seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of
reasons and abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a
psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. Thus
the best forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reinforce the best
tendencies of the present. The writings of the above gospelers of work not only
could and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd
and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete
without the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be the
mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who design and draw
patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to shape matter for human
uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all
such things. The muse of art and even of music will have some voice in the great
synthesis which is to gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of
secondary motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of
adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate,
drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform
offer to our selection. All this can never make work become play. Indeed it will
and should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus,
because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own distinct,
but richer, and more abounding life.
I must not close this section without brief mention of two important studies that
have supplied each a new and important determination concerning laws of work
peculiar to adolescence.
The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per minute of
all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not very difficult and is
often attained after two months' practise. This standard for a receiving rate is
harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught shows that about
seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so
are not employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in
both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical subject in the
curve on the following page.
From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a few
months before the receiving rate, which may fall short. Curves 1 and 2 represent
the same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the three-fourths who fail.
Receiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at
ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low