The new Education is all-sided — its Effect. — A Harmonious Development of the Whole Being. — Examination for Admission to the Chicago School. — List of Questions in Arithmetic, Geography, and Language. — The Curriculum. — The Alternation of Manual and Mental Exercises. — The Demand for Scientific Education — its Effect. — Ambition to be useful.
We have now passed in review all the school laboratories, from the engine-room, or laboratory where power is generated, to the Machine-tool Laboratory where power is utilized, or harnessed, and compelled to do the work of man. We have observed the student, in his first effort over the drawing-board, struggling laboriously to make a straight line, and in the Laboratory of Carpentry, trying with varying success to make a tenon fit the mortise, and we have stood by his side in the Machine-tool Laboratory in the moment of his triumph exhibiting his graduating “project”—a miniature engine throbbing under the pressure of steam, and doing its work with admirable precision. But we have seen only the manual side of the curriculum. The mental side is still to be shown. The claim made in behalf of the new education is that it is better balanced than the old, that it is all-sided, that it produces a harmonious development of the whole being, that it makes of the student a man fully furnished for the battle of life, mentally, morally, and physically. Accordingly the curriculum of the Manual Training School combines with the laboratory exercises a variety of mental exercises of quite a comprehensive character; and first, certain mental requirements are necessary to admission, as witness the following from the first catalogue of the Chicago Manual Training School:
“Candidates for admission to the Junior year must be at least fourteen years of age, and must present sufficient evidence of good moral character. They must pass a satisfactory examination in reading, spelling, writing, geography, English composition, and the fundamental operations of arithmetic as applied to integers, common and decimal fractions, and denominate numbers. Ability to use the English language correctly is especially desired.”
The following questions were used at the first examination for admission to the Chicago school.
ARITHMETIC.
Transcribe work sufficient to show processes. No credit given for results alone.
1. Change to decimals and find the sum of 4⁄5, 5⁄8, 11⁄16, 9⁄20, 41⁄50.
2. Divide the product of 285⁄7 and 134⁄9 by the difference of 85⁄12 and 44⁄5.
3. Divide .00875 by 121⁄2.
4. Reduce .395 of a mile to integers.