All children are naturally practically disposed and want to turn to immediate use the fruit of their labor. To postpone their enjoying of these fruits until an indeterminable "Future" is to divert the childish disposition into a wrong channel and kill at the birth their childish delight in their own work.

To take an example: If an artist - say a painter or a sculptor - never was expected to accomplish any work until he were able to produce his masterpiece, but always had only to go on practising and practising for a distant and uncertain goal, how could he develop any zeal for his undertaking, and how could he ever be expected to complete something great? And yet he would be in possession of more patience and forethought, than we can expect from a child.

Manual Training has nothing to do with education; it is only a special kind of factory work, by which individuals are transformed into living machinery. It is a mere "caste" training for schools frequented by children either of the rich, or by those of the very poor.

The former are enjoying it as a "hobby", that they take up and drop in accordance with their own notions.

The latter, the "pariahs", are expected to take it up and to stick to it as to an unavoidable duty. For how could there otherwise be secured carpenters and cabinet makers and builders and shipwrights, etc., for the future, now that the workmanship of the building trades - preserved from the mediaeval time by generations - is vanishing to an alarming extent, and that the iron-machinery can not after all fully replace the work produced by the human hand?

So the children of the poor are destined by the community to become "menials" of the future, and moreover, the parents of these children are expected to be deeply obliged for the "education" their offspring is thus receiving.

The "Future" should not always be held up for children's imagination as a mysterious and frightful phantom, for the sake of which they have to struggle and learn things that are perfectly indifferent, if not even distasteful, to them. Let children be happy in the present and do things just for to-day; but let the educator consider it as his duty to see that the children's work of to-day is laying a steady foundation for the requirements of the future.