that training of the eye and
hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in
former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally,
as it were, in the mere course of growing up.

On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time.
History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives,
instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is illustrated
in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the
new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them,
schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual
training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but
nothing more. The most valuable and important work of this kind is
reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain
high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for
the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all
sorts of educational privileges already. Education, publicly provided,
free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established
primarily for the benefit of the workers' children, yet of all
children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit
from it. Many circumstances combine to produce this unfortunate
result. The chief direct cause is poverty in the home. So many
families have to live on such poor wages--five and six hundred dollars
a year--that the children have neither the health to profit by the
schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the
home is one or perhaps two rooms. The curse of homework in cities ties
the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on
buttons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the
work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at
school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are
with the teacher. In the country the frequently short period of school
attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced
from young children by poverty-harassed parents has similar disastrous
results.

Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen,
many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age.
The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears
English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade
than the child of English-speaking parent