their
own garments, cook and serve meals to teachers or to other classes;
while in the advanced grades the boys make furniture, sleds, derricks,
bridges and telegraph instruments. Chair caning, weaving and clay
modeling are also widely used in the hand work of both boys and girls.

Fitchburg, Mass., has developed a Practical Arts School, paralleling the
seventh and eighth grades in the grammar school. The school includes a
Commercial Course, a Practical Arts Course, a Household Arts Course and
a Literary Course. The regular literature, composition, spelling,
mathematics, geography, history and science of the seventh and eighth
grades is supplemented by social dancing, physical training and music in
all of these courses; and in addition for the Commercial Course by
typewriting, shorthand, bookkeeping, business arithmetic and designing;
for the Practical Arts Course, by drawing, designing, printing, making
and repairing; for the Household Arts Course, by cooking, sewing,
homekeeping and household arts; and for the Literary Course, by
half-time in modern language and the other half in manual training and
household arts.

At the end of the sixth year (at about twelve years of age) children in
Fitchburg may elect to take this school of Practical Arts instead of the
regular grammar school course. The results of this election are
extraordinary. The practical course was planned for the children who
expected to leave school at fourteen, or at the end of the eighth grade.
Curiously enough, all types of children have flocked into it. Sons of
doctors, lawyers and well-to-do business men; boys and girls preparing
for college, and children who must stop school in a year or two are all
clamoring for admission. In spite of the fact that pupils are kept in
these schools six hours a day instead of five, as in the other schools,
the attendance at the end of two years has outrun the accommodations.
The children who leave this applied work and enter the high school are
apparently not a whit less able to do the high school work than those
children who have come up through the regular grades.

The new education is broader than the old, because it accepts and adopts
any study which seems likely to meet the needs or wants of any class of
children or of any individual child. The storehouse of the mind is
to-day unlocked with educational keys of which educators in past
generations scarcely dreamed.

XI School and Shop

For the present, at