cow or drive a horse properly is more educational in its outcome for most boys than learning how to extract the cube root or to con geographical definitions. In this field of farm life and labor even a smattering of skill and experience would vitalize much formal schoolwork and open up a new life to many city boys. This then I submit as a vital element in a future course of study in manual training. It can be done and would do much to broaden and unify the physical life and the sympathies of such children.

Finally, courses in shopwork, in both wood and iron, have been worked. out elaborately in many schools. It is not my purpose to speak of these in any detail, but simply to say that unless they stimulate the children into a desire for self-expression, and furnish opportunity for the same, they will not fully meet their needs. Furthermore, they must be so constructed and so ordered that the child will feel that he is attempting to do something worth while. That he has undertaken to make something worth having when it is done, at least that it will satisfy some normal need of the child or his fellows. As far as possible, imitation should be avoided, for as we have said elsewhere, habitual imitation fails to broaden, quicken, and enlarge consciousness, for this conscious life is never so vivid and never so enriched as when the individual is trying to express his thoughts in some active process. We ought never to lose sight of the fact that action without much thinking and planning goes a very

little further than the muscles.

III. FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT CHARLES H. KEYES, SUPERVISOR OF SCHOOLS, SOUTH DISTRICT, HART

FORD, CONN.

I. The problem before us for consideration and discussion today involves many mooted questions of intricacy and difficulty. We may help to clear the way for a few steps on the path toward solution, by recalling five special pedagogical axioms that are usually promptly and completely forgotten by people who undertake the formulation of a course of study in manual training for elementary schools.

1. No adequate course of study in manual training was ever made by a school superintendent or a group of superintendents.

2. The large majority of the inefficient and unbalanced manual-training courses are prepared by manual-training teachers and supervisors, and the freer the rein given them, the wilder these courses of study usually are.

3. Art teachers are no better equipped to make manual-training courses than school superintendents and manual-training people are. They possess the one advantage, however, of being as a rule too modest to essay any such task.

6. The child-study experts are the only people who might make worse courses than ordinarily come from any one of the three sources just referred to.

5. The responsibility for inadequate and defective courses of study in manual training must rest primarily with the school superintendent and his

principals. To state the proposition in other form: The superintendent of schools must be held responsible for the development of a rational manualtraining course and it must be made in the same way that an effective course of study in any other subject is produced.

II. This responsibility is for a number of specific and fundamental items which must be carefully examined.

1. The superintendent and his principals must see to it that proper time and opportunity is provided for doing the proposed work in a way that is worth while-time that can be protected from the demands and encroachments of other subjects of the curriculum. The poorest course of study thus provided for and protected is better than a superior course without time to be genuine.

2. It is the duty and responsibility of superintendents and principals to insure that these courses provide for such forms of manual training only as can be shown to be educative interpretation or genuine self-expression. Doing stunts with knives, or needles, or planes, or hammers is not necessarily a desirable form of education. Not all confections in mud or paper, iron or pine, reed or rafia, twine or tilo, are either self-expression or educational interpretation. Educational manual training is nothing else; and it is the specific responsibility of the superintendent and his principals to see that the course in manual training can stand this test.

3. The responsibility is similarly placed for making the manual-training work as largely as possible ancillary to the work in the traditional branches of arithmetic, geography, history, nature-study, and science. In this way only will the work get adequate time in the modern school of many subjects.

4. The superintendent and his principals before attempting the formulation of the course in manual training are responsible for securing complete and illuminating advice from four classes of experts. (a) The most important. of these is the manual-training teacher or supervisor. Skilled in manual processes, observant of their reactions upon pupils as well as themselves, familiar with tools and appliances as well as materials, they are best fitted to furnish the most important counsel as to what the course of study should contain. But this advice should never be vouchsafed until the manualtraining expert first learns from observations of classes and pupils what work they are doing and can do in the arithmetic and drawing and science and other branches of common-school endeavor. Only experts competent to recognize and estimate educational values in the academic work should qualify as advisers on this point. (b) Another expert whose counsel and assistance are indispensible to the framer of the manual-training course is the art teacher. Educational manual training is and ought to be so dominated and determined at almost every step by art principles that it would be futile to expect an effective course of study in this field without the constructive criticism of the art-teacher. Again the work of the art-teacher and the manual-training teacher is necessarily so inextricably and delightfully inter

woven that it would be impossible to prepare any intelligent scheme of work without the art-teacher's contribution. In fact we may well question whether the only ideal special teacher of manual training in the first four or five grades is not an art-teacher trained for this special service. (c) The next expert to whom we must turn in assuming this responsibility is the master of childstudy. To him we must go for criticism of processes, appliances, and materials. The bearing of all these on the intellectual and physical health of the child ought to be studied by the practical expert and judgment rendered accordingly. It will be a fortunate day also when child-study experts and sane physicalculture teachers address themselves to the study of manual-training processes as a means to health. We shall then be much aided in producing a more effective course. (d) But after the manual-training teacher, the art-teacher, and the doctor of child-study have done their best there still remains to be sought the counsel and criticism of the most valuable expert of all, the efficient grade teacher. Without her aid and judgment the course will not infrequently rub at points; and she is always able to help put the most carefully prepared course into shape that makes it mean more for her boys and girls. She is a teacher of girls and boys, of course, and not of clay modeling or basketry, and I wonder if some of our elementary training is not so wooden and muddy at times just because we do not put enough of the live grade teachers into the course of study. When further we take into account that it is the regular grade teacher who must do three-fourths of the work in manual training of the early grades it is the more important that we shall command her aid in shaping the course.

5. The superintendent and his principals are responsible for the sequence and arrangement of the material of the course of study so as to secure proper correlation of teaching endeavor. I am not concerned with a correlation for the sake of correlation but I have grave interest in more correlation for the sake of more effective teaching. How much time is lost, for example, because we fail to bring the drawing or the arithmetic to the manual training or the manual training to the science and arithmetic. No one but the superintendent and his principals can effectively contribute this element of strength to the course.

6. Last but not least of these specific responsibilities of the superintendent, I name the necessity for securing recognition of the environment of the school in the details of the course of study in this subject. In every subject we strive to knit together the world inside the schoolroom and the world outside the schoolroom. So the surrounding natural, economic, and social conditions furnish wise limitation or powerful stimulus for the work of the school. Thus the interests of the community re-inforce interest in school and the boys and girls are trained to an understanding and respect for the conditions out of which their own prosperity issues.

III. Now I am not sure that any one has dreamed of a uniform course of study in elementary manual training for the whole country or even for all the

schools of a single great state. Such a plan would appear to the speaker one of the most unwise that could be undertaken, doing violence to the principle just enunciated. We have had two trying experiences in this country illustrating the danger of implanting a system without reference to its environment and assuming that it would grow and prosper. The Sloyd courses of Sweden were brought to Boston; but it took ten years of Yankee modification to make them go in New England public schools. Boston Sloyd courses were prescribed for Pasadena and Santa Barbara and it took five years of study and modification to make them fit the public schools of southern California.

Again, the history of the kindergarten in America furnishes another illustration of the folly of attempting a uniform fixed course. For years the country was full of kindergartners working themselves into rhapsodies and their friends into ecstasies over their unchanging and unchangeable system, the same yesterday, today, and forever. All of truth had been discovered by a revered leader-what he did in Switzerland in his time was exactly the thing to be done in any land and in any time-the materials and processes he used with his peasant babies on the mountain sides were the only things to be used, in Philade'phia or Quebec, in Honolulu or Bombay. Some dear devotees of the "pure kindergarten" still insist on this gospel and urge it in language that no one can understand and no one ever has understood; the mass of thinking kindergartners have brought their kindergarten courses and processes into vital touch with their special environment. Good kindergartens in Hartford and Boston, in Los Angeles and Helena, in New Orleans and St. Paul, are not and never ought to be the same in their courses and plans. I assume accordingly that we shall not strive to formulate any one ideal manual-training course for the elementary schools of the country.

IV. I believe, however, that it is desirable that some of the best thought of the country be brought to bear upon producing several courses of study in manual training for the elementary schools.

All should recognize universal fundamentals inherent in the nature of the child. Each should recognize and take into account a great characteristic environment. One classification might be into classification for great cities, for small towns, for country schools. Another might recognize such types as are suggested by urban-manufacturing trolley-netted southeastern New England, by the farming belt of Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, etc., by the semi-tropic empire in whose metropolis we are met.

The Committee of Seven found in dealing with its much simpler problem -history in the secondary school-that a number of courses must be formulated to meet varying conditions thruout the country. One or the other of these courses has been adopted in hundreds of cities and towns thruout the country and no progressive city in America now undertakes to issue or reissue a course in history for its high school without incorporating therein the chief features of one or more of these courses. A set of courses on manual training similarly

prepared would solve the problem exactly for scores if not hundreds of towns thruout the country; and they would furnish a guiding standard for the schools of every wide-awake town of the land.

V. I venture to suggest that the departments of the National Educational Association represented in this joint session ought to undertake this work; and they ought to do this thru a working-committee made up of representatives of the five interests involved in this discussion. (1) Live school superintendents and (2) growing school principals who have come up thru the ranks to successful leadership, (3) child-study experts (not doctrinaires of the cloister variety), (4) efficient manual-training teachers and supervisors who are not simply handy but educated, (5) and broad-gauge co-operative teachers of art-these are the people who can deliberately do this work. It means drudgery and conference and more drudgery and more conference. It means faith and sympathy and insight. But the result will affect for good the schools of the land for a generation.

If we can inaugurate and perfect some such movement as this, the session has been worth while; if not, another theoretical, pedagogical seminary has passed into history under pleasant skies and a gracious presiding officer, whose assembly it has been a high privilege to address.

DISCUSSION

T. A. MOTT, superintendent of schools, Richmond, Indiana.-The superintendent's view of the manual training as a part of the educational process in the schools of the state should be a broad one. If we recognize as we must that the training of the hand is as legitimate a function of the school as the training of the heart or the mind, the duty of the superintendent is clear. The three papers we have just listened to on this subject are the ablest discussions that I have ever heard. With them I clearly agree.

The superintendent's place in our educational system is that of the leader and director of the educational forces of the community. Not only should he be a leader and director of the corps of teachers, but also a leader in the board of education and among the people with whom he works. The new education has established the fact that manual training in its true forms is purely educative and seeks the development of the full man. It insists that the school cannot in any complete sense develop the intellectual and moral powers of the child without a corresponding training of sense and muscle to be the servants of the mind. It also insists that there can be no high degree of manual power on the part of our citizens without a corresponding mental development. In fact we all recognize that the man with heart and mind and hand trained co-ordinately becomes the most useful citizen whether his life be lived in the industrial world or in the realm of intellectual work. That the one who possesses the most rounded development of bodily power will in the long run prove the strongest in all those fields of life in which the highest forms of intellectua effort are demanded.

Again we must recognize the value of joyful work as an educating force in human life. The power to do work is the largest factor in the measurement of character. Training in the power and habit of doing accurate work with a true motive is one of the greatest elements in the educational process. Education from the first to the last means training in doing the best one can do along lines of useful work.

Granting these facts, manual training becomes a fundamental element in every