rade work before coming to him. His school, which includes pattern
making, cabinet work, carpentry and machine shop work, is run on the
"job" plan. That is, a boy is assigned to a job such as making a
head-stock for a lathe. The boy makes his drawings, writes his
specifications, orders his material and tools, estimates the cost of the
job, makes the head-stock and then figures up his actual costs and
compares them with the estimated cost. Not until he has gone through all
of the operations, may he turn to a new piece of work.

"We tried the half-day and half-day in shop plan," Mr. MacNary explains,
"but it was not a success. It disturbed the boys too much. So we hit on
the plan of letting each boy divide his time as he needed to. When he
has drawing and estimating to do, he does that and when the time for
lathe work comes, he turns to that. It breaks up any system in your
school, but it gives the best chance to the individual boy."

One day a week all of the boys meet the teachers in conference to
discuss their work and to make and receive general suggestions.

The boys who come to Mr. MacNary's school are boys who would probably
leave the regular school at fourteen. Many boys come because they are
discouraged with the grade work, and of these "grade failures," many
succeed admirably in the new school. During the two years of this
shop-work, the boys get a training which enables them to take and hold
good positions in the trades. As one foreman said, "A boy gets more
training in the two years of that school than he gets in three years of
any shop."

These are but an index of the myriad of attempts which cities are making
to bring school and shop together, to train for usefulness, to start
boys in life.

XII Half a Chance to Study

There are other ways in which the school may help. For example, in the
case of homework. On the one hand, homework for the sake of homework may
be eliminated. On the other hand, children may be given half a chance to
read and study.

One day in a squalid back street I glanced through the window of a
corner house. The front of the house was a grocery store. The room into
which I happened to look was a general dwelling room. On one side stood
the kitchen stove; the floor was littered with children and rubbish, and
just under the window a child sat, her book before her on the
supper-covered dining table, doing multiplication examples--her
homework. The well-to-do child, less than ten sq