Manual training must be carefully adapted to the child’s age, and in the case of very little children must take the form rather of a game. Its character may be very various: the preparation of drawings and models, experimentation with tools, the construction of tools or other useful objects out of wood, clay, dough, iron, &c., garden work, and the like.
Although the results of manual training are so remarkably good, it is only quite recently that it has been utilised as a means of education. The explanation perhaps is that manual work being all done by slaves, serfs, body-servants, and wage-labourers, was despised by the upper classes, and for this reason its great educational value was so long overlooked. Ethical and educative influences are so completely lacking to wage-labour, that the child should not be occupied in wage-labour, but only in manual work of an educative influence and tendency. Instruction in productive work, involving an explanation of the fundamental methods of the production of commodities and habituation to the use of the simpler tools must form a part of education. The attempt to extend manual training expresses the general tendency of evolution. The elementary schools of most civilised countries show that manual training can be readily introduced into the elementary school curriculum. Indeed, in the public elementary schools of many countries, manual training is now compulsory, especially as regards instruction in feminine manual occupations. But manual training cannot be developed to the fullest extent, nor can this method be expected to furnish the best possible results, until capitalist production for profit has been replaced by social production for use.
_Preparatory Schools._--What we said about crèches applies, though with some differences, to preparatory schools. Children go to the modern elementary school at a comparatively early age, and are subjected to the discipline of school without any preparatory initiation. Institutions whose aim it is to prepare children for the life of the public elementary schools are known as preparatory schools. The idea that before the age of school-attendance the child should be methodically employed for some hours daily, that the occupation should be physical, and that the work should be so arranged as to appear to the child as a kind of play, is not a new one. Alike on educational and on social grounds it is certainly desirable that the period of public education should begin earlier than the present age of compulsory school-attendance. Such is indeed the tendency of evolution, and in Hungary we have already advanced far in this direction.