A WISE INDUSTRIAL EXPERIMENT

Globe, Volume XX, Issue 1523, 4 January 1879, Page 3

A WISE INDUSTRIAL EXPERIMENT

An interesting experiment (says the “Argus”) is being made by the municipality at Rheims. That body has founded a school of industry, capable of accommodating 300 pupils, and affording a course of instruction covering a space of three years, to which boys between twelve and fifteen years of age are admissible from other schools. It possesses a staff of six professors, and there is a teacher in each of the workshops. In one of these practical mechanics is taught in all its branches, steam power, a forge, benches, and all kinds of tools and implements being provided. In another part of the establishment the boys learn the carpenter’s, joiner’s, and cabinet-maker’s arts. In a third department weaving is carried on by means of numerous hand-looms, and the textile fabrics produced are from designs devised upon the premises. A portion of the building is devoted to the study of chemistry, and, as Rheims is one of the seats of the woollen manufactures of France, the pupils are taught how to analyse the staple, how to wash and cleanse it without injuring its fibre or its lustre, how to extract from it the natural grease and reduce it to a solid substance, how to prepare dyeing colours, and how to apply them. Attached to the school is a large piece of ground, planted with trees, shrubs, herbs, and llowors; and here the science of botany is taught. The institution has now been in existence for two years, and the advantages it offers seem to be eagerly embraced by the rising generation in Rheims, who find in it much more entertaining and profitable occupation than in lounging about the streets of the city after nightfall, and poisoning the air with the fumes of cheap tobacco ; for the evening lectures, which are free to all the residents in the place, are numerously attended and highly prized. Altogether the undertaking is one deserving of the warmest approbation, and its success will probably lead to the example thus set being emulated by other cities. It is the kind of education which is most wanted in this “working-day world,” and nowhere so much, perhaps, as in the colony of Victoria,