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. 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

rational course of study in the grammar and high schools, and the equipment of manualtraining facilities is an essential part of the physical equipment of every school system.

The great variety of manual-training courses in this country is bewildering. The great need of our schools today is an authoritative statement of the best courses of study in manual work. The many courses proposed and carried out in different schools should be carefully studied and sifted by a competent educational committee, and their judgment given to the world in the form of a report to this association.

L. E. WOLFE, superintendent of schools, San Antonio, Texas.-Professor Dresslar, in his valuable paper has presented a great variety of subject-matter for manual training The selection of the proper subject-matter for manual training is very difficult. I am sure however that we will not go far wrong if we keep constantly in view the general principle that such educative material must be selected as will most vitally relate the pupil to industrial life. As some doubt has been expressed as to the feasibility of school gardens and school farms, I would like briefly to refer to what is being done in our city. For nearly three years we have had school gardens in connection with each of our twenty-four schools. These gardens are on the school grounds, and are in size from a tenth- to a half-acre. The boys of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades devote one hour a week to gardening while the girls sew. The work is in charge of a competent supervisor who goes from school to school. While the gardening was made voluntary when first introduced, only a few requests to be excused came from the parents. The boys look forward to the garden hour with delight. They love the work and are especially glad to have an opportunity to stretch their limbs. We must not think of this gardening as simply digging in dirt. On the contrary, it is highly educative. The boys are more or less familiar with the necessity for economy in the use of material in woodwork—in the building of houses, etc. They learn that a like economy must be used with the soil and moisture out of which grains, grasses, fruits, and vegetables are made.

We are looking forward with the beginning of school next September to a school farm of twenty or thirty acres, located near the terminus of a car line, where boys of the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades and the high school can be taken for a half-day or more once every two or three weeks, for the practice and study of tree culture and for the purpose of carrying out such systematic experiments as are being made under the direction of the state experiment stations and the United States department of agriculture.

I am satisfied that there is a great future for school gardens and school farms thruout the South, where a spring and a fall garden can be planted, cultivated, and harvested during the school session. In the North where the growing-period is chiefly during vacation, we may have to resort to vacation schools, to secure the best results. For these reasons I can not entertain the idea of omitting the dealing with mother earth in our manual training, especially at a time when the government of the United States is doing more than ever before in this line and when Luther Burbank and others are showing the possibilities in the field of agriculture.

CREE T. WORK, president of the College of Industrial Arts, Denton, Texas.-By way of information touching the subject of agricultural instruction, which has been included in the presentation of this question, you will be interested to know that day after tomorrow (July 11) there becomes effective in the state of Texas a law requiring that the elements of agriculture shall be taught in all school districts having a scholastic population of three hundred or less. I also desire to announce what the gentleman from San Antonio (Superintendent Wolfe) was too modest to say, namely, that not only does San Antonio teach agriculture in the schools, but that she has also been making generous provision for, and a good beginning in, bench work, domestic science, domestic art, and other forms of manualtraining work.

I desire to call your attention to two points bearing upon the adequacy of our courses in elementary manual training, and to commend them to your consideration: The first is, that the adequacy of our courses depends in part upon their adaptability to the sex of the

pupils. Girls and boys have an intellectual recognition of sex and the consequent differences in habits, work, and even thought processes, before they reach the period of physical change. In all of our schoolwork we have been too prone to overlook this great fact. We have followed most faithfully the tendency of our forefathers to masculinize the curricula of our schools thruout, from the A-B-C class to the end of the high-school course, and even thru the college. Search your textbooks and see what a dearth of reference there is to the interests, activities, and life of women and girls. If we will recognize the existence and interests of both sexes in our courses of manual training, as well as in other schoolwork in the elementary grades, we will thereby do much to vitalize the process we call education.

The second point I would make is that the adequacy of our courses in manual training depends in good part upon the attitude of the school authorities-the board of education, the superintendents, the principals, and the teachers-toward the work, and particularly in the matter of the credit given to the work by them. The esteem in which any line of schoolwork is held by the authorities and teachers has much to do with the manner in which it is received by, and with the consequent educational effect on, the students. We cannot expect our courses in manual training to be the most beneficial so long as they are regarded as ornaments, extras, tag-ends, or “non-essentials;" or so long as we relegate the work to the attic, the corner, or the damp, dark basement of the school building, where we would not think of placing the history or the mathematics work which really requires less light and less pure air than the manual training. Neither can we hope for the best results until the manual-training courses are taken with the same seriousness by teachers and superintendents as is bestowed upon other subjects, and credit given on the records and reports accordingly. I would not have in my school work for which I could not give credit. If the manual-training work is not worth classifying with other schoolwork in this respect let us dispense with it and put in something that is worth while. But since its worth has been well demonstrated, it seems reasonable to ask and to expect that it be formally respected. This will result in the greater effectiveness of the work in the school, as well as in a positive advantage to the individual pupil.

EMMA C. DAVIS, supervisor of public schools, Cleveland, Ohio, stated that an experiment in school gardens had been carried on in that city for three years. Gardens, in which both girls and boys worked, were in eight school districts under the supervision of a director of school gardens. These gardens were devoted mainly to vegetables, tho flowers also were grown. The gardens varied in size from plots in the school yard to a half-acre of ground adjoining a school building. Talks and experiments on soils, growth, pollination, etc., formed an important part of the work. It is considered a valuable adjunct to both the manual training and nature-study in Cleveland.

A. H. CHAMBERLAIN, Throop Polytechnic Institute, Pasadena, Cal.-Fifteen years ago it would have been an easy matter for me to have outlined a course of study in manual training best adapted to the elementary school. Today I should hesitate about making a dogmatic statement in this direction. Indeed I should oppose any uniform course of study proposed. But whether the course be suggested by the school superintendent, the childstudy specialist, the grade teacher, the art, or the manual-training teacher, the first element necessary is common sense. True it is that the work adapted to one locality may not be best suited to another, and even in a given locality the work demanded at one time may differ materially from that which should be offered at another.

Too long has the "bread and butter" idea been in seeming conflict with the culture side the utilitarian as opposed to the so-called educational phase. There is and should be no conflict. It is necessary that in any locality the children be taught to use those elements and materials that lie about them. Too frequently the teacher ignores the facilities at hand and reaches out after the non-attainable. While we should always strive to better conditions the effort should be made to utilize to the utmost the materials at hand and to use the equipments in the most effective way.

In a given city or state an expert should be provided to visit the various schools. He should study the equipments and see how they may be improved at the least possible expense. He should investigate the possibilities of materials in the immediate neighborhood; he should learn the needs and demands of the locality; he should study the teachers and their methods and be what the English would call an organizer in manual training. He should combine the necessary qualifications of superintendent, child-study specialist, art, manual-training, and grade teacher and be possessed of a large amount of tact and

common sense.

THE RELATION OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION TO PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

INTRODUCTION BY THE PRESIDENT

FRANK M. LEAVITT, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF DRAWING AND MANUAL TRAINING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, BOSTON, MASS.

It is probable that no single topic has engaged the attention of educational conventions more frequently, during the past two years, than has this topic of industrial education. Certainly there is no question which has been so insistently urged as being of immediate and vital concern to the country at large. Furthermore the discussion has been remarkable in that there seems to be but one opinion regarding the necessity for, and the benefits to be derived from, the establishment of a wise and far-reaching system of industrial training.

The conditions which have led to this urgent need have been set forth so fully and are doubtless so familiar to most of us that I will merely mention the most obvious of them without comment.

The industrial and commercial prosperity of our country has resulted from peculiarly advantageous circumstances. Our raw material has been comparatively cheap and seemingly unlimited. In addition to foreign customers we have had a large and prosperous home market. Our native population has been almost instinctively industrial and is virile, aggressive, and adaptable. We have had also the advantage of a liberal sprinkling of skilled and industrially trained workmen from the Old World, attracted by the superior opportunities offered in our new and rapidly growing country. While never as perfect as some seem to imagine, we formerly had an apprenticeship system which provided a thoro industrial training for a considerable number of our workmen.

It is apparent that these advantages over other industrial countries are fast disappearing and that they do not today exist in a degree sufficient to warrant us in ignoring longer the crying need of a thorogoing system of industrial education.

While there is unanimity of opinion as to the needs of the establishment of a system of industrial education, there is no agreement whatsoever as to the agencies by which such education shall be given. Shall it be provided at public expense thru an extension of the present school system? Shall the state give local aid in establishing special schools for this purpose? Shall