366 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
lowed by entrance upon the work of life in early childhood, with no previous preparation for it and no unity whatever between the school and work.
It may be said that there are already schools having manual training classes ; but this does not alter the fact that, taking the whole country into consideration, it is the sons of the business and professional men who receive manual training and the son of the artisan who gets none. The workingman who knows his trade only as a trade, and not as an art or a craft, aspires to work his boy into commerce or a profession ; but the man of assured position wishes for his son the continued advantages of the manual training begun in the kindergarten, and he gets them. It is one of the many anomalies of the present educa- tional situation that manual training is chiefly fostered in com- munities which, from the industrial point of view, need it far less than do the manufacturing centers. This is evidence of the acknowledged pedagogical value of this training; but it is proof, also, that we have not yet recognized its industrial and social value. At a stage of industrial development in which every waste product of the material world is scrupulously util- ized, the precious latent talent of the working-class children is recklessly left out of account in our general scheme of educa- tion for the years from six to sixteen.
It is not the purpose of this paper to urge any one scheme of manual training. We may find, with growing experience, that there are certain pedagogical principles underlying given forms of work, as we have already found that drawing possesses a distinct pedagogical value, besides serving the children subse- quently in industrial ways. Sloyd is still in so incipient a state that its teaching savors of the amateur, though the use of the knife may be the beginning of greater things. This is not the place, however, for discussing the relative merits of this or that branch of instruction, but rather to urge the adoption of the principle of extending manual training to all the grades of all the schools, not merely at the option of the high school boy. While this principle is reaching adoption, and provision making
