The boys are chosen mainly from the seventh standard, and attendance at the workshop is considered a privilege, and a reward of merit in ordinary school subjects. It is therefore a simulus and incentive to industry and thoroughness of work. This plan has been so effective that a boy once chosen values the teaching and practice so much that he continues to be chosen each week, and the instruction is therefore continuous, for the class has been virtually the same since it started.
Boys who have been trained in a good school, and have acquired soundly the rudiments of education, too often when they leave school think that their proper career is a city counting-house, and that to wear black clothes and appear as a gentleman is a fair summit of their ambition. I certainly think that this workshop for upper standard boys will help to dissipate this idea, as it will show boys that, after we have given them the best education which the school offers, we then lead them into the workshop, and so practically show them that the end and aim of our training is to enable them to learn some useful trade, and so become good workmen.
The workshop, I believe, is a valuable training to enable the eye and hand to work in harmony. It is intended to make the school-drawing, especially the scale-drawing and geometry, apply as much as possible to the work done in the workshop. It is certainly a pleasant relief to ordinary school-work. Should a boy not follow a trade when he leaves school, he will at least be able to make his home-work comfortable by using the skill and facility which he has acquired in this workshop.At the expense of the Rev. S. Barnett and a few of his friends, a workshop has recently been fitted in the school attached to St. Jude's Church, Whitechapel. Arrangements have been made for giving instruction in carpentry and turnery to boys, and in modeling and woodcarving to girls of the upper standards, and the results of the lessons have fully justified the most sanguine expectations of the advocates of this kind of instruction. Those who have visited these schools have been struck with the cheerful interest shown by the children in their work, and by the effect of the teaching in quickening their perceptive faculties and in stimulating their intelligence. The contrast between the listless and often inattentive attitude of children, occupied with some ordinary class lesson, and the eager eyes and nimble fingers of the same children at the carpenter's or modeling bench is most instructive; and no one who has seen it can have any doubt of the educational value of this kind of training. These results, it must be remembered, have been attained by teachers most of whom have themselves been trying experiments, and have been working by the light of Nature without any well-considered methods. Under properly-trained instructors, the results would doubtless have been far more satisfactory.
There is good reason to believe that the stimulating effect of workshop instruction on the intelligence of children will be such that, not-withstanding the loss of the time spent in the shop, their progress in their ordinary studies will be in no way retarded.
Mr. Swire Smith, a member of the late Commission on Technical
