A few points in boyhood from fourteen to eighteen determine the whole trend of a life.

Manual training in the high school gives a boy something to do. It requires him to spend two hours a day in hard work in the shop, work which in itself is sufficient relaxation and exercise for the whole day. Instead of tramping the streets for exercise, he gets it in the day time in the shop, and is compelled to study at night in his home. And the boy who stays in at night is safe, safe from a thousand snares spread for impulsive and unwary feet.

And why shouldn't the high school boy have manual training? It is no detriment to his regular work in the school. We have fifty boys who are taking the course and they stand right up in the classes side by side with the other boys. It is true that the boy in the manual training school has to cut down his time for riding bicycles and playing amateur base-ball. helps him.

But instead of its hurting the boy, we think it

Last June a pale-faced boy was promoted to the high school. He was a youth of slight physical frame, of the sort that physicians sometimes recommend to be taken from school for the benefit of their health. At the beginning of the year, he entered the class in manual training, and with some curiosity I watched the physical effects upon the lad. After some months I began to detect rounded lines in arms and legs where before there was a painful straightness. Walking home with him last week, I inquired about the training school and its effects upon his health. "Well," he said, "I do not know that my health is better than it ever was; it has always been good, but then I am a good deal stronger than ever before." The manual training school not only educates the hand, but it puts legs and arms on the boys instead of the miserable caricatures we sometimes find instead. It puts down under the life a good physical foundation.

The boy has a right to the best training that the state can give him. in the time devoted to his education. If he can take a course in manual training without any detriment to his other studies, why should we say him nay.

There be those who do not hesitate to assert, and our own short experience in Toledo bears them out in the matter, that far from being a hindrance, the training in the manual department is a positive help in the purely mental studies. It is certainly true that the training in the manual school lets in a flood of light upon a thousand things but imperfectly understood before. All of the manual exercises are intel

lectual exercises.

Man can be defined to be not only the animal that laughs, but the

animal that uses his hands for constructive purposes. And in all construction, the hand and brain are complementary factors. We deal too much with words. Like Hamlet, our pupils read "words, words, words." In the manual school we get down under the word to the thing itself.

Prof. C. M. Woodward, of St. Louis, says:

"Manual exercises, which are at the same time intellectual exercises, are highly attractive to healthy boys. If you doubt this, go into the shops of a manual training school and see for yourself. Go, for instance, into our forging shop, where metals are wrought through the agency of heat. A score of young Vulcans, bare-armed and leatheraproned, with many a drop of honest sweat and other trade marks of toil, stand up to their anvils with an unconscious earnestness which shows how much they enjoy their work. What are they doing? They are using brains and hands. They are studying such words as "iron" "steel," "welding," "tempering," "upsetting," "chilling," etc. And, in the shop where metals are wrought cold (which, for want of a better name, we call our machine-shops), every new exercise is like a delightful trip into a field of thought and investigation. Every exercise, if properly conducted, is both mental and manual. Every tool used and every process followed has its history, its genesis, and its evolution."

Further, if the introduction of manual training in the high school compels such a judicious use of time as will do away with loafing and killing time that hangs heavily on unemployed hands, if it will take the boys off the streets at night, there is another powerful reason why it should be introduced into the high school. If, further than this, it aids in building up a robust type of the physical man, if it gives that temperate exercise, spoken of in the old copy-books, which strengthens the constitution, there is another reason why we as school men should not stand in the way of the proposed change.

But, if beyond all this, it holds out to the boys a promise of an education that will the better enable them to take hold of the practical business of this life, if it gives them the hope of a hand so trained that it can catch on to any one of a thousand occupations, and if by means of this sure promise and this well grounded hope, the boys can be induced to prolong their school life until the ratio of boys to the girls shall not be as 100 to 222, but as 222 to 222, who of us will not bid Godspeed to manual training in the high school?

The settling of things by dead men and living generations of men, has been and still is one of the curses and clogs of humanity.

THE PROPER SPIRIT IN THE SCHOOL.

BY H. W. HARRIS.

[Read before a joint meeting of teachers of Portage and Summit Counties.] Every pupil as well as every teacher carries with him into the school room a certain spirit which serves to mark and characterize him-a sentiment or purpose which underlies his work. In a well regulated school the outward conduct of pupils is not likely to differ much under ordinary circumstances. They are uniformly respectful to their teachers and in the preparation and recitation of lessons no marked difference is observable. And yet, as the observer begins to look within, he discovers the widest variety in the motives in obedience to which pupils conduct themselves and do their work. In one there is a love of order, respect for authority, and a ready adjustment of self to the life of the school; in another disorder, lack of self-control, and a disposition to rebel against lawful restraint.

The teacher soon learns of these differences, reading them, as he does, in the countenances of his pupils, in their behavior under success and failure, and in their intercourse one with another. And though he may be able to secure a somewhat uniform attention to the work of the school he knows this attention comes from widely different motives. The obedience that comes willingly from one comes grudgingly from another. From one he gets a ready compliance in the preparation of lessons; another has to be driven to his work and watched constantly to see that he does not slight it.

It thus happens that at the very outset of his work the teacher is met by one of the most important questions pertaining to it,-how to get his scholars into such a mental condition that they can advance in culture as they should. He is well assured that the pupil who does his work merely because he has to do it, and who yields obedience to authority merely because he dare not resist, is not in a condition to be most benefitted by the school, even though it have no other purpose than merely to impart instruction. Pupils learn but poorly in an atmosphere of discontent and rebellion, however these things be kept under restraint. How to get the pupil to make sufficient progress in his studies and how to get the public sentiment of the school what it should be for purposes of government must remain open questions until the school is controlled by right purpose. The importance of this gets additional force when it is remembered that the design of the school is to fit for life. That which at first appeared as a mere annoyance to the teacher in his government, or a hindrance in his work, now appears as something likely to affect the entire future of the boy

or girl. While it is important that the boy have courage, honesty and ambition enough to be a good pupil, it is far more important that he have enough of these qualities when he becomes a man. And we as teachers are never to forget that it is along the line of this life culture that our work principally lies. The benefit the public school is bound to confer upon the state is to send out its boys and girls trained in those qualities which the state most needs. The public school can never hope to instruct in everything, and it is doing its proper work when it affords that training least able to be secured from other sources and which contributes most to the highest public good. Every other test of public school courses and public school methods should yield to this one. And so intimately does the cultivation of right habits, the possession of self-control and integrity in the citizen, enter into the welfare of the state that it may reasonably expect aid of its servant, the public school, in securing them. The pupil's tastes, his conscience, and, in short, his entire moral ke-up are the things in which the teacher is ever to be concerned, as they are the things which make most for true citizenship and for the future of the man or woman. If the boy leaves school with intellect enough to make a successful rogue and without character enough to prevent him becoming one, the state is likely to be the loser in instructing him. We are not to forget that heart is above intellect and that learning unsanctified by character can but prove a curse to him who has it. If we are not preparing our pupils for life but for examination; if under the influence of our so-called "machine system" pupils are being robbed of their individuality and made impractical and selfish, the public school system, or its administration, needs change. How much ground there is for these complaints it is not our present purpose to enquire, but rather to ask what some of the actuating motives of the school should be and what means the teacher has at hand for securing them. In this, extended classification is not attempted but merely the pointing out of some things pertaining to the questions.

In the first place, the pupil should feel that as a member of the school he has duties to perform and a measure of responsibility; that this is his place of business in which he is to be interested and in which he is to display his energy. If he be a member of a class studying a certain branch that fact should dispose of all whims of dislike and disposition to shirk because the work is not just his kind. Pupils who are ready to find small excuses for neglect of school work, or to half do things which they know it is their duty to do well, display a weakness of character that needs the attention of the teacher. Many of the most important concerns of life are such as must be at

tended to whether pleasant or not. Preparation for these things is a part of the legitimate work of the school. Nor is it necessarily a preparation without pleasure, as the consciousness of performing duty becomes even to the boy a source of satisfaction.

Courage and a grip that does not let go too easily are qualities eminently useful in the affairs of life. Much of our school work contributes directly in the line of such culture if rightly used. If the teacher accept it as his duty to remove all that is difficult from before the pupil, the latter may, however, get but little help in this direction from his arithmetic and his algebra. The not improperly called "soft teaching" proceeds upon the principle that the way must be made so easy that the pupil find little or nothing to test his patience and tire his brain-a principle that however attractive fails to recognize the essentials of all real success. Do not those who proclaim a method of education that costs no effort on the part of the learner either dignify by the name something that is not genu, or forget Heaven's great law of labor? Is it a safe doctrine for the cd to feel that though a human being he forms an exception to this universal law of mankind? that in his case honest, faithful toil is not the price to be paid for success? The law of toil does not begin when the pupil leaves school; but it is the law of his childhood as well as of his manhood and old age. What can so unfit a pupil for life as to send him out with the belief that working and sweating, getting tired and exercising patience, though well enough in the days of his grandfather, are not needed now? Oh! but some will say, "That is drudgery. Our children cannot be subjected to such treatment." Honest labor is drudgery only when made such. Peace, happiness, and contentment in fullest measure have always appeared in the dusty garb of toil. To ask of the child strength. and character and culture without work is to ask an impossibility. For the teacher to beget in the pupil the notion that getting an education is a grand sight-seeing pleasure excursion is to make a serious mistake. He may teach him that no right effort put forth is without its reward even in an increase of happiness; but not that reward comes without effort. He may teach him that education is boundless in the pleasure that it yields; but not that it is mere play. A teacher may so train a pupil by making everything as easy as possible that self-confidence and self-reliance gain little or no strength. Many a class does little because its members think that they can do but little. A boy's ability and his faith in himself ought to stand at the same level. What he thinks he can do is likely to be the measure of what he does; hence the importance of training him in properly estimating his own powers. As the relation of the pupil to the teacher and to his fellow pupils is