yet be formed. Much depends on the system adopted. If the instruction were given during school-hours, it would take the place of some other lesson, and, by a proper arrangement of time-tables, might be given at very little additional expense. In some of the schools in which the experiment has been already tried, special teachers have been appointed, who have received a certain fee for each lesson. But if several schools in the same district combined, one teacher might be engaged, and either the children might be brought to a common center, as in the case of the cookery-classes, or the teacher might go from school to school, as in the case of the science-teaching in Birmingham and Liverpool. The latter plan might be more convenient for the schools; but the former plan would be more economical, as enabling one shop and certain tools to be used by several sets of children.
It would be necessary under any circumstances that the instruction should be encouraged by a system of grants, or by some equivalent external aid. A system might be organized of paying grants on the results of the individual work of each pupil; but all the disadvantages of the method of "payment by results" would be emphasized in the case of workshop instruction, and the teaching would lose much of its disciplinary value. The amount of the grant should depend mainly on the average number of children in attendance. A grant of four shillings, as in the case of cookery-lessons, and the recognition of the subject by the Education Department, would afford sufficient encouragement to induce certain school boards and school managers to make manual training a part of the curriculum of the schools under their control. The total amount of these grants would be but a slight addition to our education expenses. According to the last report, the whole number of children presented for examination in the sixth and seventh standards was 112,455. Of these, we may assume that about 60,000 are boys. Supposing half this number to elect to receive workshop instruction, the grant would amount to £6,000 a year. But even this estimate is excessive as an addition to our present expenditure. For many of the children might take handicrafts in lieu of one of the specific subjects on which grants are now paid.[1] It may, therefore, I think, be asserted that, the workshops being once equipped, the additional cost in grants of introducing handicraft teaching into the curriculum of our elementary schools would not exceed £5,000 a year; and for this comparatively small expenditure about 30,000 boys might be annually sent out into the world from our elementary schools endowed with practical skill at their fingers' ends, imbued with a taste
- ↑ It may be well here incidentally to call attention to the relatively small amount of grants earned for specific subjects. Out of 352,860 children, who last year were examined in elementary subjects in the fifth, sixth, and seventh standards, only 64,376 presented themselves in specific subjects, the total amount of grant paid being £14,662 11s. 8d. Of the children on account of whom these grants were earned, Sir John Lubbock tells us that less than 25,000 were examined in any branch of science.
