fields.

Both Mr. Brown and Dr. Harris fail to see this mental element in manual training. The former thinks of every boy with tools in his hands as the victim of a system which dispenses with brains and "reduces him to a mere machine." Speaking of a man he has seen or heard of in a manufacturing town, Mr. Brown says: "Ten hours per day for twenty years has matured the turning of plow-handles into a mental and physical habit which domi

*Says Dr. W. Götze, before the Eighth Congress of German Educators: "Manual instruction teaches the child to contemplate, to observe - gives him opportunity for personal experience. The clear look [insight], the active sense which the boy acquires in practical work, acts advantageously on the rest of his studies, for his whole being is transformed."