- **. 
 
 II 
 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE 
 
 OIF 1 
 
 BY 
 
 Professor C. M. WOODWARD. 
 
 D. C. HEATH & CO.
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE 
 
 OF 
 
 MANUAL TRAINING, 
 
 CONSISTING OF AN 
 
 EXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENTS PRESENTED IN THE 
 
 REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL COMMITTEE ON 
 
 PEDAGOGICS, AT NASHVILLE, JULY, 1889, 
 
 BY C. M. WOODWARD, 
 
 Of Washington Uim-ersiti/, St. Loitix. 
 AND A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE SAME REPORT 
 
 BY GILBERT B. MORRISON, 
 Of the Kansas City High School. 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX CONTAINING THE COUNCIL 
 REPORT IN FULL. 
 
 D. C. HEATH & Co., PUBLISHERS, 
 BOSTON, NEW YORK AND CHICAGO, 
 
 1890.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 717 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF MANUAL 
 TRAINING. 
 
 There is every indication that the interest in the aims, 
 methods and results of manual training is spreading and 
 deepening. Extravagant notions are being laid aside, 
 and correct and reasonable views are taking their place. 
 Persons who had supposed that there was nothing in 
 it, that it was only a craze, are finding that there is 
 something in it worthy of consideration and respect. 
 Those wild enthusiasts who claim everything for it are 
 gradually forming a class by themselves quite apart from 
 those who are steadily testing every theory by careful 
 practice. 
 
 There is, however, much confusion as to the true 
 scope, meaning and value of manual training. It is my 
 sincere wish to do what I can to give trustworthy in- 
 formation on the subject, to the end that manual train- 
 ing may take its true place in American education. 
 Accordingly, I have gathered here certain reviews and 
 discussions which I hope will be found useful. I do not 
 here present any full discussion of the economic value 
 of manual training, but it must not be inferred that that 
 value is not high. On the contrary, I think its great 
 practical utility would be a sufficient argument for its 
 introduction into certain grades of all schools, were its 
 educational value much less than it is. But its educa- 
 tional value is great as well as its economic, and since 
 I am now concerned in setting forth the former, utility 
 arguments may be left to present themselves. Many
 
 4 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 people, teachers and others, are prone to consider direct 
 utility as unworthy of any place among educational 
 aims. 
 
 This leads me to call attention to the universal tend- 
 ency of public opinion to drive people and institutions 
 into extreme positions. One college officer says that 
 it is no part of the function of an institution that claims 
 to follow a liberal course of study, to give instruction 
 in any useful branch. If a branch of science is discovered 
 to have direct practical value, or a line of research is 
 seen to have positive professional worth, that is a suffi- 
 cient reason for discouraging it. In a similar way it is 
 taken for granted that in a technical school, everything 
 which is not of direct practical value is out of place. 
 There appears to. be no institution in which practical 
 and culture studies may be combined. In a recent 
 paper Dr. Harris says : " There remains a permanently 
 valid place for the manual training school for all youths 
 who are old enough to enter a trade and who are un- 
 willing to carry on any further their purely culture 
 studies." The inference is that if they are willing to 
 carry on their purely culture studies, they should not 
 attend a manual training school, no matter how many 
 of such youths there may be nor how long their willing- 
 ness may continue. Is it not possible for culture and 
 manual training to go on together? Some persons ap- 
 pear to think that it is not. Classically educated people 
 stare in wide surprise when one happens to speak 
 of Latin and English poetry in the manual training 
 school. With equal surprise they would hear of a 
 Greek student giving a portion of his time to shop- 
 work, or practical electricity. Certain studies admirably 
 suited for both use and discipline are in small favor in
 
 PREJUDICE AGAINST THE USEFUL. 5 
 
 both literary and technical departments of study in 
 the former because they are too useful ; in the latter 
 because they are too useless. Now, I claim that both 
 exclusive and extreme positions are bad ; the world 
 is full of their evil fruits. 
 
 This prejudice, which is especially strong in higher 
 institutions, is plainly seen in the attitude of some edu- 
 cators towards a manual training school. Because a 
 portion of the curriculum has bearings which are dis- 
 tinctly practical, useful and economic, it is assumed, 
 first, that the manual part is purely economic and not 
 educative ; and secondly, that all literary and general 
 education is either omitted from the curriculum or re- 
 duced to a minimum. I greatly fear that these two 
 assumptions may be strengthened by the Report on 
 the " Educational Value of Manual Training," pre- 
 sented to the Council of Education in session at Nash- 
 ville, Tenn., July 15, 1889. The Report was signed by 
 Geo. P. Brown (of Illinois), S. S. Parr (now of Minne- 
 sota), J. H. Hoose (of N. Y.), and W. T. Harris (now 
 Commissioner of Education). This Report I propose 
 to examine somewhat in detail, at least where I disa- 
 gree. For the sake of immediate reference it is given 
 in full in the Appendix of this pamphlet. 
 
 I suggest to the reader that if he has not already read 
 the Report, to do so before reading my criticisms. He 
 will observe that in the outset, the Committee " have 
 proposed in their report to inquire in what precisely 
 consists the educative value of the branches taught in 
 the manual training school." Yet in spite of this laud- 
 able purpose the reader will find that the instruction 
 given in a manual training school receives but scant at- 
 tention in the Report. He will find a large number of
 
 <) MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 subjects discussed, which have no connection, or only a 
 remote one, with the nature and purpose of manual 
 training. There are homilies on Street Gamins, Ar- 
 rested Development, Conduct, Illiteracy, and The Study 
 of Pure Science, as though these were pertinent to their 
 declared purpose. What I regard as misleading and 
 erroneous in the Report is these fugitive side-discussions 
 and incidental definitions. It is not so much what the 
 Committee actually declare, with one or two exceptions, 
 as what they lead the reader to infer, that is most ob- 
 jectionable, as I shall soon proceed to show. 
 
 The Report has already been published five or six 
 times, and no doubt has been widely read. I ask from 
 friends and foes alike a candid consideration both of 
 the Report and of the criticisms which are submitted 
 herewith. It seems to me that one coming to the Re- 
 port for information, with no previous clear notion of 
 manual training, its purpose and its scope, must get 
 from its perusal a widely erroneous conception of the 
 nature and mission of the educational feature known as 
 manual training. 
 
 I have no idea that there was any intention to mis- 
 lead on the part of the writer of the Report, but that it 
 is misleading I feel quite sure. Evidently the Commit- 
 tee had in mind the " uncompromising enemies " of 
 public education fully as much as " the advocates of 
 manual training." In the very first paragraph the Re- 
 port declares that those two classes are united. I think 
 that a grave mistake. Manual training people have no 
 fellowship with the enemies of public schools. 
 
 Under the cover of an attack upon manual training 
 the Committee deals its heaviest blows upon those " un- 
 compromising enemies " who oppose all literary educa-
 
 NOT ENEMIES OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 7 
 
 tion at the public expense. None of such blows actu- 
 ally hit us, but the unwary are liable to think that they 
 do and that we deserve them. They naturally ask: 
 " Unless the enemies and the manual people are under 
 the same flag, why this attack on the opponents of spir- 
 itual education under the cover of the Educational 
 Value of Manual Training ? " 
 
 Now the people who are engaged in carrying on 
 manual training schools are to a man heartily in favor 
 of public schools; most of them are public school peo- 
 ple, and they all believe in the value and necessity of 
 literary and scientific training. But they believe in 
 more than that, they believe in incorporating manual 
 training in the higher grades, and they most firmly 
 maintain that public education will thereby be im- 
 proved. 
 
 I shall take up several points in the Report in a cer- 
 tain logical order. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE CURRICULUM OF THE MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL. 
 
 The Council Report says that " the entire curriculum 
 of the manual training school," is included in " work 
 in the trades that deal in wood and metals." 
 
 How can the Committee justify the use of such lan- 
 guage ? The vast majority of teachers and parents 
 have never seen a manual training school ; have had 
 no chance to know what one is and how it is con- 
 ducted. These people naturally look with confidence 
 to the deliberate utterance of a committee of the Coun- 
 cil, the most august body of Educators in the land. 
 One of the important questions of the hour is: What 
 is the real value of a manual training school ? Prelim-
 
 8 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 inary to this is the question : What is a manual training 
 school ? And this distinguished Committee says that 
 the "ENTIRE curriculum of the manual training school 
 is included in work in the trades ! " 
 
 It is not easy to account for such a careless state- 
 ment. It seems probable that having fixed their minds 
 upon shop-exercises, they, for the moment, laid aside 
 all thought of anything else. I shall recur to this point 
 at a later stage of this discussion, but I cannot refrain 
 from remarking that in this respect their report se- 
 riously misrepresents manual training schools. Let us 
 call it a slip of the pen ; they wrote " entire curricu- 
 lum," instead of " the entire tool-work of the curricu- 
 lum." But we do not expect such men to slip in that 
 way. 
 
 Now what are the " cold " facts in regard to the cur- 
 riculum of the manual training schools? I think I can 
 answer for nearly every one of them : 
 
 First. The curriculum gives one-half as much time to 
 drawing as to tool-work. 
 
 Second. It gives as much time (study and recitation) 
 to mathematics as to tool-work. 
 
 Third. It gives as much time to Science (theoretical 
 and practical) as to tool-work. 
 
 Fourth. It gives as much time to language and litera- 
 ture as to tool-work. 
 
 No " trades " teach drawing, or mathematics, or 
 science, or literature. All these things must be in- 
 cluded to make up the curriculum entire of a manual 
 training school. In confirmation, see the catalogues of 
 the manual training schools of Chicago, Baltimore, 
 Philadelphia, Toledo, San Francisco, St. Paul, Cam- 
 bridge and St. Louis.
 
 DOES MANUAL TRAINING MEAN ILLITERACY? 9 
 
 In the face of these truths, how unfortunate the Com- 
 mittee's statement is ! And as I reread the entire re- 
 port, I see that it was no slip of pen. In numerous 
 passages the reader sees the same statement assumed. 
 I quote from the report : 
 
 " Your Committee understand that any amount of 
 manual training conducted in a school is no equivalent 
 for the school education in letters and science, and 
 ought not to be substituted f of it. 
 
 " The economic utilitarian opposition to the spiritual 
 education in our schools, makes sure of his [the pupil's] 
 inability to ascend above manual toil by cutting off his 
 purely intellectual training. 
 
 " The illiterate manual laborer, no matter how skill- 
 fully educated for his trade in wood and metal opera- 
 tions, cannot read and write. 
 
 " To be excellent in manual training, would not pre- 
 vent him [the pupil] from being illiterate and a bad 
 neighbor and a bad citizen, even a dynamiter" [The 
 Italics are mine.] 
 
 They speak of the manual training school as a 
 "school devoted to the business of educating the 
 youth in the essentials of his trade or vocation." 
 
 There are other passages of similar import which the 
 reader may readily find in the Report for himself. Now 
 what idea of a manual training school is a parent or 
 teacher to get from such passages as those ? We are 
 bound to suppose there is some relevancy in them, yet 
 if they are not as misleading as language can be, I do 
 not understand my mother-tongue. 
 
 But the Committee may have knowledge which has 
 been denied to me. They may have found in Illinois, 
 or Indiana, or Massachusetts, a manual training school 
 either in existence or in prospect which has " cut out
 
 10 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 letters and science and all purely intellectual training ; " 
 where the boys are " illiterate, unable to read and 
 write ; " where the managers of the school are making 
 sure of the boys' " inability to rise above manual toil " 
 by " making their childhood a preparation for special 
 industries," with a strong probability that they will be- 
 come bad neighbors, bad citizens, and even dynamiters. 
 
 If they have found such a school,* their language has 
 some justification, and I heartily join them in condemn- 
 ing it, root and branch. Let all who believe as I do in 
 the value of cultured minds, as well as skillful hands, 
 join in frowning such a school out of real or possible 
 existence, and do what they can to establish the gen- 
 eral adoption of a rational curriculum. Meanwhile let 
 the Committee amend their report; give credit where 
 credit is due, and avoid the danger of being suspected 
 of setting up a " straw-man " for the exquisite pleasure 
 of seeing it topple over under their vigorous blows. 
 
 Unless the Committee can justify their words by ref- 
 erence to some such obnoxious manual training school, 
 
 * In answer to this charge of misrepresentation, Supt. Parr 
 has replied : 
 
 "Truth is not geographical in its boundaries. Fortunately it 
 is not to be viewed as circumscribed by the corporation lines of 
 great cities, like Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis, whose man- 
 ual training schools are cited as a larger truth against the smaller 
 truth from country districts like Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota." 
 
 This suggests that he has found in the country districts of 
 those three States manual training schools of the very objection- 
 able sort. I am sorry that such schools exist, but I am very glad 
 that Mr. Parr has found them. Let us all hope that they may 
 mend their ways. But Supt. Parr should be careful how he speaks 
 of " country districts." I gave great offense once by referring to 
 one of our most accomplished educational writers as a "country 
 editor in Illinois."
 
 MANUAL LABOR WITHOUT CULTURE. 11 
 
 we shall conclude that not a phrase only, but the greater 
 part of their report was a slip, and should have been 
 submitted under another title. 
 
 When the above criticism was made in the pages of 
 THE TEACHER, the chairman of the Committee, Mr. 
 Geo. P. Brown, was constrained to reply. He ridiculed 
 the idea that any one could be misled by their statement 
 in regard to the curriculum. Of course, every one 
 knew that manual training schools had more or less 
 work in science and literature, but the educational value 
 of such work was not under discussion. What was 
 wanted was a definite statement and analysis of the ed- 
 ucational value of manual training. Said he: "The 
 Report was upon the educational value of manual train- 
 ing considered by itself, disconnected from the study of 
 letters and science, and without any regard to where it 
 was obtained, and the St. Louis school or the education 
 received in-it ivas riot in the minds of the Committee while 
 making it." 
 
 This is a most astonishing confession. Mr. Brown 
 admits that although they claimed to inquire into the 
 " educative value of the branches taught in the manual 
 training school," yet in writing their report no thought 
 of the education received in the manual training school 
 entered their minds. They did not even go into the 
 schools to see what their tool-work was and how it was 
 taught. On the contrary, they went outside, among 
 manual laborers, where labor (not " training ") was not 
 complicated by a knowledge and study of science and 
 letters. Taking Mr. Brown's confession and the Report 
 together we see where they went. They went among 
 the street gamins, and noted their stunted pre-maturity. 
 They went into the factories which employ child labor,
 
 12 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 and almost wept over the deformed bodies and joyless 
 lives of the helpless victims they found. They went 
 among the illiterate craftsmen and enumerated the 
 great number of things they ought to know, but of 
 which they knew nothing. They went among the riot- 
 ers of a great city, all of whom were " excellent in 
 manual training," but wanting in all the characteristics 
 of good citizens and good neighbors. 
 
 Then they returned from their inquiry and prepared 
 their Report. Now, unless they have stultified them- 
 selves, they wish their millions of readers to understand 
 that the evils they have witnessed the arrested de- 
 velopment, the deformity, the wretchedness, the igno- 
 rance, and the crime, are to be taken as indicative of 
 the educative value of manual training as taught in the 
 manual training school. If they are not to be taken to 
 mean that, then what in the name of reason are they to 
 be taken for ? 
 
 Hands without brains are as worthless as brains with- 
 out hands. Mr. Brown has been satisfied with the lat- 
 ter; I suppose it in accordance with the law of 
 extremes for him to expect us to be satisfied with 
 the former. It is now evident that he believes that 
 the processes and activities of manual training as taught 
 in school, and closely associated at every step with sci- 
 ence and letters, are identical with the mental and 
 physical processes and activities of uneducated labor- 
 ers, toiling for daily bread in commercial establish- 
 ments. 
 
 This defense of Mr. Brown, that in order to observe 
 the effect of manual training pure and simple, it is 
 necessary to go among people whose only training is 
 in the manual direction, has little in its favor. In the
 
 HOW TO DETERMINE EDUCATIVE VALUES. 13 
 
 first place, there are no people whose moral, physical 
 and intellectual status may be attributed to manual 
 training and to nothing else. Secondly, the sort of 
 training that people get in practical work" outside of 
 schools cannot be compared in educative effect with 
 the systematic and logical work given in tool-work and 
 drawing in a manual training school. Thirdly, to find 
 the educative value of a feature of school training, it 
 must be considered as it is given in connection with 
 other school work. It is utterly unreasonable and un- 
 fair to take it out of its environment. We do not test/ 
 values thus in other matters. In estimating the value 
 of salt as an ingredient of our food, it is not necessary 
 to hunt up a people who eat nothing but salt, and ob- 
 serve its effects upon them. In determining the edu- 
 cative value of the study of Italian, it is not necessary 
 to analyze the character and condition of a swarthy na- 
 tive of Venice or Naples, selling fruit and peanuts at 
 the corner, or vending plaster images from door to 
 door. To be sure, his education is limited to an unsci- 
 entific knowledge of his native tongue, and may be held 
 to be free from all other branches of culture, and we 
 may pay no " regard to where it was obtained." 
 
 I insist that the influence of manual training in school 
 education shall be studied under the conditions in 
 which it is given in education. There is absolutely no 
 question about its educative value under other condi- 
 tions. We are discussing schools and school-work, 
 and nothing else. If the influence of manual training 
 as it is taught in manual training schools and in con- 
 nection with all the other school work is not yet 
 sufficiently manifest in the lives and characters of those 
 who have received it, then let us not attempt to give it
 
 14 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 by reasoning from effect to cause. Leave that phase 
 of the discussion till adequate data are at hand, and 
 confine the present discussion to an analysis of the 
 character and content of manual training, and, reason- 
 ing from cause to effect, determine its influence upon 
 the minds and characters of school boys. 
 
 It may be answered that the Report gives such an 
 analysis and such a course of reasoning. Such a claim 
 I should flatly deny, for the processes it analyzes are 
 those of factories and not of schools, and then, for the 
 most part, it attempts to determine the influence of 
 such factory methods on illiterate, unscientific peo- 
 ple. But the difference between school work and 
 factory work needs to be set forth at length. 
 
 II. 
 
 SCHOOL TOOL-WORK VS. TRADE-WORK. 
 
 Assuming that the Council Committee meant the 
 " entire tool-work of the curriculum," let us compare it 
 with trade-work. Let us see if it is all " included in 
 trades that deal in wood and metals," as the Report 
 would have us believe. 
 
 It is true that all our actual tool-work is included in 
 trade operations, just as all arithmetic is included in the 
 business of the grocer, the jeweler, the druggist, the 
 banker, the plasterer, etc. ; and as all natural science is 
 included in the work of engineers and manufacturers. 
 Those are strong points in favor of tool-work, arith- 
 metic and science. If there were no use, no applica- 
 tions of arithmetic in life, it would be as little taught 
 as is Chinese. 
 
 But the converse statements are by no means true.
 
 MANUAL TRAINING VS. TRADPi WORK. 15 
 
 No trade is included in our tool-work, just as no occu- 
 pation is included in science and mathematics. Let 
 me dwell a moment upon the striking difference be- 
 tween our work and ordinary trade-work. 
 
 The false statement most easily made and most often 
 heard is that the manual training school aims to turn 
 out carpenters and blacksmiths ; and the Report en- 
 courages that notion by admitting " in the outset, the 
 reasonableness of substituting a system of manual train- 
 ing in special schools for the old system of apprentice- 
 ship." 
 
 Suppose a man learns the trade of a carpenter, what 
 does he learn to do ? He learns to lay a floor, to make 
 a panel-door, Jo build a cornice, to shingle a roof, to 
 construct a picket-fence, to build a flight of stairs, 
 to put in headers in floor joists, to frame a barn, and to 
 cut rafters for a hip-roof. Unless he can do all or 
 most of these things, he is no carpenter. Our students, 
 as a rule, never do any of these things. The joinery, 
 wood-carving, wood-turning, and pattern-making we 
 give our students have small reference to particular 
 trades, though as the exercises deal with the theory 
 of tools and with the elements of construction, they 
 may be said to underlie a score of trades. 
 
 But the fact that at every stage of our work drawing 
 is interwoven with the use of tools, and the fact that 
 attention is always called to what is general and what 
 is special in the exercise, make our wood-work a differ- 
 ent thing from the work of any industrial establish- 
 ment. 
 
 Similarly a worker at the forge and anvil can scarcely 
 be called a blacksmith till he has skillfully made and 
 set a horseshoe, welded and fitted the tire of a wagon
 
 16 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 wheel, forged and sharpened heavy drills, and made a 
 certain number of bolts or nails in an hour. 
 
 We aim to do none of these things, so that gauged 
 by such a standard our students are acquiring some- 
 thing very different from blacksmithing. They fairly 
 learn the principles of metal forging, and they have 
 had just practice enough to enable them to thoroughly 
 understand and appreciate those principles. They 
 know, for instance, that when the thread-end of a tie- 
 rod has been enlarged by up-setting, the rod is stronger 
 than when a larger end has been welded on instead; 
 and they know why it is stronger, and their knowledge 
 has a quality about it which is altogether lacking in the 
 knowledge one gains from reading such, a statement in 
 a book. 
 
 But some one will ask, is not this knowledge of prin- 
 ciples, and this personal experience valuable to one 
 who does subsequently learn the full details of a metal 
 trade? Of course it is, immensely valuable ; in fact, I 
 do not see how any really intelligent and successful 
 worker can get on without it ; nor can I conceive of 
 any reasonably active mode of life, in which this knowl- 
 edge and experience would not be of great value as a 
 species of practical science culture. 
 
 The second error then to which I would call atten- 
 tion is that of regarding the shop-work, which is ap- 
 - propriate for a school, as adequate for apprenticeship. 
 If at the age of 17, 18, or 19, the manual graduate de- 
 sires to learn a trade, he must still serve a brief ap- 
 prenticeship in a strictly trade establishment where not 
 principles but definite practices are taught. But this 
 he can do with numerous and important advantages on 
 his side. His knowledge of drawing, of science, of
 
 SHOP-WORK UNSUITED TO YOUNG PUPILS. 17 
 
 mathematics, of letters and of the fundamental prin- 
 ciples and processes of construction fit him for speedy 
 leadership among the old style, uneducated mechanics. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE AGE OF MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL PUPILS. 
 
 In the very beginning of their Report, the Committee 
 propose " to inquire in what precisely consists the edu- 
 cative value of the branches taught in the manual 
 training school." They say that they will "treat in- 
 cidentally also the economic questions involved." 
 
 After assuming that the " branches taught" consist 
 exclusively of trade work, and conceding their superi- 
 ority to the old style of apprenticeship, they " insist 
 that such manual training ought not to be begun be- 
 fore the completion of the twelfth year of the pupil." 
 
 Incredible as it may appear, the Committee insist, as 
 though in the face of some determined opposition, that 
 boys shall not devote their time exclusively to learning 
 trades before they are twelve years old! For the sake 
 of emphasis they repeat : 
 
 " They hold the opinion that neither apprenticeship 
 nor the industrial school should be allowed to take pos- 
 session of the youth until the completion of his twelfth 
 year at least; the fifteenth year is still better, because 
 physical maturity is necessary for the formation of the 
 best muscular movements to produce skill. At too 
 early an age the pupil with his small hands and fingers, 
 his short and undeveloped arms, is obliged to acquire 
 bad habits of holding the implements of labor. More- 
 over, the serious occupations of life cannot be imposed 
 on children without dwarfing their human nature
 
 18 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 physically, intellectually and morally and producing 
 arrested development. Not only the games of youth, 
 but the youth's freedom from the cares of mature life 
 should be insured to him if the best preparation is to 
 be made for manhood." 
 
 The Report then dwells on the sad spectacle pre- 
 sented by the unschooled children of the very poor, 
 the street gamin, and the premature old age of those 
 whose childhood has been usurped by suffering and 
 care. 
 
 As I said in reference to former quotations, we are 
 bound to suppose that all this has something to do 
 with manual training and the manual training school. 
 
 The Committee does not say outright that manual 
 training schools are attempting to teach trades to chil- 
 dren not twelve years old, but they plainly give one to 
 understand that they do, and that these dreadful evils 
 are likely to follow as their legitimate fruit. Unless 
 these evils exist or are imminent in our manual train- 
 ing schools ; unless those schools do cramp the small 
 hands and fingers, the short and undeveloped arms of 
 tender children, dwarfing and stunting both body and 
 mind by hard labor, premature care, and cheerless 
 drudgery, why does the Committee interpolate the 
 sad picture? Did they consciously or unconsciously 
 hope or expect that, because we all condemn cruelty 
 and injustice to children, we should be led by this jux- 
 taposition in their report to condemn manual training 
 schools also ? 
 
 I suspect that my readers, who have seen the Report, 
 and who have gotten from it some notions of the insti- 
 tution, whose educative and economic value the Com- 
 mittee set out to investigate, will suffer no small surprise
 
 THE AGE OF MANUAL TRAINING PUPILS. 19 
 
 when told that not only is there no physical, intellec- 
 tual and moral dwarfing in the manual training school, 
 no imposition of the serious occupations of life, no lack 
 of joy and cheer, but that no manual training school that 
 I know of admits pupils till they are thirteen or fourteen 
 years old. 
 
 The usual age corresponds to the ninth year in school ; 
 in some cases it is the eighth year or possibly the sev- 
 enth, provided the boy be thirteen years old. The aver- 
 age age of the 100 boys who form the " first-year class " 
 of the St. Louis Manual Training School, and who were 
 admitted on the i6th of September, 1889, was 15 
 years, 1 1 months. The youngest boy in the class was 
 13 years, 8 months old. In the manual training schools 
 of Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, Cam- 
 bridge, Indianapolis, Albany, Minneapolis, and San 
 Francisco, the age is about the same as in my school. 
 In those of Baltimore, Toledo, Omaha, Springfield, 
 Mass., New Orleans, and St. Paul, the age may be a 
 little less. 
 
 Manual training schools are springing up so rapidly 
 (that is, public high schools are becoming manual train- 
 ing schools in so many cities and large towns), that I 
 cannot speak definitely of many of them. The Com- 
 missioner appointed by the Governor of Pennsylvania 
 to investigate the subject of manual training as related 
 to public education, reported in favor of the introduc- 
 tion of manual training (shop-work and drafting) into all 
 the high schools in the Slate. 
 
 I do not ignore the fact that the country is full of in- 
 sane people, and that not a few indulge in educational 
 vagaries. Perhaps the Pedagogical Committee have 
 come in contact with some of them, and have mistaken 
 
 2
 
 20 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 them for manual training school people. But I " insist " 
 that in discussing the value of the manual training school, 
 they shall take the school as it is, and not as some irre- 
 sponsible party I was about to say " crank " may 
 imagine it to be. [It will be observed that I am not 
 speaking of my manual training school, but of the 
 manual training school.] 
 
 I have met some of these mad people. They always 
 find much fault with us. They think we might do and 
 ought to do numerous things that I know very well we 
 cannot do, and would be very foolish to try to do- 
 These erratic people generally are unfamiliar with sci- 
 entific methods of teaching, and as ignorant of what 
 trades really are and the conditions under which they 
 may be adequately mastered as I am of oil painting. 
 
 It may be objected that the Committee were dealing 
 with the question of manual training in all the grades as 
 it has been introduced in some cities and as it has been 
 urged by excellent people for all cities. Of course I 
 cannot know all that has been done in the name of 
 manual training, but so far as my acquaintance does ex- 
 tend, the manual training work which has been tried 
 in the lower grades [of New Haven, or Montclair, or 
 New York City, for instance,] is as far as possible from 
 "trade work In woods and metals." The exercises 
 consist only of paper-cutting, drawing, clay-modeling, 
 whittling, and a few simple exercises in joinery with the 
 older classes. There may be a little turning, scroll- 
 sawing and filing, but it is too little to justify any of the 
 assumptions of our Committee. So far as I know the 
 views of teachers who have had actual experience with 
 regular tool instruction, I am able to say that they are 
 almost unanimously opposed to giving shop-work to
 
 A CASE OF MISAPPREHENSION. 21 
 
 boys less than thirteen years of age. Editor Brown 
 has repeatedly called me an advocate of manual train- 
 ing as an " integral part of the curriculum of the com- 
 mon schools." I am not quite sure that I know what 
 he means by " integral," but from the context I infer 
 that he means that I advocate the introduction of regu- 
 lar shop-work in all the grades, primary, intermediate 
 and high. But I advocate no such thing, and I do not 
 think I have ever written or said a word which can fairly 
 be interpreted as conveying any such notion. 
 
 In conclusion, I challenge the Committee to point out 
 a single school in the United States, manual training or 
 otherwise, where pupils not 12 years of age are set to 
 learning trades. If they cannot do so, it will be in 
 order for them to explain why they devote so much 
 time and space to an essay on "street gamins," "child 
 labor," and physical deformity, and to insisting that we 
 shall not do what no one has ever done, and what no 
 sane man wishes to do. 
 
 IV. 
 
 SOCIAL EVILS AS RELATED TO MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 In continuing my criticism, I wish to say that there 
 are many things in the Report which I should heartily 
 approve were they removed from all connection with 
 the discussion of manual training, Take, for instance, 
 a long passage in which the Committee answers the 
 question : " What does one need to know besides his 
 trade? " They answer correctly and well under these 
 heads : Behavior towards Fellow- Workmen, Employ- 
 ers, Neighbors, Family, Children, Fellow-Citizens,
 
 22 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 Votes, Voters ; Evils of Illiteracy ; Victims of Agita- 
 tors ; Geography, History, Literature. 
 
 Why, of course ! It goes without saying that there 
 is no difference of opinion among respectable people 
 on these points. But in what way does such a discus- 
 sion bear upon the educative value or economy of 
 manual training ? 
 
 Could they not with equal force and propriety 
 discuss the needs of personal cleanliness, the care of 
 the teeth, diet, the use of tobacco, whisky, etc. ? 
 
 I suppose the Committee will reply, at least in 
 thought, that these matters are not in any peculiar man- 
 ner related to manual labor, while the evils they point 
 out are characteristic of laborers and craftsmen. 
 
 Possibly they are but still I ask, why was the point 
 introduced? Had the Report been written to set forth 
 the educative value of the study of the Greek language, 
 this disquisition on Social Evils would have been just as 
 appropriate as now. The passage referred to appears 
 to be introduced to point out " a fatal omission on the 
 part of the economist," who claims that " the schools 
 should fit the child for his future duties in life." 
 
 We are not told who the " economist " is, nor is it 
 shown that in truth he makes the " fatal omission," but 
 we have here a clew to the Committee's reason for pre- 
 senting their homily on Conduct : First, they assume 
 that the economist is asking for the manual training 
 school ; and secondly, they assume that the manual 
 training school is an institution to multiply laborers and 
 craftsmen of the sort who know nothing besides their 
 trades. In other words, they have gone into the pin- 
 factories, plow-factories and forge-factories, the street 
 mobs, and into the jails of Chicago, and they have said :
 
 NOT THE FRUIT OF MANUAL TRAINING. 23 
 
 " These pin-makers, these plow-handle turners,* these 
 blacksmiths, these illiterate bad neighbors, and these 
 dynamiters are manual laborers, and they typify the 
 legitimate fruit of manual training and of an attempt to 
 fit boys for their future duties in life !" 
 
 The magnitude of the Committee's error in all this is 
 past measuring. Those unfortunate men exhibit the 
 fruit not of manual-training-school education, but of a 
 want of it. If they are the fruit of anything, they are 
 the fruit of that system of education which has prevailed 
 ever since they were born, and which our Committee 
 would fain have us be contented with as adequate to all 
 communities and to all times. Instead of trying to 
 bolster up their attack upon manual training by an 
 enumeration of the shortcomings of those ill-trained 
 people who unquestionably make up the mass of laborers 
 
 * A word of explanation is necessary here. Mr. Brown is the 
 editor of a school journal, and he has naturally discussed manual 
 training in its pages. Once he wrote : 
 
 "A man in one of the manufacturing towns of this State has 
 been turning plow-handles for twenty years. Day after day his 
 life has been one monotonous round of toil. Ten hours per day 
 for twenty years has matured the turning of plow-handles into a 
 mental and physical habit which dominates and even constitutes 
 his life. When two-thirds to three-fourths of the curriculum of 
 lower grades, and one-half of the higher is devoted to work akin to 
 turning plow-handles, is it not a serious question whether it gives 
 the preparation which that man most needs that is to turn plow- 
 haudles all his life? " 
 
 If I believed, as of course Mr. Brown does, that the friends of 
 manual training were laboring to bring about the condition of 
 things pictured in the above quotation, I should oppose manual 
 training so vigorously that I should put Mr. Brown's opposition 
 to the blush. " Two-thirds to three-fourths of the curriculum of the 
 lower grades!!" Great Scott! "Devoted to work akin to turning 
 plow -handles!'. " Shade of Horace! Can the man be rnad ?
 
 24 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 in this country to-day, they should see that had manual 
 training schools been as numerous during the past thirty 
 years as have high schools and academies, the evils 
 they complain of would be much less than they now 
 are. 
 
 This for two reasons : (i) The number of boys car- 
 rying their education forward into their teens would 
 have been vastly greater than it has been without such 
 schools ; and (2) though not teaching special crafts, 
 but general principles; giving a wide range of culture 
 instead of aiming to put boys into trades and profes- 
 sions, had the number of manual training schools 
 been adequate to the wants of the community, three 
 striking results would have followed : 
 
 (a) There would have been a greater industrial de- 
 velopment, particularly along new lines and into new 
 fields, though the relative number of craftsmen would 
 scarcely have been increased. 
 
 (fr) The amount, variety, and quality of industrial 
 products would have been greatly increased and im- 
 proved. 
 
 (c] The average tone and character of our home- 
 trained industrial workers would have been substantially 
 raised above its present level ; they would have been 
 much better educated than they now are, for manual 
 training means not less but more education. 
 
 This analysis does not include the benefit that would 
 have accrued to other occupations, not industrial, from 
 the wholesome training of the same schools. 
 
 Though the Committee set out to discover "the edu- 
 cative value of the branches taught in the manual train- 
 ing school," they have done no such thing; they have 
 only taken up the question : What is the educative value
 
 MANUAL TRAINING VS. PTJRK SCIKNCE. 25 
 
 of ordinary manual labor with tools, as practiced by 
 those who have had no other education of any sort ; who 
 know neither how to behave, how to read, how to draw, 
 nor how to vote ? 
 
 I therefore convict the Committee of a piece of most 
 illogical reasoning, to wit: They condemn manual train- 
 ing schools on account of evils for which they are in no 
 way responsible, but which, on the contrary, it is a part 
 of their high mission to help remove. 
 
 V. 
 
 MANUAL TRAINING COMPARED WITH THE STUDY OF PURE 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 The Report begins the discussion of the educative 
 phase of manual training with an admirable state- 
 ment : 
 
 "The education of the intellect takes place through 
 the ascent from one thought or idea to another; from a 
 narrow point of view to a broader and more compre- 
 hensive one ; from a vague and general grasp of a sub- 
 ject to an insight that explains all the details, and sees 
 the relations of all parts to the whole." 
 
 I ask for nothing better than that on which to base 
 criticisms. Equally good is another which I shall also 
 be glad to use at another time. I insert it here because 
 the two come side by side in the report, and both are 
 worthy of high praise : 
 
 " The education of the will takes place by fixing and 
 unfixing habits of doing." 
 
 The report presents an argument based on science to
 
 2(i MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 prove that the intellectual education gained from 
 manual training is of narrow scope and limited in time. 
 The argument is of the a fortiori sort. 
 
 (a) " The study of pure science is more educative 
 intellectually than the study of special applications of 
 it." 
 
 (3) "The study of applications of science is more 
 educative than the labor of making the machine." 
 
 Therefore, a fortiori, the study of pure science is much 
 more educative intellectually than the labor of making 
 the machine. This conclusion is not formally stated, 
 but of course it is easily inferred. In proof of the first 
 point (a), the Report compares the study of the steam 
 engine with " the study of the theory of heat and of 
 the dynamics of elastic fluids." The second point, (b), 
 rests upon the consideration that the maker of a 
 machine adopts one design out of many, one material 
 out of several, and " obscures his general view of the 
 principle of the machine by covering it up with a great 
 collection of details that do not essentially concern it." 
 
 The Report leaves the reader to make the application 
 of this argument for himself. Of course it is to be 
 understood that the manual training pupil is the maker 
 of "the machine." It is not very clear what "the 
 machine " is, but perhaps the steam engine is meant. 
 It would also appear to be understood that the machine- 
 maker does not study the applications of science 
 beyond the limits of his particular machine, and that he 
 gives no attention whatever to the general theory of 
 heat and the dynamics of elastic fluids. Moreover, it 
 would appear that the educational object of making the 
 machine can only be to acquire thereby some view of 
 the principle of the machine. The conclusion of the
 
 MANUAL TRAINING AND SCIENCE COMBINED. 27 
 
 argument was explicitly stated by Mr. Harris, the 
 writer of the Report, in closing the debate upon it. 
 He said : 
 
 "The purely manual work of the school belongs to 
 the lowest grade, and furnishes the obscurest knowl- 
 edge of principles covered up by a mass of non-essential 
 circumstances." 
 
 There are many things to be said in answer to this 
 argument. First, I will meet the Committee on their 
 own ground, that of the study of science. In the sec- 
 ond place, I will show that their ground is not our 
 ground, and that in this case, as in many others, they 
 have not yet divined the motive nor the content of tool- 
 work. 
 
 I. The study of pure science, the theories of heat, 
 pneumatics, hydraulics, electricity, chemical affinity, 
 etc., are not omitted in a manual training school. Of 
 course, the students are young and capable of only 
 elementary work. 
 
 Moreover, the study of pure science is coupled with 
 a large variety of special applications. Instead of de- 
 bating the question which is best, pure science without 
 applications, or applications without pure science, we 
 have both, with a perfect assurance that the two com- 
 bined are greatly superior to either alone. In the next 
 place, our students make a great variety of apparatus to 
 illustrate special applications of scientific principles. 
 For instance, they actually make pumps, fountains, 
 pyrometers, telephones, dynamos, engines, telegraphic 
 apparatus, cameras, etc., etc. [Of course the more 
 elaborate of these things are made as "projects " by in- 
 dividual students at the very end of their course.] And 
 we find that their work with minute and exact details in
 
 28 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 real wood, iron, steel, brass, copper, leather, tin and 
 glass, does not obscure their general view of the princi- 
 ples of science, but that it makes it wonderfully clear. 
 Their minds " ascend from one thought to another, 
 from a narrow point of view to a broader and more 
 comprehensive one: from a vague and general grasp to 
 a clear insight." The narrow point of view must come 
 before the broad one. The best possible beginning is 
 to thoroughly master certain experimental phenomena, 
 and the best way to know an experiment is to know 
 the apparatus root and branch.* 
 
 Did Tyndall or Faraday obscure his view of science 
 by manufacturing his own apparatus ? Did Edison ob- 
 scure his view of the theory of electricity by manufact- 
 uring his hundreds of devices with his own hands ? 
 Does the musician obscure his general view of the 
 principles of music by the thorough mastery of a par- 
 ticular exercise or piece ? Can any one have a compre- 
 hensive view of the whole unless he has a clear and 
 comprehensive view of the parts ? 
 
 Mr. Harris himself once said most happily, while 
 comparing the primitive knowledge which one gets for 
 
 * Speaking of the apparatus used to illustrate the principles of 
 science iu school laboratories, Prof. John F. Woodhull says : 
 " Most pupils of high-school a<:e fail to comprehend the machines 
 and their minds are only confused thereby with reference to the 
 principles." 
 
 " As discussions about words can never remove the difficulties 
 that exist in things, so no skill in the use of those aids to thought 
 which language furnishes can relieve us from the necessity of a 
 prior and more direct study of the things which are the subjects of 
 our reasonings. And the more exact, and the more complete that 
 study of things has been, the more likely shall we be to employ with 
 advantage all symbolic aids and appliances." Preface to "Boole's 
 Differential Equations.' 1 ''
 
 THE VALUE OF PRIMITIVE KNOWLEDGE. 29 
 
 himself with mere second-hand hearsay knowledge : 
 " A very little primary knowledge is worth more than 
 a cargo of secondary knowledge." All primary knowl- 
 edge begins with details. 
 
 On the other hand, what confidence can one have in 
 a mere theorizer ? one who knows nothing of special 
 applications ? And if he has studied applications 
 under ideal conditions only, where machines are purely 
 imaginary, with imponderable, inextensible, invincible, 
 and perfectly rigid or perfectly flexible material ; if he 
 knows by experience nothing of the details of appara- 
 tus made of real materials and used under actual con- 
 ditions, is he not lacking in many essential elements 
 of a sound scientific training ? 
 
 In my judgment the field of pure science lies far 
 beyond the range of the manual training school, in 
 the higher realms of the technical school. The pupil 
 must creep before he can walk, and he must walk be- 
 fore he can run. In the manual training school we can 
 hardly claim to do more than to help him to walk. 
 His point of view is narrow, his horizon near, but if he 
 sees clearly what he sees at all, and grasps firmly what 
 he puts his hand to, he will with increasing strength 
 and a broader vision " ascend from thought to thought," 
 to a just conception of the scope and meaning of 
 science. 
 
 My answer is, then, that, on the assumption that the 
 exercises of the shop of the manual training school 
 consist solely of machine-making, for the purpose of 
 illustrating the principles and applications of pure 
 science, their argument still does not couch us, for our 
 plan of combining theory and practice is a vast improve- 
 ment over either alone.
 
 30 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 2. The chief purpose of our shop- work is not the study 
 of science as that phrase is ordinarily understood. The 
 work I referred to above, that of constructing and using 
 physical and chemical apparatus, is quite distinct from 
 our regular course of shop-work. Of course, there is 
 more or less science in all shop- work, for every mechan- 
 ical process and the form and theory of every tool are 
 based on established principles of science ; yet the 
 main object of shop exercise is not to gain a knowl- 
 edge of those established principles. 
 
 Just here is the stumbling block of many an inquirer. 
 It is often assumed that we must have one or more of 
 these three objects in maintaining tool-work in school, 
 viz.: 
 
 1. To produce articles for the market or for domestic 
 use. 
 
 2. To teach specific trades to those who wish or ex- 
 pect to follow them. 
 
 3. To teach and illustrate the principles of practical 
 science. 
 
 Let me give the Committee credit for not holding 
 the first opinion. I am not so sure as to their standing 
 on the second point. As to the third point, the argu- 
 ment I quoted above appears to show that the Peda- 
 gogical Committee regard our tool-work as only a poor, 
 narrow method of-studying science. 
 
 None of the three objects are ours. 
 
 The primary object of tool-work (for there are many 
 secondary objects) is to develop and strengthen productive 
 activity by gaining a mastery over materials and certain 
 conventional tools and processes. What we shall do 
 with our materials and tools after we have mastered 
 them we do not particularly inquire. They are suited
 
 THE REAL OBJECT OF TOOL WORK. 31 
 
 to abundant uses, and the active mind will need them 
 a thousand times in embodying thought and in effect- 
 ing other ends. The most efficient method of arousing 
 and stimulating the executive faculties is by giving one 
 the sense of mastership over materials, forces, and ap- 
 pliances. One quickly desires to do what he first sees 
 he has the power to do. The sense of mastership, of 
 ability to smash, to break, to overthrow, which leads 
 the undisciplined, unskilled youth, to commit vandal- 
 ism, may be converted into a sense of ability to build, 
 to invent, to construct, to create ; which leads to such 
 things, as book-cases, dynamos, engines and cameras. 
 
 This conversion cannot be effected without teaching 
 minutely what book-cases, dynamos, engines, and cam- 
 eras are ; and secondly, giving a mastery of the mate- 
 rials and tools to be used, and the principles of 
 construction. 
 
 But while gaining this mastery, ulterior objects are 
 kept out of sight, just as we keep the sonatas of 
 Beethoven and the nocturnes of Chopin out of the 
 sight of a child absorbed in the intricacies of scales, 
 fingering, and counting exercises on the piano. 
 
 For example (and I think it best to be quite minute 
 on this point, for here is where many fail to appreciate 
 our methods), we teach the boy how to grind his plane 
 and oil-stone it, till it has a razor edge without flaw or 
 feather. Then we teach him by precept and by example 
 how to set his plane; to take it to pieces; to readjust it 
 to the nature of his material ; how to hold and push 
 it so as to avoid unequal cutting on a side or at the 
 end of a piece, -and all this without any particular 
 thought as to what he will make with his plane when he 
 has mastered it.
 
 32 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 In a similar way he is taught the proper care and use 
 of every tool on his list. He learns how to work with, 
 against, across, and on the end of the grain, with all 
 kinds of wood from Apple and Ash to Walnut and 
 Willow. He learns how to treat a knot ; how to use 
 the brace and bits ; how to avoid splitting when nailing, 
 chiseling and boring; how to use try -square, gauge, 
 and bevel, in accurately laying out mortices, dove-tails, 
 etc.; how to hold his chisel and how to strike with the 
 mallet ; how to saw to a fit on the right or left of a line ; 
 how to match and glue, and polish, etc. 
 
 The pupil learns all these things abstracted from 
 special applications. No lively interest in some pro- 
 posed construction is allowed to " obscure his view " of 
 the details of the work which must be mastered one by 
 one. While making a joint, for instance, nothing is al- 
 lowed to interfere with a full comprehension of its na- 
 ture, its exact form and dimensions, and the order in 
 which the steps of the process may best be executed- 
 The question of what is to be done with the joint is 
 not allowed to come in till he has thoroughly learned 
 not only to draw it, but to make it. 
 
 In these several respects we teach tool-work and the 
 properties of materials just as we do the details of 
 algebra. Addition, subtraction, factoring, equations, 
 elimination, and so forth, are taught without much ref- 
 erence to the uses of algebra in the study of physics, 
 mechanics, astronomy and the higher mathematics. 
 As a rule the teachers of algebra have no conception 
 of its use beyond the solution of problems " made up *' 
 as illustrations. The real problems which gave rise to 
 algebra, not one teacher in a thousand knows anything 
 about.
 
 FACTS BEFORE REASONING. 33 
 
 Moreover, we give our student workmen facts to rea- 
 son upon before we set them to formal reasoning. 
 Scientific theories are the product of mature and well- 
 informed minds. There is in recent educational efforts 
 to teach the principles of science, far too much of a cer 
 tain sort of shallow generalizing on one or two facts, 
 and these more often borrowed or supposed than ob- 
 served. 
 
 Hence, while teaching the use of the chisel and plane 
 and knife, we say scarce a word about the theory of the 
 .wedge, and the inclined plane; while giving instruction 
 in the use of the mallet, hammer and sledge, we say 
 little about momentum and kinetic energy; while 
 teaching the exact and delicate operations of cutting 
 V-threaded and square-threaded bolts and nuts we 
 barely refer to the theory of the screw and to co-effi- 
 cients of friction. By the time our pupils get far 
 enough in our analytic method of shop-work, to be able 
 to make an entire steam engine, they are near the end 
 of the course and are familiar with an elementary theory 
 of such engines. Having gained a fair mastery over 
 materials and tools, they are now. able to use them in 
 the study of general principles and in the expression of 
 thought. 
 
 If this mastery is well gained they have conquered a 
 new world, a world full of thought and valuable experi- 
 ence, a department of knowledge fraught with wide 
 uses and a generous human interest. With it one can 
 never fail to be stronger, clearer, surer in dealing with 
 the problems and duties of real life. In spite of the 
 high authority of the Committee, the mastership of 
 materials, tools, and industrial processes is educative in 
 a high degree. The kind of knowledge acquired is far
 
 34 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 reaching in its applications and far more invigorating 
 to the mind than the masses of details and circum- 
 stances that surround certain literary studies * which 
 painfully impress many people competent to judge, as 
 unhappily neither educative nor essential to any rational 
 theory. Mr. Harris once said that a child trained for 
 one year in a kindergarten would acquire a skillful use 
 of his hands and a habit of accurate measurement of 
 the eye which would be his possession for life. How 
 can I adequately express the value of the rich and varied 
 possessions gained by a boy in his teens, having a daily 
 exercise of from one to two hours for three or four 
 school-years in a good series of school-shops ! 
 
 From this brief and imperfect sketch (for I have 
 touched only upon a very few of the details of the man- 
 ual branches taught in every good manual training 
 school) it must be seen that there is no occasion for 
 making comparisons, disparaging or otherwise, between 
 the study of science pure or applied, and manual train- 
 ing. The two must go on side by side, and instead of 
 trying to belittle one at the expense of the other we 
 should aim to perfect both. This latter aim we greatly 
 help by combining the two. No science-teaching with- 
 out shop-work can possibly be as efficient as it easily 
 becomes with it; and again, no shop- work carried on 
 in a school where no science is taught can possibly be as 
 luminous with thought, as where the two are carefully 
 taught side by side. They are strong allies, and inci- 
 dentally they serve each other continually. 
 
 Thus do I answer the argument of the report based 
 
 * Suchas " memorizing the etymological trash from the lumber 
 room of antiquity." Report of Supt. Wm. T. Harris.
 
 CONVENTIONALITIES OF INTELLIGENCE. 35 
 
 on a comparison of the study of science with an as- 
 sumed unscientific construction of individual machines; 
 and thus do I show that while the Committee reasons 
 badly on its own ground, its ground is not at all our 
 ground, and that their argument is entirely irrelevant. 
 
 Dr. Harris, in his Ohio paper on the relation of high 
 schools to colleges, says that while a knowledge of 
 natural science, modern literature, and universal history 
 was not demanded nor expected from an educated man 
 one hundred years ago, things are now so changed that 
 no man can pass for educated without more or less 
 minute acquaintance with them. They have become 
 recognized as " conventionalities of intelligence." 
 
 To that statement, which I accept, I would add that 
 a more or less complete mastery of the materials, tools, 
 and processes which underlie the vast industrial develop- 
 ments of this age of scientific applications is fast be- 
 coming one of the " conventionalities of intelligence." 
 It will no longer satisfy nor suffice to claim that a knowl- 
 edge of the details of good workmanship, of the practi- 
 cal arts which underlie manual skill in whatever field of 
 industry, has neither dignity nor educational worth. 
 No Council Committee can be allowed to dispose of it 
 as " a mass of non-essential circumstances." 
 
 There is danger that some unconventional fellow will 
 voice public sentiment by some word meaning " over- 
 conservative " while speaking of the Committee and 
 their Report. 
 
 Mr. Brown in particular is very sensitive to the term 
 "old fogy," which possibly some one has been rude 
 enough to apply to him. I should be sorry to believe 
 that he deserves the title ; but let him not flatter him- 
 self that the list of " conventionalities of intelligence " 
 4
 
 36 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 has been closed. If he is left behind as our civiliza- 
 tion rushes on at lightning speed, he must not expect 
 that the melancholy fact will altogether escape the 
 knowledge of his former associates. 
 
 If the Committee really wish to inquire into the edu- 
 cative effect of our shop-work let them examine it care- 
 fully in view of its primary object as I have stated it 
 above, and then see whether the mastery sought is gen- 
 erally worth gaining ; whether there is a more efficient 
 method of gaining it ; whether our pupils really achieve 
 it ; and what its real educational influence is. 
 
 VI. 
 
 INTELLECTUAL POWERS, MISCHIEVOUS, BENEFICIAL AND 
 OTHERWISE. 
 
 I come now to a most remarkable sample of argu- 
 mentation. 
 
 The Report says: 
 
 " Your committee would here call attention to other 
 arguments often used which are weak and misleading ; 
 such, for example, as the statement that manual train- 
 ing cultivates the powers of attention, perseverance, 
 and industry. These are formal powers and not sub- 
 stantial ; that is to say, they derive their value from 
 what they are applied to, and they may be mischievous 
 as well as beneficial. The power of attention may be 
 cultivated by the game of chess, or the game of whist, 
 or of draw poker, or to [sic] the picking of pockets ; 
 but it is only attention to those subjects, and not at- 
 tention in general that is cultivated." 
 
 In a similar vein, reference is made to games of 
 " marbles, quoits, base-ball and jack-straws. These
 
 AN ATTEMPT TO BELITTLE MANUAL TRAINING. 37 
 
 too are educative, as manual training is, in the powers 
 named ; and they carry with them some general train- 
 ing." " But it would not be fair to expect that these 
 qualities of mind would show themselves in the boys' 
 work in mathematics or history." 
 
 It must not be supposed that there is any argument 
 in the above, and I do not suppose that any member of 
 the Committee would claim that there is. The fact 
 that a game is or is not educative does not prove that 
 grammar and wood-turning are or are not educative. 
 Nevertheless, there appears to be an attempt to belittle 
 manual training by coupling it with games. The sug- 
 gestion of a " mischievous poiuer of attention " is cer- 
 tainly an original one; but the subsequent illustrations 
 of gamblers, pick-pockets, and dynamiters, are scarcely 
 graceful or in good taste. If they have any force at 
 all in the discussion, it is to the effect that the influence 
 of manual training in cultivating attention, perseverance, 
 industry, dexterity, and accuracy may not only be not 
 good, but positively bad. 
 
 But the propriety of calling the powers of attention, 
 perseverance and industry, " beneficial powers " or ''mis- 
 chievous poivers," I most seriously question. One may 
 be attentive to things good or evil ; one may persevere 
 in right-doing or in wrong-doing; one may be indus- 
 trious in useful or harmful work ; but that a committee 
 of four eminent psychologists should soberly assert that 
 these intellectual poivers can be good or bad, beneficial 
 or mischievous, is passing strange ! 
 
 A little later in the Report the Committee appear to 
 lament the unwillingness of manual training people to 
 insist upon the repetition of exercises in shop-work till 
 all interest is gone, and till the work excites disgust ;
 
 38 MAXUAL TRAINING. 
 
 because, by such refusal an educative opportunity is 
 lost; "for the patience and perseverance that pursues 
 its work to the end, and bravely keeps down any tend- 
 encies to disgust at the lack of novelty, is a moral 
 education indispensable to success in any manual call- 
 ing." 
 
 Are not the powers [or habits] of patience and per- 
 severance just as "formal" and non-" substantial" as 
 ever ? and are the Committee sure that here they are 
 beneficial and not mischievous ? May not a pick-pocket 
 be patient ? and a dynamiter be persevering? 
 
 Moreover, when can one know that he is cultivating 
 " attention in general ? " Whenever one gives atten- 
 tion to anything it is always to something in particular, 
 not something in general. The committee twice men- 
 tion approvingly the study of grammar. Perhaps 
 grammar is sufficiently something in general and noth- 
 ing in particular to be capable of cultivating " attention 
 in general." 
 
 Again, is it not just possible that there may be some- 
 thing " mischievous " in the power of attention to 
 certain book-learning, as shown by the tendency of 
 bookish people to dislike manual labor, and sometimes 
 even to become bad citizens not to mention dyna- 
 miters ? 
 
 One more word in regard to the educative oppor- 
 tunity lost by not requiring pupils to overcome the 
 tendency to disgust at lack of novelty. The Report 
 says : 
 
 " No teaching in the studies of the school as they are 
 would be esteemed of a high order if it did not train its 
 pupils to attack difficult studies and courageously over- 
 come them. Mere natural disinclination and impa-
 
 MORAL INFLUENCE. 39 
 
 tience must be conquered before the child can become 
 a rational being." 
 
 Now the two cases are in no wise parallel. When 
 pupils feel a repugnance to attack difficult studies we 
 urge them to persist, for we know that there is some- 
 thing there which will reward effort. When success 
 does come there is plenty of novelty, and the "habit of 
 doing " is strengthened by the result, which is the 
 mastery of a difficult study. 
 
 But when one repeats many times an exercise from 
 which all educative juice has been extracted, he has 
 nothing to reward his effort. The longer he works the 
 less he gets, and disgust is not only natural but highly 
 proper. No amount of trying can overcome it, and the 
 longer one is kept at it the more intense the disgust, 
 unless, perchance, he falls into that unhappy, stupid 
 condition in which one is willing to repeat indefinitely 
 a senseless and fruitless operation. 
 
 " Natural disinclination " to do useless things is to be 
 respected, and should never be conquered. Laziness, 
 physical and mental, should be conquered, and the love 
 of study, whether with book, tool or apparatus, should 
 be stimulated by a reasonable hope of something to 
 recompense earnest effort. Legitimate manual work is 
 not without its opportunities for promoting industry and 
 encouraging hard work, but the repetition of empty ex- 
 ercises is not one of them. 
 
 It may, perhaps, be replied to this that students of 
 the school may become actual mechanics or routine 
 workers in after life, and that as such they will be 
 obliged to repeat many processes from which all lively 
 interest will long since have disappeared, yet they must 
 keep on, with or without disgust.
 
 40 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 To this it should at once be answered that the all- 
 sufficient motive then will be, not novelty, not ideas 
 and principles, but wages. Every stroke of work will 
 then mean money, and every repetition will mean more 
 money. Attention will be shifted to a new object 
 which has perpetual interest No such pecuniary in- 
 terest comes into school work. 
 
 Dr. S. H. Peabody, of Illinois, endeavored to re-enforce 
 the argument of the Report in his paper read at Nash- 
 ville the day after the Report was made. He said, after 
 referring to the passage quoted above : 
 
 " Accuracy, for example, is of first importance, and 
 no tool-work that fails to show it in a reasonable and 
 constantly refining degree ought for an instant to be 
 tolerated. But accuracy, nakedly and without relation- 
 ship, has no ethical quality. Accuracy and truth are 
 not synonyms. Accuracy is good or evil according to 
 its purpose. Accuracy in fitting a jimmy, that may 
 be used for house-breaking, means burglary. Accu- 
 rate pistol practice, on the night before a duel, means 
 murder. In like manner, industry is good or evil ac- 
 cording to its relationship." 
 
 Is there not something chaotic in all that? He de- 
 clares that accuracy is of first importance, nothing short 
 of it should be for an instant tolerated. So say we, and 
 we claim that manual work is peculiarly favorable to the 
 acquisition of habits of accuracy and industry. Where- 
 upon he wheels square round and declares that there 
 is nothing ethical in naked accuracy. Accuracy and 
 industry may both be evil. Accuracy may mean bur- 
 glary or murder ! 
 
 I hope we may not claim too much for manual train- 
 ing. I do not wish to say that there is in it anything
 
 ARRANT SOPHISTRY. 41 
 
 which on fair trial will not be found there. It is not a 
 panacea for all evils, social, domestic, or personal. It has 
 no monopoly of educational values. It has not even a 
 corner on good habits. It is a valuable educational feat- 
 ure, and should stand beside other valuable educational 
 features, and be judged, as they are, by its fruits. I pro- 
 test that there is no just excuse for dragging into this 
 discussion burglars, murderers and dynamiters, as though 
 they in some way furnished arguments against manual 
 training. As to the ethical quality of " accuracy with- 
 out relationship," I think I shall decline to agree. A 
 single remark must however suffice. When a boy 
 has actually acquired habits of accuracy, attention, 
 perseverance and industry, in a manual training school 
 or in any other good school, his naked chance of be- 
 coming a burglar, a murderer or a dynamiter is dimin- 
 ished fully ninety-five per cent. 
 
 One is led to ask if the Committee ever thought of 
 applying their method of reasoning to other branches 
 than manual training. Let them try arithmetic, for ex- 
 ample. The Report quotes M. Sluys to the effect 
 " that when the child is compelled to manufacture large 
 numbers of a given object in order to acquire skill in 
 the work, the educative value of the work diminishes. 
 ' From the third or fourth sample his interest wanes ; 
 mechanical repetition invariably excites disgust for the 
 work.' " 
 
 The failure of manual training schools to force pupils 
 on to the point of disgust constitutes the " opportunity 
 lost." Now, suppose we apply the same reasoning, 
 thus : 
 
 When the child is compelled to perform large numbers 
 of examples in Long Division in order to acquire skill in
 
 42 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 the work, the educative value of the work diminishes. 
 From the third or fourth page of such examples his inter- 
 est wanes; mechanical repetition invariably excites dis- 
 gust in the work. 
 
 Keep that work up for fifty or sixty solid pages, with 
 a view to acquiring the skill of a lightning calculator, 
 and there will be " disgust " enough for an entire moral 
 education. 
 
 This attempt to make a point against the method of 
 manual training on account of the " opportunity lost " 
 seems to involve the Committee in some confusion. In 
 order to give validity to another argument it was neces- 
 sary to assume that the shop-work was " trade work,' 
 with endless repetitions, until freedom of action was 
 lost in muscular stiffness and insensibility. 
 
 The Committee declare that it is a fact that such rep- 
 etitions are " deadening to the mind." But " the 
 advocates of manual training admit " this fact, and con- 
 sequently avoid such repetitions as contrary to the the- 
 ory of the school. They steer wide of trade methods 
 and trade-work. "This, of course," the Report says, 
 " makes against the economical argument," but it must 
 not be allowed to stand in favor of the methods of the 
 manual training schools as they exist ; so the Committee 
 brings in this argument of an " educative opportunity 
 lost." One is reminded of the children in the market 
 place.* 
 
 * Vide Matth. xi: 16-19.
 
 43 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF THE METHOD OF MANUAL 
 TRAINING. 
 
 Does the method of the manual training school 
 " make against the economic argument " in behalf of 
 such schools ? 
 
 The Report says : 
 
 " The advocates of manual training admit that it is 
 useful as education only if not carried to the point of 
 arriving at skill in production. This feature, of course, 
 makes against the economical argument in behalf of 
 such schools. According to the economic view, skill in 
 production is the primary object aimed at by introduc- 
 ing the training of the hand into schools." 
 
 I could well afford to pass this attempt to array 
 against manual training those who advocate trade in- 
 struction and trade schools. I do not know how many 
 of such men there are among us. I have never met ten 
 in my whole experience, and those I have met were 
 outside the schools and confessedly unfamiliar with the 
 details of either trades or schools. Nevertheless, I 
 should be sorry to have any one misled by such an ar- 
 gument. I shall therefore try to show that the refusal 
 on the part of the teacher of manual training to adopt 
 " factory " methods, and insist upon repetitions until 
 motions become semi-automatic, requiring little or no 
 conscious mental activity, does not "make against the 
 economic argument." 
 
 The highest economy in all arts and all industries is 
 that which most employs brains. If there be any art or 
 industry which is not more remunerative the more one
 
 44 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 brings to it intellectual training of a healthy sort, let us 
 boycott it. One's value in whatever manly occupation 
 is in proportion to his intelligence, his potential energy 
 (to borrow a term from mechanics), and that energy de- 
 pends upon the amount of intellectual power at his 
 command. What we call skill in executive work de- 
 pends upon speed, order and accuracy. When the 
 mind has mastered the conditions of order and accu- 
 racy, the major part of skill has been achieved.* Speed 
 comes with practice, in which there is scarcely a new 
 idea. Again, if, the moment one has grasped the con- 
 ditions of order and accuracy as related to the ma- 
 terial to be wrought, the tools to be used, and the 
 forms to be produced, he sets out by numerous 
 repetitions to acquire the element of speed which 
 shall combine with the former to produce skill, 
 he loses numerous opportunities to acquire an intelli- 
 gent mastery of other materials, processes, and condi- 
 tions. The student who stops to acquire complete skill, 
 narrows his training and shuts himself out of the range 
 of free activity. The lack of true economy in such a 
 course seems plain. Hence, while a manual training 
 school aims not at complete skill in individual opera- 
 tions, it does aim at the intellectual part of all opera- 
 tions. I am as certain as I can be of anything not 
 actually tested by experience, that the manual training 
 school would have far less economic value of it should 
 cease to make intellectual training its chief object, 
 and set about producing skillful factory hands and 
 producing articles for the market. 
 
 * Bacon said that what he had been able to accomplish was due 
 to " order and method."
 
 INTELLECTUAL TRAINING THE CHIEF THING. 45 
 
 Let no one be surprised that I speak thus of intel- 
 lectual training ; that I set it forward as the pre-eminent 
 object of a manual training school. There is no royal 
 road to intellectual power. Perception, memory, imag- 
 ination and judgment may be cultivated in a thousand 
 ways. When one sets out to select the best means for 
 training the intellect and the will he is embarrassed by 
 the great variety of available appliances. Generally, 
 extraneous considerations determine his choice. He 
 is governed largely by convenience and the incidental 
 value of what the mind stores up and exercises itself 
 upon. It would be very easy to show that convenience, 
 availability, use, conventionality and fashion have 
 largely shaped the traditional course of study. By 
 fashion I include an active tendency away from utili- 
 tarian ends to such a degree that the purely intellectual 
 value of a study is held to increase as its practical value 
 decreases. In other words, it is the fashion to assume 
 that, if a study has no economic value, its intellectual 
 value must be not only pure but great. This doctrine 
 must be admitted as partly true. If a study has no 
 economic value, its value must be purely intellectual, 
 whatever that may be there is no denying that conclu- 
 sion; but it does not at all follow that because its value 
 is wholly intellectual, it is therefore greater than the in- 
 tellectual value of another study, which is at the same 
 time very useful. Herein lies a very weak point in the 
 position of those who oppose the introduction of man- 
 ual training on what they call educational grounds. 
 They talk loudly about intellectual studies,* and stoutly 
 
 * The Report uses the word " spiritual " and ' spiritual educa- 
 tion " repeatedly, as if the word furnished a stronger contrast with 
 the " gross materialism " of manual training.
 
 46 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 maintain their superiority to mere manual exercises 
 which have only low and sordid ends. 
 
 If they are " mere " manual exercises, such a state- 
 ment is of course sound, and is trite enough, but when 
 these opponents go on to draw conclusions from it ad- 
 verse to manual training, their error is twofold. First, 
 they ignore the fact that manual studies are intellectual 
 as well as manual ; and secondly, they fail to take ac- 
 count of the fact that the intellectual elements involved 
 in them are for the most part of a very superior charac- 
 ter, admirably suited to stimulate and invigorate the 
 mental faculties. 
 
 I am anxious not to misrepresent those who fail to 
 agree with us. They honestly believe that it injures 
 the educative influence of a study to have a clear and 
 decided practical bearing. They have often claimed 
 that its tendency is to corrupt the mind ; to withdraw 
 the attention and interest from purely intellectual ends; 
 to lower the moral tone. If improperly taught, it may 
 be so, as one may study pedagogics from sordid mo- 
 tives, and hence we cannot take too great pains to se- 
 cure a quality and manner of teaching which is of the 
 highest grade. Nothing is more fatal and disappointing 
 than ignorant and ill-trained teachers. 
 
 But with competent and thoroughly trained teachers 
 the supposed demoralizing influence of the practical 
 side of a study does not occur. The question of what 
 is moral, what intellectual, and what practical in a study 
 does not rise particularly in the minds of pupils. Every 
 study should bear in all three directions. No sensible 
 teacher ever says to his pupils (what no one should 
 ever be able to say), " This study has no practical value, 
 but it is highly intellectual." On the contrary, every
 
 THE BEST INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 47 
 
 good teacher aims to impress his pupils with the im- 
 mense probable and possible practical value of a com- 
 plete mastery of the subject in hand. The best 
 intellectual culture is gained unconsciously, when the 
 student is so absorbed in his work that he takes no 
 thought of its effect upon himself. On the other hand, 
 how absolutely unhealthy is the effect, both morally 
 and intellectually, of a study, a book, or an exercise 
 which a student hates and shirks, and is glad to lay 
 aside forever ! The traditional curriculum for second- 
 ary schools has been so pruned and trimmed in order 
 that the economic may be at a minimum, and the purely 
 intellectual (i.e., the practically useless) may be at a 
 maximum, that the pupils who are keenly alive to the 
 necessity of practical training, and parents who feel 
 as the Supt. Sabin of Iowa puts it, that only " applied 
 (appliable) knowledge is power," see little beyond the 
 three R's which to the average youth is worth the 
 getting. 
 
 Paradoxical as it may seem to many, manual train- 
 ing was organized and is carried on in the interest of 
 a better and more rational intellectual training. It 
 aims alike and at the same time to intellectual cult- 
 ure, to moral worth, and at practical power and 
 efficiency. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE ARGUMENT AGAINST LIBERAL CULTURE IN TOOL- 
 WORK. 
 
 The last argument against manual training urged by 
 the Report is a purely economic one and very wide of 
 the mark at that; and hence might well be overlooked,
 
 48 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 but it has appeared so frequently and so persistently 
 it appeared three times at Nashville in three different 
 papers that it may be well to attempt to dispose of 
 it now for good. The Report says: 
 
 " The education of the muscles of the hand and arm, 
 the training of the eye in accuracy, go for something in 
 the way of education, especially if these, too, are of a 
 general character, and productive of skill in many arts. 
 But it happens in most cases that the training of the 
 muscles for a special operation unfits it more or less 
 for the other special operations. Every trade has its 
 special knack or skill, and not only requires special 
 education to fit the laborer to pursue it, but it reacts on 
 him, and fixes in his bodily organism certain limitations 
 which for greater or less extent unfit him for other 
 occupations. The work of blacksmithing, for instance, 
 would unfit one for engraving; the work in planing and 
 sawing would diminish the skill of the wood-carver. 
 Work in the trades that deal with wood and metals 
 (and these include the entire curriculum of the manual 
 training school) would be disadvantageous to the deli- 
 cate touch required by the laborer on textile manu- 
 factures ; and this class of laborers is nearly as large as 
 the combined classes of wood and metal workers." 
 
 In the discussion which followed the reading of the 
 Report, Dr. Harris explained that by the " delicate 
 touch required by the laborer on textile manufactures," 
 he meant such things as " picking up threads and tying 
 knots." 
 
 So many ideas struggle for expression in comment- 
 ing on that paragraph that I scarcely know where to 
 begin. It must be perfectly transparent to all that the 
 writer could not have been thinking much of the work 
 actually done in manual training schools. He was 
 thinking of trades and trade-work all the time, calcu-
 
 THE ARGUMENT AGAINST LIBERAL CULTURE. 49 
 
 lating the number of wood-workers, metal-workers and 
 textile-workers in the United States, and supposing 
 that the mastery of one trade unfits for another. 
 
 Unless manual training is trade training, the passage 
 has no force in the Report. On no purely educational 
 theory does the number of laborers in a certain class, as 
 shown by the census, have claim to consideration. As 
 the manual training school is not a trade school, either 
 in theory or practice, I might dismiss the matter as 
 irrelevant, but were I to do so, I might appear to admit 
 that the economic value of tool-training, even when 
 carried to a point far short of the demands of a trade, 
 was diminished by giving it breadth and liberality. 
 
 Now we do not doubt that a fair proportion of our 
 students will become mechanics. Students from high 
 schools which do not have manual training, become 
 mechanics and why should not ours? All of our stu- 
 dents have high respect for mechanical skill ; without 
 exception they all enjoy shop-work; and the demand 
 for our students from manufacturers is very great. 
 What wonder then if many find it for their interest to 
 accept positions as tool-users? 
 
 Let me warn the reader not to be misled by shallow 
 reasoning on this point. If one does not become or 
 remain a mechanic it does not prove that he dislikes 
 manual work; it only suggests that he has found some 
 other occupation more remunerative. On the other 
 hand it does not follow that because one does become 
 a mechanic he is therefore in love with manual labor. 
 People are often forced to perform labor which they 
 hate. Examples have not been wanting in recent 
 educational literature, in which writers have reasoned 
 very weakly on these points.
 
 50 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 Returning now to our examination of the passage 
 from the Report, in spite of its extravagant trade bias, 
 and an insinuation that our training is too narrow, we 
 find a distinct argument that it is too broad. The ar- 
 gument as it applies to us stands as follows: Long 
 practice in special narrow operations results in certain 
 muscular habits which seriously interfere with one's 
 free activity when he would undertake different opera- 
 tions. What is true for long practice is proportionately 
 true for short practice ; hence, what one acquires at the 
 forge unfits him for the joiner's bench, and conversely ; 
 an exercise which hardens one's hands disqualifies for 
 an exercise requiring soft and flexible fingers. 
 
 Such appears to be the argument, purely muscu- 
 lar and physical in character. I do not understand that 
 there is any claim of mental disqualification, and yet 
 it seems to me that there ought to be, for it is 
 there that is found the most unfortunate effect of end- 
 less repetitions of muscular operations. Stupidity is 
 the fate of Mr. Brown's turner of plow-handles. " Ten 
 hours a day for twenty years has transformed the man 
 into a machine." His work demands no conscious ef- 
 fort of the mind, and hence the mind lies idle while the 
 hands move automatically. It is possible that such a 
 mind may become so blunted and deadened that 
 healthy mental activity is impossible. Such would be 
 the argument of the Report if it consistently made the 
 most of its position. 
 
 Now, let us see how these theories including the 
 one I have added to make them consistent and com- 
 plete on the supposition of long, unbroken practice, 
 apply to such work as is really under discussion, viz.: 
 the tool-work of the manual training school.
 
 HOW INTEREST WAXES AND WANES. 
 
 51 
 
 To begin with, the law of simple, director inversepro- 
 portion does not hold in measuring the intensity of mental 
 activity in the act of repeating a special operation or 
 exercise. A man may become dull and insensible, men- 
 tally and physically, while repeating the same special 
 operation three million times, but it does not follow 
 that he would grow dull and insensible to the one- 
 millionth of the former extent, as the result of repeating 
 the operation three times. If the operation were one 
 requiring skill, with the elements of order, accuracy and 
 speed, the probability is that the interest and the men- 
 tal activity would increase gradually to a maximum and 
 then begin to wane. So long as the art was imperfectly 
 understood, so long as it stood as a challenge to one's 
 intelligence, the interest would grow. As soon, how- 
 ever, as the intellectual part of the art was mastered, 
 and nothing remained but the necessity of a more per- 
 fect co-ordination of the muscles to produce speed, the 
 interest would rapidly fall away. 
 
 This may be clearly represented by a diagram. 
 
 JL .8 C D 
 
 Let the line ABC. . . Z denote the lapse of 
 time required for countless repetitions of a special opera- 
 tion. Let the perpendiculars Aa Bb Cc, &c., denote the 
 degrees of interest which mark the mental activity 
 during different repetitions. The initial interest Aa 
 may be greater or less ; if the exercise is well chosen, 
 the interest will increase slowly at first, then rapidly as 
 at Bb. The number of repetitions required to reach 
 
 5
 
 52 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 the maximum Cc varies greatly with the nature and com- 
 plexity of the operation, but the time is sure to come 
 earlier or later when the mental characteristic of the ex- 
 ercise diminishes; this is shown by a waning interest. 
 
 In a school, the repetition is never carried far into this 
 waning period. Every special operation should be laid 
 aside for a new one the moment the mental activity has 
 fairly passed its maximum. The intellectual part of the 
 exercise has been mastered and hence that special ex- 
 ercise should cease. No good teacher would carry it 
 beyond Dd. When the mental condition indicated by 
 ZWhas been reached, in the place of a lively interest 
 there is a keen sense of satisfaction. The feeling is 
 precisely akin to that with which one rises from an intel- 
 ligent mastery of a new subject in algebra or a poem of 
 Browning. The argument in the Report seems to be 
 based upon the assumption that the repetitions are car- 
 ried on till the point Z is reached, the region of mental 
 insensibility, sans interest, sans profit, sans everything. 
 The reader will now see, if he did not before, the force 
 of my remark that the intensity of mental activity and 
 growth is not determined by simple proportion. It is 
 seen that there is a tide in the intellectual activity of 
 students, whatever may be the matter in hand, and it is 
 the important duty of the teacher to know when it is 
 at its flood. A growing interest and zeal is contagious 
 and so is a waning one. Beware the ebbing tide. 
 
 The application of this mental analysis to the argu- 
 ment of the Report is easy. So long as we go not 
 beyond the point of lively interest, we go not into the 
 realm of unconscious activity. Every movement is de- 
 termined by the conscious will, not by habit. No au- 
 tomatism has set in, and consequently every motion
 
 HAMMER CULTURE ANALYZED. 53 
 
 may be modified without the necessity of breaking up 
 a muscular habit, for no such habit has been formed. 
 The hand exerts much force or little as the mind wills, 
 with equal facility. The watch-maker's hammer or the 
 blacksmith's sledge is handled without interference and 
 with equal interest so long as equal directive intelli- 
 gence is required. There is more in either than was at 
 first suspected, but what one finds in mastering the tiny 
 hammer is no hindrance to mastering what is to be 
 found in the manipulation of the massive sledge. On 
 the other hand one is a positive preparation for the 
 other. The mental activities are in part identical, and 
 the physical activities differ more in degree than in 
 kind. Consequently the thorough mastery of the one 
 process renders the mastery of the other an easy matter. 
 Hence related exercises of that sort should not appear 
 too numerously in the manual training curriculum. It 
 would be educationally wasteful to bring in exercises 
 with all the hammers, those of the silversmith, the car- 
 penter, the machinist, the forge-worker, the shoemaker, 
 and the stone-mason because having mastered some, 
 the mastery of the others is so easy that their educa- 
 tional value is insufficient ; the time and opportunity 
 can be more profitably spent on wholly new ground. 
 
 I said that the mental activities were in part identical, 
 and I have shown that so far as they are identical a new 
 analogous operation is more easy and proportionally 
 less valuable educationally. But the activities are in 
 part dissimilar, in consequence of new materials and 
 new conditions. Hence a liberal range must be allowed 
 that the judgment may be broadly trained, and that the 
 mind may be led to make critical comparisons. Hence 
 in manual training schools, from Massachusetts to Cal-
 
 54 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 ifornia, and from Minnesota to Louisiana, hammers are 
 used (I keep in mind the use of hammers as an illustra- 
 tion, partly because the hammer has, so to speak, been 
 so often thrown at us, and partly because it may well be 
 taken as typical of numerous classes of tools) ham- 
 mers are used on tiny brads and on huge spikes, in 
 mortising and in wood-carving (i.e., wooden hammers 
 or mallets), on soft and hard iron (hot and cold), on 
 lead and on steel. This is liberal culture, reasonably 
 sufficient for both for mental discipline and for rigid 
 economy. 
 
 But I am not limited to psychological reasoning in 
 establishing the value of a liberal culture. There is 
 abundant evidence from actual experience that neither 
 in the manual training school nor in the realm of prac- 
 tical mechanics is it found that skill (such as there may 
 be), with one set of tools, stands in the way of acquir- 
 ing skill with different tools. 
 
 If I am not mistaken, President Peabody, of the Illi- 
 nois University, whom I have already quoted, first sug- 
 gested the argument which appears in the Report. 
 More explicitly, he asserted that the ability to use cor- 
 rectly the carpenter's hammer is not only of no value in 
 learning to use a machinist's hammer, but that it is a 
 positive hindrance ; in other words, that it is more diffi- 
 cult to make a machinist out of a carpenter, or a car- 
 penter out of a machinist, than it is to make a carpenter 
 or a machinist out of a green hand who never handled a 
 hammer of any sort. Says he, " if the one use of a 
 hammer which the boy has acquired, does not interfere 
 with the use of it in a different way or for a different 
 purpose, then I much doubt whether he has really 
 learned that one use." I suppose Dr. Peabody has a
 
 REAL TRAINING MAKES MORE TRAINING EASY. 55 
 
 standard of attainment in hammering peculiarly his 
 own, for he goes on to add : " Certain kinds of skill 
 require that a man stop thinking, and put himself as 
 nearly as possible in the condition of a machine and 
 carry through a series of movements like a machine." 
 I have no use for men nor for boys who have reached 
 that stage. All persons I meet have abundant and 
 continual use for their brains. 
 
 Not long since it became necessary for our teacher of 
 metal work to take a class in joinery and wood-turning. 
 He had learned the machinists' trade and had been at work 
 on iron and steel for ten or fifteen years, and no one pre- 
 sumed to say that he had not " really learned " the use 
 of the metal-working tools. He was a comparative 
 stranger to joinery and knew absolutely nothing about 
 wood-turning. It was astonishing to see how quickly 
 he mastered the new tools. In a dozen lessons he 
 learned more than a green hand, who had never used 
 tools at all, would have learned in fifty lessons. So boys 
 who come to our school with some knowledge of iron 
 work always go to the front in wood work. And boys 
 who enter the school in advance of the regular admis- 
 sion, and who consequently lack the tool training of the 
 earlier year or years, are always at great disadvantage 
 in shop-work, though the operations omitted are quite 
 unlike those they enter upon. 
 
 I have made systematic study of this question, with 
 the results as stated. There is not a shop teacher in 
 my school who does not hold that this " unfitting" ar- 
 gument is totally unsound. In my Harvard days I was 
 an oarsman for three years, and I know well the de- 
 gree of stiffness and insensibility which the automatism 
 of daily pulling a long oar gives to one's hands. There
 
 56 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 is nothing in the whole course of tool- work in a manual 
 training school which can be compared with rowing in 
 that regard. Last year two of my graduating students 
 were unusually skillful musicians, one on the piano, the 
 other on the violin. Neither ever complained of stiff 
 fingers, though one of them said the iron work soiled 
 his hands and spoiled his nails. Those, however, were 
 trifling matters which a week's vacation would remove. 
 Here I submit the arguments. The position of the 
 Report appears to me to be unsound, whether examined 
 a priori or a posteriori. My conclusion is that knowl- 
 edge, intelligence, skill, power and culture are always 
 helpful in the acquisition of more knowledge, more in- 
 telligence, more skill, more power, and more culture. 
 The more accomplished one is, the easier new things 
 are to him, whether in the realm of pure intellect or in 
 the field where mind and hand are cultivated together. 
 
 IX. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The significant report of Supt. Seaver, of Boston, 
 touching the "educative value " of manual training is a 
 timely commentary on this Council Report. Mr. 
 Seaver's report, which accompanies his plan fora com- 
 plete Manual Training High School for the City of 
 Boston, is so apropos that I venture to give a generous 
 quotation. He was commissioned to visit the manual 
 training schools of Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Balti- 
 more, Philadelphia and St. Louis, and to make a 
 thorough inspection. Of one of his visits he speaks as 
 follows :
 
 THK VKKDICT OF SL'l'T. SEAVKK. f>7 
 
 "The Director of the school bade me make myself 
 perfectly at home, question the teachers, question the 
 boys, and make my investigation as thorough as was in 
 my power with all the help they could give. I devoted 
 four days to the investigation. The results were a large 
 book full of notes, and a clear impression in my mind 
 of a well-organized and vigorously working school. I 
 cannot here go into details. Suffice it to say, I used 
 my privilege of questioning freely and thoroughly. I 
 followed classes from the school-rooms into the draw- 
 ing-rooms, and into the shops. I found the boys 
 equally alert and intelligent in all branches of their 
 work. They were as ready to describe and give the 
 reasons for every step in the process of forging a pair of 
 blacksmith's tongs, as they were to state and give the 
 reasons for every step in the demonstration of a 
 geometrical theorem. There are those who doubt the 
 ' educative value ' of manual training. Let any such 
 person spend a few hours in a good manual training 
 school, like this, observing the boys at their work and 
 questioning them about it ; and if his doubts about the 
 ' educative value ' of manual training do not vanish, it 
 will be because he measures ' educative value ' by 
 standards not in common use. I should desire him 
 particularly to converse with those boys in the machine- 
 shop, now drawing near the close of their school course, 
 and busily at work on their 'projects' for graduation 
 day. Let him ask for explanations, question them 
 closely for reasons, observe the quality of their work, 
 note their own criticisms and estimates of it, and he 
 must be an unreasonable man if he does not admit that 
 somehow their school training has developed in them a 
 high degree of intelligence. The result is too striking 
 to be overlooked, analyze and account for it as we 
 may." * 
 
 As a companion to the above from the superintend- 
 ent of the public schools of Boston, I venture to insert 
 
 * See School Document, No. 15, 1889, City of Boston.
 
 58 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 an extract from the last report of Superintendent Mac- 
 Alister, of the public schools of Philadelphia. 
 
 He says that while the courses in tool-work and 
 drawing are the distinctive features of the manual train- 
 ing school, " it must be borne in mind that the others are 
 not neglected. On account of its novelty the manual 
 training is apt to make the strongest impression upon 
 visitors, and they do not always discover that the liter- 
 ary and scientific training are just as fully recognized 
 and provided for. Anything like a one-sided culture is 
 carefully avoided, the aim of the school being to give 
 to each branch, whether scholastic or manual, such rel- 
 ative importance as shall lead to a fuller and more sym- 
 metrical development of mind and body than has been 
 possible under the old systems of secondary educa- 
 tion. 
 
 "The success which has attended the manual training 
 school from the first is the best guarantee of the sound- 
 ness of the principles upon which it is organized and 
 conducted. Beginning a little more than four years 
 ago, in a very humble way, it has steadily grown in 
 public confidence and approval. // has more than jus- 
 tified every claim that was made in its behalf. Every 
 available foot of space is now occupied, and it has now 
 become impossible to admit all the pupils who apply for 
 admission. The Board of Education has therefore been 
 brought face to face with the question whether the 
 time has not come for opening another manual training 
 school in such a quarter of the city as may be deemed 
 most advantageous to the public interests. The original 
 intention of the Board was to establish four or five of 
 these schools as fast as a just regard for the other de- 
 partments of the school system would permit, and the 
 growing demand for the kind of education which this 
 school represents will render the fulfillment of this pur- 
 pose a necessity at no very remote date." * 
 
 [The italics in the above extract are mine.] 
 
 * Manual training in the Public Schools of Philadelphia, by 
 James MacAlister, Superintendent, March, 1890.
 
 THK CULTURED MIND, THE SKILLFUL HAND. 59 
 
 Thus the work goes on. The intellectual fruits of a 
 rational, well-proportioned system of manual training 
 are so evident to every close observer and student of 
 that training that I am sorry that the Committee are 
 unable to see them. Manual training will go on all the 
 same, and I hope that every member of the Committee 
 will live to see that, far from being a power for mis- 
 chief, it is a potent instrumentality for good ; that it is 
 a strong and friendly ally in promoting educational 
 progress, and in ameliorating the condition of all classes 
 of our people. I earnestly hope that manual training 
 may be able to contribute something to bring about 
 that splendid consummation, eloquently pictured by 
 Geo. Wm. Curtis, when " with one hand education shall 
 lead the young American to the secrets of material 
 skill, and equip him to enter into the fullest trade with 
 all the world ; but with the other it shall lead him to 
 lofty thoughts and to commerce with the skies."
 
 A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE REPORT OF 
 THE COMMITTEE ON PEDAGOGICS. 
 
 BY GILBERT B. MORRISON. 
 
 The National Teachers' Association, which held its 
 last session at Nashville, Tenn., revealed some interest- 
 ing and peculiar characteristics. Of the subjects dis- 
 cussed the most important was that of manual training. 
 To those who believe that an education means more 
 than an "abnormal tumefying of the inner conscious- 
 ness," it was gratifying to see that the programme of 
 this National Convention of Teachers gave a place to 
 the discussion of manual training. Still more would it 
 seem to the disinterested spectator that more than a 
 passing deference was being shown this phase of school 
 work, from the fact that it was made the subject of the 
 labors of the Committee on Pedagogics. But to these 
 first impressions of professional countenance the report 
 itself furnishes a curious contradiction. 
 
 I wish it to be understood at the outset, that I shall 
 try to treat this report solely on its merits, regardless 
 of the known ability of the committee in general, and 
 Professor Harris in particular, for whom I have great 
 admiration and respect; and it is, perhaps, the 
 heightened expectation accompanying admiration which 
 makes this report seem to me somewhat disappointing. 
 
 To a citizen of the nation, who has a right to expect 
 from a committee representing national interests an 
 unbiased report of a painstaking investigation of the 
 (60)
 
 EDUCATIONAL DOCTKIMO. (il 
 
 facts and principles involved, the following from the 
 prelude, which seems to be an apology for considering 
 the question at all, is interesting: 
 
 " This subject has come to be of prime importance, 
 by reason of the strong claims set up for it by its advo- 
 cates, and secondly, by reason of the fact that as a 
 cause it serves to unite, not only the critics of the edu- 
 cational system already existing, but also its uncom- 
 promising enemies; thirdly, because the claims set forth 
 in its behalf are based, not on economic reasons but on 
 educational reasons, an assumption being actually made 
 that the effect of manual training on the pupil is edu- 
 cational in the same sense as the branches of science 
 and literature heretofore taught, or at least if different 
 from them, of equal or of superior value to them. This 
 assumption unsettles the entire question of course of 
 study, in so far as it rests on the doctrine of a specific 
 educational value for each of the branches of the course 
 of study, and in so far as it is supposed that the present 
 list of branches provides for an all-sided intellectual 
 training." 
 
 When this prelude was read, I thought it might be 
 expressed in fewer words, somewhat as follows : " The 
 system of public education in this country rests on a 
 ' doctrine.' That doctrine does not include manual 
 training. That doctrine is settled. Manual training 
 would 'unsettle' it. The 'advocates' of manual train- 
 ing even claim that it has pure educational value. 
 They are therefore enemies to the present educational 
 system. But they are making a great deal of noise, 
 and we, the committee, will now proceed to give the 
 presumptuous intruders a black eye from the fist of 
 high authority." 
 
 The discussion which followed the reading of the re-
 
 62 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 port would remove any doubt of the justice of my 
 paraphrase of it. The council, with surprising energy 
 and alacrity, rallied almost unanimously to the support 
 of the statements expressed in the report. Professor 
 C. M. Woodward, of St. Louis, seemed to be alone in 
 the defense of manual training. But his solitude was 
 only apparent. Others present would have joined their 
 voices with his had not the ruling of thecouncilsilenced 
 them. Only members of the council were allowed to 
 be heard. I could not help reflecting that it would 
 take something more than membership, however hon- 
 orable, to demonstrate the fitness of the remarks of 
 many who spoke on this question. 
 
 Listening to these venerable schoolmasters discuss- 
 ing manual training schools, persistently calling them 
 " trade schools," trying to measure them by their own 
 individual experience and preconceived notions, re- 
 minded me of the following anecdote : 
 
 An aged hunter, who in his young days had been 
 considered a " dead shot," was accustomed to sit by 
 his fireside, an old-fashioned chimney-place, looking 
 reverently at his old and trusty flint-lock, which he 
 never allowed to be removed from his sight. One 
 beautiful day in early spring, the sun shining through 
 an open window, fell upon the shaggy brow and silvery 
 hair of the veteran. Its genial warmth seemed to re- 
 vive in him something of his youthful vigor. Peering 
 wistfully out, he discovered a squirrel frisking in a 
 neighboring tree. With the unerring instinct of habit 
 he seized his gun still sitting in his chair took aim 
 and fired. He then sat calmly waiting for his son, who 
 was working in the garden, to bring in the coveted 
 rodent. When the smoke had cleared away he saw, to
 
 SHOOTING AT IMAGINARY GAME. 63 
 
 his surprise and chagrin, the same squirrel still sporting 
 with undisturbed equanimity in the same tree. The old 
 man summoned all his energy, re-loaded his gun, took 
 a more careful aim, and fired again. To his now un- 
 disguised amazement the squirrel still remained. The 
 son had by this time arrived, in haste to learn the 
 meaning of this in-door musketry. Looking into the 
 anxious and troubled face of his aged parent, he at 
 once discovered the situation, and exclaimed : " Why, 
 pa, dear pa, there is a parasite {Pediculous capitis] on 
 your eyelash! " 
 
 The educational leaders of the United States seem 
 to be shooting at an illusion, which they call the " trade 
 school." But the manual training school, which is to 
 them only another name for the same thing, still con- 
 tinues to sport in the upper branches of public favor 
 after the smoke of each pedagogical volley has cleared 
 away. 
 
 Quoting again from the report: 
 
 " Your committee, accordingly, have proposed to 
 themselves in this report to discuss the various phases 
 of this assumption, and to- inquire in what precisely 
 consists the educational functions of the branches 
 taught in the manual training school." 
 
 The committee here assume that the claims of 
 manual training rest on an " assumption ; " they there- 
 fore do not deem it part of their duty to examine the 
 schools themselves, but only to draw from their inner 
 consciousness arguments to refute the "assumption." 
 
 Again : 
 
 " They (the committee) have proposed to treat inci- 
 dentally, also, the economic questions involved, inas-
 
 64 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 much as the popularity of the movement has its 
 foundation in the conviction that if the schools teach 
 manual training, all pupils will be fitted for useful in- 
 dustries before the age of leaving school for business." 
 
 Is this not an admission that there is a popular be- 
 lief that the schools as now existing do not fit the 
 pupils for useful industries, and therefore do not give 
 that " all-sided " training which is claimed for them ? 
 There could hardly be better evidence that the schools 
 as now existing are not wholly satisfactory, than that a 
 proposed change is popular, even though untried and 
 opposed by the pedagogical cult of the nation. 
 
 The committee now go out of their way to discuss 
 "special trade" schools, and admit that the training 
 furnished by them is superior to the old apprentice 
 system. " But," say they, " your committee insists 
 that such manual training ought not to be begun be- 
 fore the completion of the twelfth year of the pupil." 
 This is another shot at the supposed squirrel, and has 
 no application to manual training schools as now exist- 
 ing, which are simply high schools with the manual 
 element incorporated. 
 
 But it might be well to stop here to reflect on the un- 
 soundness of the statement that manual training should 
 not begin before the twelfth year. Manual training 
 means using the hands, as intellectual training means 
 using the mind. And the former is essential to the 
 normal use of the latter. Children learn more during 
 the first five years of their life than during any subse- 
 quent five years. This is ' because they have more 
 manual exercise during this period. They use their 
 little hands continually, finding out the properties of 
 matter, enjoying that reflex activity between the brain
 
 READING OX SCIENCE VS. WORKING IN SCIENCE. 65 
 
 and sensorium, which is one of the fundamental condi- 
 tions of correct thinking. Frrebel recognized this 
 principle when he founded the kindergarten, which is 
 nothing more than juvenile manual training. The fault 
 of educational systems is that this manual training, or 
 what might otherwise be called normal intellectual 
 training, does not continue. In the stereotyped Ameri- 
 can school the pupil must stop this " play," form in line 
 outside the school-house, march in when the teacher 
 taps the bell, fold his hands that they may do no " mis- 
 chief," toe the mark, and learn to read and spell. Read 
 and spell what? Words, words, words ! which often 
 mean nothing to him. But it is done in good " form," 
 and therefore supposed to be "all-sided." Froebel has 
 done good service for primary grades, Professor Wood- 
 ward and others for high school grades, and he who 
 shall devise a system of manual training applicable to 
 the intermediate and grammar grades, will do a service 
 equal in value to either of these. 
 
 The Report continues : " Your committee understand 
 that any amount of manual training conducted in a 
 school is no equivalent for the school education in let- 
 ters and science, and ought not to be substituted for it." 
 This implies that when manual training begins, educa- 
 tion in science, etc., ends. This is a somewhat strange 
 doctrine in this age of experimental and applied 
 science, wherein the manual element is an organic and 
 indispensable part of the work. This committee does 
 not appear to be aware that science cannot be learned 
 without the manual element. They evidently belong 
 to that school of educators who believe that science 
 can be learned historically. They believe in reading 
 on science instead of working in science. Who ever
 
 66 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 knew a scientist worthy of the name who was not an 
 experimenter? Encyclopedic information about things 
 does not furnish correct conceptions of those things. 
 With all active men of science the manual element is 
 uppermost, and forms the fundamental condition of 
 correct concepts. Every experimental laboratory 
 wherein the pupils are allowed to work is a manual 
 training school. The student in a manual training 
 school proper, uses his tools as the student of science 
 uses his apparatus, chiefly as the necessary means in 
 forming correct ideas. 
 
 The educational bias which ignores the manual ele- 
 ment in education is difficult to account for. It is the 
 bias which possesses that class which, as Colonel Gar- 
 rick Maliory expresses it, regards him the best teacher 
 "who has most enormously tumefied his inner con- 
 sciousness, and who can then expose its morbidity by 
 the most pretentious diagnosis." 
 
 The intimation in this report that manual training is 
 unfavorable to the study of science, must be amusing 
 to any one who has had any experience in science- 
 teaching. An experience of ten years in teaching 
 physics and chemistry is sufficient to convince me that 
 manual training is indispensable to the proper pursuit 
 of these studies. The boy from the farm or shop will 
 always outstrip the boy who has never stooped to the 
 " vulgar " material. Pupils who come to the High 
 School from the Grammar School are mere infants when 
 taken to an experiment, and away from their shadows 
 of ideas words. The time spent with them must 
 therefore be of the most rudimentary character such 
 as teaching them how to observe, how to exercise their 
 senses, and to interpret impressions. The true nature
 
 UNITY OF METHOD. 67 
 
 of the work done in the average Grammar School can 
 be seen by the persistency with which the student turns 
 from the examination and discussion of things, and the 
 alacrity with which he seizes and retains words which 
 are supposed to represent things. 
 
 " Physical maturity is necessary to the formation of 
 the best muscular movements to produce skill," say the 
 committee. Why not also say, " Mental maturity is 
 necessary to the formation of the best mental move- 
 ments to produce thought." This is much like saying, 
 " Do not begin to climb the hill till you get to the top." 
 It is saying to the young fledgeling, " Do not try to fly 
 until yeu have risen above the housetops, for the ob- 
 jects below would impede ' freedom of movement.' ' 
 
 The time-prescription method by which learned edu- 
 cators pretend to assign work specially adapted to each 
 year of a child's life, and that of a different character 
 from that which preceded it, is artificial and stultifying. 
 Healthy growth results from healthy natural exercise 
 of mind and body. The exercise need not differ in its 
 nature at different periods. It varies only in degree 
 both as to quantity and quality. 
 
 Science, language, etc., are simply thought and its 
 expression, and can be as easily taught to a child of 
 eight years as to the senior in college. The young 
 child begins with his playthings to study the nature of 
 things, and his first words and sentences are expressions 
 of his thoughts. The college senior, if his work is 
 what it should be, is but continuing the process. His 
 investigations in science are but the continuation of his 
 study into the nature of things. The discovery of a 
 child that fire burns, and that it will destroy his toy if 
 he expose it, is of the same nature, so far as thought 
 
 5
 
 H8 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 processes are concerned, as the discovery by his father 
 that a certain amalgam will melt at 250, and will there- 
 fore serve a useful purpose as a safety plug or electric 
 light cut-off. With the boy who has run away from his 
 geography lesson, and while building a dam across the 
 brook finds that sand and ordinary mud will not do, 
 and then seeks clay, it is not different in nature from 
 the work of the student in studying the strength of 
 materials in mechanical engineering. If the young 
 dam-builder were led to write his essay on his engineer- 
 ing efforts, how would it differ in nature or mental 
 process from the effort of the senior in preparing his 
 thesis? When reading his juvenile stories, character- 
 izing some as funny, some sad, and exercising his 
 powers in similar efforts of his own, he is studying 
 what he will later, when analyzing Shakespeare, call 
 literature. It is only the conventional " doctrine" of 
 time-prescription which is equal to the task of starting 
 off the memory at one time, the reason at another, the 
 observation at another, and manual exercise at another, 
 gravely asserting that " the industrial school should 
 not be allowed to take possession of the youth until the 
 completion of his twelfth year." It would be interest- 
 ing to know just how long it would require for the " in- 
 dustrial " school to get full possession of a boy who 
 had previously enjoyed a training exclusively " intel- 
 lectual." 
 
 The quack doctor who, in his ignorance of his 
 patient's- case, prescribes bread pills (under another 
 name) to be taken at intervals of two hours and seven 
 minutes, alternated with meal powders (also under 
 another name), has an eye to business. Such a knowl- 
 edge of the wonderful mechanism of the human body,
 
 "THE CARKS OF MATURE LIFE." 69 
 
 and the chemical nature of the medicine put into it, so 
 perfectly estimating the beginning and end of effects, 
 is wonderful to behold, and inspires the implicit confi- 
 dence of the hopeful patient. So the educator who so 
 claims ability to discern the " rise and fall " of faculty 
 as to be able to prescribe when the child should begin 
 to think or to use his hands, has been admired by those 
 who have more money to pay taxes than time to inves- 
 tigate the validity of the claim. 
 
 The committee dwell at some length on the evils of 
 "premature development," "arrested development," 
 " preternatural acuteness," of street gamins, " Punch 
 and Judy faces," etc., as though these things had any- 
 thing to do with the subject of their investigation. It 
 is one of the favorite methods of a bad cause to point 
 out existing social evils as casually related to the ob- 
 ject of the aversion. That cause must, indeed, be a 
 desperate one which will attribute to the manual train- 
 ing school that class of influences which makes street 
 gamins and criminals of its students. 
 
 The report sounds a note of warning against impos- 
 ing on the child the " cares of mature life." It would 
 be a gratuitous assumption that would intimate that 
 manual exercise produces this result, or that it is un- 
 pleasant to the pupils. That the reverse of this is true 
 has been iterated and reiterated by pupils, patrons and 
 managers of manual training schools. The committee 
 themselves acknowledge this in another part of the re- 
 port, when they say : " Boys may love the work of the 
 manual training school, and dislike history, grammar 
 and mathematics, and all book-learning, in fact." This 
 not only seems to contradict the " premature-cares-of 
 -life " plea, but furnishes another gratuitous assumption
 
 70 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 that love for the manual training school means hatred 
 for other factors of education. These conflicting ex- 
 pressions seem to give the report more the appearance 
 of the special pleading of the mere advocate than of 
 the candid statement of the unbiased judge. 
 
 Whatever may be said of the advantages or disad- 
 vantages of the immunity of youth from responsibility, 
 it is curious that any one should believe that this immu- 
 nity consists in preventing the pupil from exercising 
 his hands under mental guidance. 
 
 The juvenile phase of manual training seems to be 
 indorsed by the committee, if I correctly interpret the 
 meaning of the following somewhat ambiguous sen- 
 tence : " The work of the kindergarten, the schools for 
 waifs, and this line of effort, will stop the growth of that 
 hopeless class of society that has become arrested be- 
 low the moral stage of development." This is a well- 
 deserved compliment to the kindergarten, but it is 
 expecting too much of it. Does the committee mean 
 that this " hopeless class that has become arrested be- 
 low the moral stage of development " work their 
 children between the ages of two and eight years ? and 
 that the kindergarten saves these children from this 
 "premature assumption of the cares of life?" If so, it 
 may be asked : " Does the kindergarten reach the class 
 of children referred to ? What will become of them 
 after they leave the kindergarten? Are these good 
 influences, exerted during this brief period of infancy, 
 sufficient to " stop the growth " of that immoral branch 
 of society from which they sprung? 
 
 This acknowledges the potency of the manual ele- 
 ment in education to a degree which would hardly be 
 ventured by the most Ardent advocate of manual 
 raining.
 
 IS ALL LABOR DRUDGERY? 71 
 
 The committee do not appear to regard the Kinder- 
 garten in the light of a manual training school. But 
 wherein lies the difference between the Kindergarten 
 and other methods of teaching children if not in the 
 manual element? Why not anathematize those innova- 
 tions of Froebel as " trade schools ? " The little ones 
 build houses, construct bridges, erect forts, weave pat- 
 terns, and make many other things suggestive of the 
 " drudgery of life ! " Let it be here noticed that any 
 system of education which educates the pupil to look at 
 labor as " drudgery " is a false and pernicious educa- 
 tion, and the language of the report we are considering 
 seems to indicate that this kind of education not only 
 still exists but is advocated by the highest authority 
 the National Committee on Pedagogics. Is it not about 
 time that we examine our ideals ? 
 
 The report lays much stress on the " scientific view " 
 that infancy and childhood should be protected from 
 dwarfing influences. In this, they have clearly mis- 
 taken a scientific principle for an instance that is sup- 
 posed to come under it. The truth of the principle will 
 be admitted by all, but the use of it in supposing that 
 manual training violates it and the schools as heretofore 
 existing exemplify it, is an assumption which the facts 
 do not justify. 
 
 A parallel to this is seen in the case of two boys who are 
 eating fruit one a peach, the other a banana. They 
 dispute as to which kind is more healthful, when one of 
 them vanquishes his adversary by quoting from his 
 physiology lesson that, " that fruit is most healthful 
 which best promotes digestion." 
 
 To the same effect the committee continue :" For there 
 is a conviction deep seated in the minds of the people that
 
 72 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 all children ought to be educated together in the humane 
 studies that lie at the basis of liberal culture." But what 
 are the " humane studies ? " If it be the three R.'s, will 
 the manual element neutralize any of the kindness 
 which these indispensable studies may be supposed to 
 have inculcated? If it be grammar, would the pupil 
 become less sympathetic if allowed to alternate the use 
 of the saw with his syntax ? If it be history, would his 
 hour in the shop rob him of the benevolence he had just 
 inculcated from his study of human warfare and blood- 
 shed? If it be rhetoric, would he lose the compassion 
 which he had imbued while studying the laws of emo- 
 tional expression if called upon during the next hour at 
 the forge to tie up the burnt finger of a fellow student? 
 If it be Greek, would he lose any of the mildness, ten- 
 derness, or mercy which the reading of the fables of the 
 Odyssey had contributed to his character by forgetting 
 for an hour at the bench that men were once changed 
 into swine by royal fiat ? 
 
 The committee would have the years of childhood 
 and of youth free from anything like labor, that this 
 period may be devoted to "spiritual growth," and the 
 training of the will and intellect. That as they will not 
 have time for these things when they are grown up they 
 should lay in a stock while young sufficient to last them 
 through life? If there is a kind of spirtuality to which 
 the committee refer that grows without the exercise of 
 the cardinal virtues which find their expression in the 
 daily experiences of the daily industries and cares of 
 life, then I will not pretend to discuss it. If they mean 
 a species of will which grows in an atmosphere when 
 the will is nor exercised in self-denial, in performing un- 
 pleasant duties, and in overcoming difficulties, then I
 
 SPIRITUAL GROWTH. 73 
 
 acknowledge my inability to speak of it. If there is a 
 principle of growth which depends on influences of a 
 nature different from those which the organism will be 
 required to endure in maturity, then something new 
 must have been recently discovered. Such a principle 
 would have the oak grow in a warm shady spot and 
 sheltered from the wind that it may better withstand the 
 fierce storms to which the tree will be subjected in ma- 
 turity. 
 
 This is not offered as an argument for increasing the 
 cares and anxieties of childhood. I quite agree with the 
 sentiment of the committee that this should as far as pos- 
 sible be avoided. But it is consideration of the stuff 
 which spirituality and will-power are made of that in- 
 duces me to call in question the qualityof the ready-made 
 article which the report prescribes. 
 
 Again : " The common school shall teach the pupil to 
 conquer fortune by industry and good habits and the ap- 
 plication of the tools of thought." If rightly interpreted 
 this expresses a sound doctrine. If by tools of thought is 
 meant the ability rationally to think in relations limited by 
 the conditions of being, then no objection can be raised 
 to this view of the province of the commonschool. Such 
 a view makes the manual training school indispensable. 
 But if by tools of thought is meant the mediaeval tumor 
 of abstract phrases which enables the possessor to cant 
 about the unconditioned, then the tax-payer has a right 
 to demur. Much that reaches the conventional stand- 
 ard of education is a mere flourish of the "tools of 
 thought " without the thought. The workman is not 
 known by his tools, but by his chips and the article 
 produced. 
 
 "The trade or vocation in life is but a small part of
 
 74 MANUAL TKAINING. 
 
 the total functions of any one's life" saythe committee. 
 Quite true, but it must not be forgotten that the trade 
 or vocation is an essential <p-ax\.. It is idle to talk about 
 the luxuries till the means for the essentials have been 
 provided for. The manual element in education makes 
 the luxuries possible by making the essentials sure. 
 But the misguided pupil who has been taught to regard 
 the essentials as " drudgery " will stand a poor chance 
 of getting the luxuries. It seems strange that leading 
 educators should feel called upon to treat with con- 
 tempt the very conditions of existence. The entire re- 
 port is a reflection of that false and pernicious type of 
 education which despises labor and fills the land with 
 "scholarly" upstarts who are incapable of earning an 
 honest living. 
 
 The report dwells at some length discussing the dan- 
 gers from the "illiterate manual labor." Is it possible 
 that this committee believe that applies to any manual 
 training school in existence? If so, then their igno- 
 rance of the factsmakes the report valueless. It seems 
 strange that an association representing the nation 
 should appoint a committee to report on a question to 
 which they had given no thought. The appointment 
 by the officers of a county fair, of a dry goods mer- 
 chant to award premiums for the best threshing ma- 
 chines, would be regarded bad management ; and this 
 would rarely happen unless the appointing power 
 owned one of the machines. 
 
 The committee argue the uselessness of manual train- 
 ing from the advance made in machinery, which " does 
 the drudgery of the work and leaves to the laborer only 
 the task of supervision. The more complete the machine 
 becomes the more operations it includes in its processes,
 
 WHENCE COME INVENTORS? 75 
 
 the more intellect is required to manage it." But it 
 may be asked at this point, Who completes the ma- 
 chine ? Who invents it? Do inventions emanate from 
 the so-called intellectual workers who have learned the 
 laws of nature and the properties of matter from books ? 
 Who does not know that inventors are almost invariably 
 either manual laborers or practical scientists whose 
 manual or experimental efforts lead to discovery and 
 invention ? The common error with educators is in mis- 
 taking encyclopedic information about science for 
 science itself. There is a difference between historical 
 information about science and working in science. Is it 
 to be supposed that a man educated in books alone is 
 fit to supervise either the construction or the running of 
 machinery ? If there is doubt on this point let a college 
 graduate of the conventional type apply for a position 
 to " superintend machinery." The answer and the ex- 
 pression on the face of the man applied to might be 
 suggestive. If the invention of machinery were de- 
 pendent on that kind of " intellectual training " pre- 
 scribed by the committee, some time would elapse be- 
 fore it would " emancipate the laborer." 
 
 Perhaps the most unsatisfactory and untrustworthy 
 part of this report is where reference is made to the com- 
 parative value of " natural science in its general phases " 
 with its " special applications to the theory of special 
 machines." It is claimed that the former is " more last- 
 ing," that the latter " is but for a day." This is true of 
 and applies only to the mere servile mechanical laborer, 
 who without mental training works under the eye of 
 another. It is not true of the student who builds the 
 machine for mental and manual culture. 
 
 In building a single engine he will be brought face to
 
 76 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 face with almost all the principles learned from his 
 books. He has the opportunity of correcting false 
 notions which he is sure to get from book study alone. 
 He here, and here only, can learn the true meaning of 
 many of the technicalities of the text. The whole ar- 
 gument urged against the construction of machinery as 
 an educative factor would have equal force against the 
 laboratory method of studying physics and chemistry, 
 and would run as follows : " Why soil the hands and 
 consume time in experimenting when the theory of 
 these operations involves all realizations of it ? " The 
 performance of the experiment admits of one of an in- 
 definite number of " styles " of performance, uses one 
 kind of reagent or apparatus " out of many, and en- 
 counters peculiar difficulties of one kind and another 
 occasioned by temporary conditions that have nothing 
 to do with the nature of the ' experiment ' or with its 
 performance elsewhere." For the student " thus ob- 
 scures his general view of the principle of the ' experi- 
 ment ' by covering it up with a great collection of de- 
 tails that do not essentially concern it." (Italics are 
 mine.) Why not learn these things from the book and 
 be done with it ? 
 
 I am aware that this sort of argument when applied to 
 laboratory work would be accepted by many still rank- 
 ing themselves as educators, but it is hardly fair to sup- 
 pose that this committee belong to that type. I shall 
 assume therefore that they believe in experimental 
 work in chemistry. They are philosophers psycholo- 
 gists, and I would therefore like to hear from them on 
 the following points : 
 
 i. What is the physical advantage of performing a
 
 DOING VS. READING ABOUT DOING. 77 
 
 chemical experiment over reading about the same from 
 a book ? 
 
 2. Will not the same advantage be realized in build- 
 ing a steam engine over the mere reading about it? 
 
 3. What is implied in a concept ? 
 
 4. On what does the correctness or reliability of this 
 concept depend ? 
 
 5. What is the mental discipline and what is the stu- 
 dent getting when he is trying to overcome "peculiar 
 difficulties " in performing an experiment or in getting 
 an engine to work? 
 
 6. What kind of exercise is he getting while strug- 
 gling with " temporary conditions " which the theory 
 does not provide for? or is it exercise at all? 
 
 7. What will be the relative value of the knowledge 
 gained by this exercise after he has secured his position 
 to "superintend machinery?" 
 
 Again : " The training of the muscles for a special 
 operation unfits it more or less for the other special 
 operations. * * * It fixes in his bodily organiza- 
 tion certain limitations which unfit him for other occu- 
 pations." 
 
 This implies that the exercises of the manual training 
 school are pursued to the extent of fixing habit in 
 special movements. It also implies that these habits 
 when formed are pursued till the muscles of the student 
 become set and rigid, which would further imply that 
 the manual training school has a course extending over 
 a period of fifteen to twenty-five years. Need it be 
 said that no one of these implications is true? The 
 united testimony of manual training school teachers 
 and directors as well as that of common sense tell us 
 that no fixed habits in any special movement can be
 
 78 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 formed during the brief period of school life, especially 
 when these exercises are taken along with the other 
 part of the curriculum. 
 
 The limitations of a trade could not fasten upon a 
 school-boy. It is doubtful if even an artisan feels them 
 till he has passed the meridian of life. It is quite true 
 that "every trade has its special knack or skill," but no 
 special training is aimed at in the manual training school. 
 It is also true that the hammer and saw are among the 
 tools used in the manual training school and are not 
 used in a cotton factory. It is also true that geometry 
 and trigonometry are tools (intellectual) used in all 
 schools, but are not used in the practice of medicine. 
 If the limitations of the use of the hammer and saw dis- 
 qualify the factory hand, then why will not the limita- 
 tions of geometry disqualify the physician ? There is 
 a mental dexterity and a manual dexterity, and both 
 alike depend upon exercise for their development. To 
 suppose that the exercises of a manual training school, 
 be it what it may, disqualifies for any trade would find 
 a parallel in the supposition that the common school 
 "intellectual" branches which as taught are solely the 
 tools of a teacher disqualify for all other professions. 
 
 It will not do to say that " the course of study in 
 manual training in so far as it concerns the education of 
 the hand is limited to a narrow circle of trades in the 
 wood and metal industries," for it is not true. The 
 hand which moves under the guidance of the will is 
 educated, and the process of education does not cease 
 till that movement becomes automatic. 
 
 The only admission of the educative value of manual 
 training which the committee make is the following : - 
 
 All laborers who employ machines or tools of any
 
 AN IMPORTANT ADMISSION. 79 
 
 description would be benefited to a greater or less de- 
 gree by a course of manual training, and there is some- 
 thing educative in it for all who are to use machines. 
 This is the most that can be urged by the advocates of 
 the manual training school in behalf of its educative 
 value. 
 
 This is an important admission and is alone sufficient 
 to justify the existence of a manual training department 
 in every high school in the country. For the world's 
 producers are tool users. Man has even been called the 
 tool-using animal. He naturally takes to tools unless 
 thwarted by a false and one-sided education. But im- 
 portant as is the admission it is not sufficient. The 
 committee would have us believe that manual training 
 is of no use to the lawyer, the physician, or the clergy- 
 man. There is good reason to believe that this is a 
 false assumption ; the exposition of the error is difficult 
 and will appear of little force to those who are dis- 
 posed to ignore the identity of mind and neural func- 
 tion. Of course it is not denied that the nature of the 
 mind is a profound mystery. But the very best thought 
 on the subject, of those who have looked most deeply 
 into the matter both from the physiological and 
 psychological side, agree that if the mind is not a func- 
 tion of the supreme neural centers of the cerebrum, it 
 is so intimately connected therewith that any modifica- 
 tion of the one is known always to be accompanied by 
 corresponding modifications of the other. Many of the 
 impressions made through the senses are unconscious 
 and produce modifications of mind. We know that 
 most distinguished men have, some time during their 
 life, engaged in manual labor. I do not believe that 
 thoroughly healthy thought is possible without it. The
 
 80 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 reflex action between brain and hand is a necessary 
 condition of solid thinking. The mere metaphysician 
 is squabbling with words which have no definite mean- 
 ing. He is a giant tugging away at his boot straps - 
 wrestling with first causes " thinking " of the un- 
 thinkable. 
 
 The idea of a manual element in intellectuality is not 
 new. Anaxagoras, the master of Socrates, attributed 
 man's superiority over the lower animals to the fact of 
 his having hands. Maudsley says : " The muscles are 
 not alone the machinery by which the mind acts upon 
 the world, but their acts are essential elements in our 
 mental operations. The superiority of the human over 
 the animal mind seems to be essentially connected 
 with the greater variety of muscular action of which 
 man is capable. Were he deprived of the infinitely 
 varied movements of hands, tongue, larynx, lips, and 
 face in which he is so far ahead of the animals, it is prob- 
 able that he would be no better than an idiot, notwith- 
 standing he might have a normal development of 
 brain." [Mind and Body, p. 32.] 
 
 Again he says : " We see that the supreme centers 
 are educated as other centers are, and the better they 
 are educated the better do they perform their functions 
 of thinking and willing. The development of mind is a 
 gradual process of organization in them. Ideas as they 
 are successively acquired through the gateways of 
 the senses are blended and combined and grouped in a 
 complexity that defies analysis; the organic combination 
 being the physiological conditions of our highest men- 
 tal operations reflection, reasoning, and judgment." 
 
 Thus a boy who works with his hands, learning the 
 properties of matter through sensation the only true
 
 A CONFUSED ARGUMENT. 81 
 
 source enjoying that reflex action between hand and 
 brain which constitutes the basis of sound thinking, is 
 getting the impressions which are the physical condi- 
 tions of ideas. He is learning the elements of his true 
 relations to the things of the world of which he is a part. 
 
 The mistake made by these people who do not recog- 
 nize the educative value of manual training is in suppos- 
 ingthat the manual experience of infancy and childhood 
 is sufficient to last them through life. They work over 
 their meager sense experience into anomalous and 
 monstrous products which they give names to, and then 
 dispute over the names. It is not enough to " educate '' 
 one side of a boy in this way and then label him Dr., 
 D. D., or LL.D. For knowing nothing of the charac- 
 ter of the life work of those upon whom he depends 
 for his support and whom from his education he regards 
 beneath him, he is not in sympathy with the " lower 
 classes." This lessens his usefulness to them even if 
 his education were of such a character as to benefit 
 them. 
 
 Again I quote from the report : " The moral educa- 
 tion in manual training, in the way of perseverance, pa- 
 tience, and plodding industry is a far greater factor than 
 the intellectual factor." Three paragraphs further on it' 
 reads : " Your committee would here call attention to 
 other arguments often used which are weak and mislead- 
 ing, such for example, as the statement that manual 
 training cultivates the powers of attention, persever- 
 ance, and industry. * * * To be excellent in 
 manual training would not prevent him (the boy) from 
 being illiterate and a bad neighbor and a bad citizen 
 even a dynamiter." I shall not attempt to reconcile 
 these two quotations.
 
 82 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 Again : " The advocates of manual training admit 
 that it is useful as education only if not carried to the 
 point of arriving at skill in production. This feature of 
 course makes against the economical argument in be- 
 half of such schools." A parallel argument would run 
 as follows : The advocates of the study of mathematics 
 admit that it is useful education only if not carried to 
 the point of arriving at skill in projecting bridges or 
 other special applications. This feature of course 
 makes against the economical argument in behalf of 
 mathematical study ! Similar parallels might be drawn 
 with almost any branch of study. 
 
 The report concludes with a plea for industrial draw- 
 ing, "as a training for the hand and eye and the aesthetic 
 sense." For a production embodying educational 
 doctrine of form this seems to be a fitting climax: 
 " The object of the study of drawing in our schools is 
 not the acquirement of a ' new art of expression ' 
 * * * because it is not worth the pains to learn the 
 art of drawing merely to make pictures of what is seen 
 or what is fancied. Rather is drawing- the best means 
 of acquiring familiarity with the conventional forms of 
 beauty in ornament" 
 
 It is difficult to treat such a doctrine as this with 
 that gravity which properly belongs to the subject. 
 Conventional forms of beauty in ornament to immature 
 children! Not worth the pains to learn the art of draw- 
 ing merely to make pictures of what is seen or fancied ! 
 To offer an adequate refutation to such pedagogical 
 conclusion is not within the scope of this article. But 
 if there are those among my readers who are inclined 
 to accept statements and " doctrines " on authority, let 
 them read along with it the following from Herbert
 
 HERBERT SPENCER ON DRAWING. 83 
 
 Spencer's "Education:" "The spreading recognition 
 of drawing as an element of education is one amongst 
 many signs of the more rational views on mental culture 
 now beginning to prevail. Once more it may be re- 
 marked that teachers are at length adopting the course 
 which nature has for ages been pressing upon their 
 notice. The spontaneous efforts made by children to 
 represent the men, houses, trees, and animals around 
 them on a slate if they can get nothing better, or 
 with lead pencil on paper, if they can beg them are 
 familiar to all. * * * And these instinctive at- 
 tempts to represent interesting actualities should be all 
 along encouraged, in the conviction that, as by a widen- 
 ing experience, smaller and more practicable objects 
 become interesting, they too will be attempted ; and 
 that so a gradual approximation will be made towards 
 imitations having some resemblance to the realities. 
 No matter how grotesque the shapes produced ; no 
 matter how daubed and glaring the colors. The ques- 
 tion is not whether the child is producing good draw- 
 ings the question is, whether it is developing its 
 faculties. * * * From all that has been said, it may 
 be readily inferred that we wholly disapprove of the 
 practice of drawing from copies, and still more so of 
 that formal discipline in making straight lines and 
 curved lines and compound lines, with which it is the 
 fashion of some teachers to begin. * * The 
 
 work is, in short, a grammar of form with exercises. 
 And thus the system of commencing with a dry analy- 
 sis of elements, which, in the teaching of language, has 
 been exploded, is reinstituted in the teaching of draw- 
 ing. The abstract is to be preliminary to the concrete. 
 Scientific conceptions are to precede empirical experi- 
 6
 
 84 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 ences. That this is an inversion of the normal order, 
 we need scarcely repeat. It has been well said, con- 
 cerning the custom of prefacing the art of speaking 
 any tongue by a drilling in the parts of speech and their 
 functions, that it is about as reasonable as prefacing the 
 art of walking by a course of lessons on the bones, 
 muscles, and nerves of the legs ; and much the same 
 thing may be said of the proposal to preface the art of 
 representing objects by a nomenclature and definitions 
 of the lines which they yield on analysis. These tech- 
 nicalities are alike repulsive and needless. They render 
 the study distasteful at the very outset, and all with the 
 view of teaching that which, in the course of practice, 
 will be learnt unconsciously." 
 
 If the report of the National committee on peda- 
 gogics is a polemic, it evidently has the worst side of 
 the question. If it is anything else, then either the 
 committee are in possession of an insufficient number 
 of facts, or I have failed to grasp their meaning. 
 
 Coming from so profound a thinker as Prof. Harris I 
 can account for this report only by the supposition that 
 under the pressure of* other work he did not give it his 
 best thought and attention.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON PEDAGOGICS, 
 NATIONAL COUNCIL, JULY, 1889. 
 
 TIIK EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 The subject of the Educational Value of Manual Training 
 has come to be of prime importance by reason of the strong 
 claims set up for it by its advocates, and secondly, by rea- 
 son of the fact that as a cause it serves to unite not only the 
 critics of the educational system already existing, but also 
 its uncompromising enemies ; thirdly, because the claims set 
 forth in its behalf are based, not on economic reasons, but 
 on educational reasons, an assumption being actually made 
 that the effect of manual training on the pupil is educational 
 in the same sense as the branches of science and literature 
 heretofore taught, or at least if different from them, of 
 equal or of superior value to them. This assumption un- 
 settles the entire question of course of study, in so far as 
 it rests on the doctrine of a specific educational value for 
 each of the branches of the course of study, and in so far as 
 it is supposed that the present list of branches provides for 
 an all-sided intellectual training. 
 
 Your committee accordingly have proposed to themselves 
 in this report to discuss the various phases of this assump- 
 tion, and to inquire in what precisely consists the educational 
 value of the branches taught in the manual training school, 
 and wherein they are supplementary of the work already 
 done, and wherein they cover the same ground. They 
 have proposed to treat incidentally also the economic ques" 
 tions involved, inasmuch as the popularity of the movement 
 
 (85)
 
 86 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 has its foundation in the conviction that if the schools teach 
 maaual training, all pupils will be fitted for useful industries 
 before the age of leaving school for business. 
 
 1. Your committee in the outset admit the reasonableness 
 of substituting a system of manual training in special 
 schools, in so far as it can be done, for the old system of 
 apprenticeship. That said apprenticeship has been and is 
 wasteful of the time and talents of the pupils, is conceded ; 
 that a school devoted to the business of educating the youth 
 in the essentials of his trade or vocation, is superior to the 
 old system that employed the apprentice in all the drudgery 
 of the establishment, and postponed his initiation in the 
 essential matters of his trade. But your committee insist 
 that such manual training ought not to be begun before the 
 completion of the twelfth year of the pupil, nor before -he has 
 had such school instruction in the intellectual branches of 
 school-work, namely, in reading, writing, arithmetic, geog- 
 raphy, grammar and history, as is usually required by those 
 statute laws enforced in enlightened States to prevent the too 
 early employment of minors ill the industries, and the neg- 
 lect of their school education. Your committee understand 
 that any amount of manual training conducted in a school is 
 no equivalent for the school education in letters and science, 
 and ought not to be substituted for it. They hold the opin- 
 ion, moreover, that neither apprenticeship nor the industrial 
 school should be allowed to take possession of the j^outh un- 
 til the completion of his twelfth year at least ; the fifteenth 
 year is still better, because physical maturity is necessary 
 for the formation of the best muscular movements to produce 
 skill. At too early an age the pupil with his small hands and 
 fingers, his short and undeveloped arms, is obliged to acquire 
 bad habits of holding the implements of labor, just as a child 
 that commences holding a pen too early will not hold it so as 
 to secure freedom of movement. Moreover, the serious oc- 
 cupations of life cannot be imposed on children without 
 dwarfing their human nature, physically, intellectually and
 
 THE COUNCIL REPORT. 87 
 
 morally, and producing arrested development. Not only the 
 games of youth, but the youth's freedom from the cares of 
 mature life, should be insured to him if the best preparation 
 is to be made for manhood. It is sad to know that very many 
 children are dwarfed by family necessity, which compels them 
 to bear the weights and cares of mature years. The street 
 gamin in the city is preternatural!}- acute, but is not in pro- 
 cess of growth towards ideal manhood. Later on he will be 
 found suffering from premature old age. in every respect a 
 wasted human life burnt out before it could develop its moral 
 and intellectual ideals. He will have a ' ; Punch and Judy " 
 face such as Dickens ascribes to the stunted products of 
 London street education. Students of anthropology tell us 
 that man surpasses the animals so much in his mature life 
 because he has a so much longer period of helpless infancy. 
 He passes through a hundred grades of ascent above the 
 brute, using all his forces in learning to walk on his hind legs, 
 to use articulate speech for intercommunication, to dress 
 himself in clothes, and to put on that far subtler clothing of 
 customs and usages which hold back and conceal his animal 
 propensities and substitute courtesy towards others for selfish 
 natural impulse. Were it not for this diversion of the forces 
 of childhood, man might develop like the animals the ability 
 to walk immediately after birth, and use his bundle of intel- 
 lectual instincts at once without the necessity of a long 
 process of education. On these grounds your committee 
 deprecate the necessities which abridge the period of child- 
 hood, and consider this one of the first reforms that social 
 science is demanding, namely, the protection of children 
 from the premature assumption of the cares of life. The 
 work of the kindergarten, the schools for waifs, and this line 
 of effort, will stop the growth of that hopeless class of society 
 that has become arrested below the moral stage of develop- 
 ment. 
 
 The ever present argument of the economical view of edu- 
 cation calls attention to the fact that the great majority of
 
 88 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 children are destined to earn their living by manual labor. 
 Hence, it is argued, the school ought to prepare them for 
 their future work. The scientific view that lays so much 
 stress on the protraction of the period of human infancy, is 
 opposed to this demand for filling the child's mind with 
 premature care for his future drudgery. In fact, this, 
 scientific doctrine has already been anticipated by the hu- 
 mane Christian sentiment which has founded public schools ; 
 for there is a conviction deep seated in the minds of the peo- 
 ple that all children ought to be educated together in the 
 humane studies that lie at the basis of liberal culture. Just 
 for the very reason that the majority have before them a life 
 of drudgery, the period of childhood, in which the child has 
 not yet become of much pecuniaiy value for industry, shall 
 be carefully devoted to spiritual growth, to training the in- 
 tellect and will, and to building the basis for a larger human- 
 ity. Such a provision commends itself as an attempt to 
 compensate in a degree for the inequalities of fortune and 
 birth. Society shall see to it that the child who cannot choose 
 the family in which he shall be born, shall have given him 
 the best possible heritage that fortune could bring him, 
 namely, an education that awakens him to the consciousness 
 of the higher self that exists dormant in him. The common 
 school shall teach him how to conquer fortune by industry 
 and good habits, and the application of the tools of thought. 
 
 The economic, utilitarian opposition to the spiritual edu- 
 cation in our schools comes before us to recommend that we 
 forecast the horoscope of the child, and in view of his future 
 possible life of drudgery make sure of his inability to ascend 
 above manual toil by cutting off his purely intellectual train- 
 ing, and making his childhood a special preparation for in- 
 dustry. 
 
 Your committee would at this point call attention to the 
 fatal omission on the part of the economist to see what is im- 
 plied in his statement, that the schools should fit the child 
 for his future duties in life. For when we inquire, we <lis-
 
 THE COUNCIL REPOKT. 89 
 
 cover at once that the trade or vocation in life is but a small 
 part of the total functions of any one's life. It is what goes 
 with the trade or vocation that makes even it a success or 
 failure. What does one need to know besides his trade ? 
 To this question your committee enumerate the following : 
 
 1. Under the head of behavior toward others, Ins success 
 will depend on the treatment of his fellow-workman and his 
 employers ; on his treatment of his neighbors, and of his 
 family and children. Moreover, his behavior as a citizen 
 concerns vitally all who live with him under the same govern- 
 ment ; for he conditions to the extent of his single vote, and 
 the proletariat class as a whole may form a majority and de- 
 termine altogether what sort of government shall be placed 
 over all, rich and poor, Christian or heathen, humane or 
 selfish. The " dude " citizen, who inherits large wealth and 
 believes that the laboring classes should not be educated be- 
 yond the station they are to occupy in life, will find that the 
 manual laborers are also voters, and that they decide whether 
 there shall be rights of private property or protection of life 
 and limb for him as well as for others. 
 
 The illiterate manual laborer, no matter how skillfully edu- 
 cated for his trade in wood and metal operations, cannot 
 read and write. He cannot read the newspaper and take in- 
 terest in the doings of town, State and nation or world at 
 large, except as he hears of it in the turbid stream of per- 
 sonal gossip from fellow-workmen. He is essentially shut 
 in, and his thoughts move around in a narrow circle like the 
 horse that turns the wheel of the mill. Nothing can prevent 
 his being the victim of wild schemes of agitation that attack 
 radically all the institutions of civilization. To the observer 
 of the newer and newest phases of modern history, nothing 
 is so clear as the fact that the first necessity of civilization 
 is a system of universal education, not in industry, but in 
 the ideas and thoughts that make up the conventional \ ir\v 
 of the world such ideas and opinions as one learns in 
 studying geography and history, and especially literature.
 
 90 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 2. Your committee would now call your attention, in the 
 second place, to the educative phases of manual training. 
 They admit that manual training is an educative influence ; 
 for all that man does or experiences is educative to him, 
 and affects both his will and intellect. The education of 
 the will takes place by fixing or unfixing habits of doing ; 
 the education of the intellect takes place through the ascent 
 from one thought or idea to another ; from a narrow point 
 of view to a broader and more comprehensive one ; from a 
 vague and general grasp of a subject to an insight that ex- 
 plains all the details, and sees the relations of all parts to 
 the whole. 
 
 In so far as manual-training schools teach the scientific 
 principles that underlie the practical points of their work, 
 they add intellectual education to physical education. In- 
 struction in the natural sciences gives knowledge of nature, 
 both as to its modes of existence and as to the forces that 
 form and transform those modes of existence. Natural 
 science, it will be readily admitted, is directly tributary to 
 the emancipation of the laborer, because it leads more and 
 more to the invention of machinery. Machinery does the 
 drudgery of the work, and leaves to the laborer only the task 
 of supervision ; it assumes the physical labor, and gives him 
 the intellectual labor of directing and managing it. The more 
 complete the machine becomes, the more operations it in- 
 cludes in its process, the more intellect is required to man- 
 age it and the greater becomes its productiveness. 
 
 Compare the study of natural science in its general phases 
 with its special applications of the theory of special machines, 
 and it is seen that the study of the more general 
 is more highly educative ; and your committee would call 
 special attention to the principle on which this conclusion is 
 based. That is more highly educative which lasts longest 
 and has widest scope in its enlightening effects. The ex- 
 planation of the special machine (the steam engine, for ex- 
 ample) is an intellectual acquisition for to-day ; and it gives
 
 THE COUNCIL REPOHT. 91 
 
 one also a ready insight into all other examples to be met 
 with in future experience. But the study of the theories of 
 heat and of the dynamics of elastic fluids gives insight not 
 only into the steam engine, but also into a thousand other 
 applications (spouting geysers, oil wells, heating and ventil- 
 ating houses, meteorology, for example) within one's expe- 
 rience, and numberless thousands of examples possible in 
 future experience. Hence the study of pure science is more 
 educative intellectually than the study of special applications 
 of it. 
 
 Again, the study of applications of science is more educa- 
 tive than the labor of making the machine. The theory of 
 its operation involves all realizations of it, and is not exhaust- 
 ed until all real and possible varieties of construction have 
 been explained by it. But the construction of a machine 
 adopts one of an indefinite number of styles of construction, 
 uses one kind of material out of many for each of the parts, 
 and encounters peculiar difficulties of one kind and another 
 occasioned by temporary conditions that have nothing to do 
 with the nature of the machine or with its construction else- 
 where. The laborer thus obscures his general view of the 
 principle of the machine by covering it up with a great col- 
 lection of details that do not essentially concern it. He is 
 much more impressed with accidental matters of no account 
 in the theory of the working of the machine, than he is with 
 the principles of its action. In a second experiment at con- 
 structing a machine, old difficulties disappear and new ones 
 arise. The intellectual education is of narrow scope and 
 limited in time. 
 
 The intellectual factor of manual labor is never veiy large 
 even in the first construction of a new type of product. 
 The moral education in manual training in the way of perse- 
 verance, patience, and plodding industry, is a far greater 
 educational factor than the intellectual factor. 
 
 The education of the muscles of the hand and arm, the 
 training of the eye in accuracy, go for something in the
 
 92 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 way of education, especially if these, too, are of a general 
 character, and productive of skill in many arts. But it hap- 
 pens in most cases that the training of the muscles for a 
 special operation unfits it more or less for the other special 
 operations. Every trade has its special knack or skill, and 
 not only requires special education to fit the laborer to pur- 
 sue it, but it reacts on him, and fixes in his bodily organism 
 certain limitations which for greater or less extent unfit him 
 for other occupations. The work of blacksnaithing, for in- 
 stance, would unfit one for engraving ; the work in planing 
 and sawing would diminish the skill of the wood-carver. 
 Work in the trades that deal with wood and metals (and these 
 include the entire curriculum of the manual-training school) 
 would be disadvantageous to the delicate touch required by 
 the laborer on textile manufactures ; and this class of la- 
 borers is nearly as large as the combined classes of wood 
 and metal workers. 
 
 Your committee find that the course of study in manual 
 training, in so far as it concerns the education of the hand, 
 is limited to a narrow circle of trades in the wood and metal 
 industries, and that so far as it is auxiliary to trades and oc- 
 cupations directly, it covers the work of only one in twelve 
 of the laborers actually employed in the United States. 
 
 Indirectly, as dealing especially with the construction of 
 machinery, it has a much wider application, and your com- 
 mittee believe that all laborers who employ machines or tools 
 of any description would be benefited to a greater or less 
 degree by a course of manual training, and that there is 
 something educative in it for all who are to use machines. 
 This is the most important argument that can be urged by 
 the advocates of the manual-training school in behalf of its 
 educative value. 
 
 Your committee would here call attention to other argm- 
 
 O 
 
 ments often used which are weak and misleading ; such, for 
 example, as the statement that manual training cultivates the 
 powers of attention, perseverance, and industry. These are
 
 THE COUNCIL REPORT. 93 
 
 formal powers, and not substantial ; that is to say, they de- 
 rive their value from what they are applied to, and they may 
 be mischievous as well as beneficial. The power of attention 
 may be cultivated by the game of chess, or the game of 
 whist, or of draw poker, or to the picking of pockets ; but 
 it, is only attention to those subjects and not attention in gen- 
 eral that is cultivated. The whist-player who has developed 
 careful circumspection, keen attention, the calculation of 
 probabilities in the matter of cards, is quite likely not to 
 manifest them in regard to higher matters of observation of 
 nature or the study of man. All games of boys for in- 
 stance marbles, quoits, base ball, jacks-straws are educa- 
 tive, especially in such matters as are named as results of 
 manual training, namely : (a) the development of the physical 
 powers; (/j) the acquisition of dexterity of hand and accu- 
 racy of eye; (c) in perseverance: (d) in attention. These 
 moreover carry with them some general training, and give 
 the boy a similar ability in a field of related subjects. But 
 it would not be fair to expect that these qualities of mind 
 would show themselves in the boy's work in mathematics or 
 history, for his interest in these games might make him dull 
 and inattentive to all school studies. Boys may love the 
 work of the manual-training school and dislike history, 
 grammar, and mathematics, and all book-learning, in fact ; 
 but to be excellent in manual training would not prevent him 
 from being illiterate and a bad neighbor and a bad citizen 
 even a dynamiter. 
 
 Your committee would further call attention to the fact 
 that what is educative at one time may be entirely without 
 such an effect at another or, indeed, it may be deadening 
 to the mind. Thus the advocates of manual training admit 
 that it is useful as education only if not carried to the point 
 of arriving at skill in production. This feature, of course, 
 makes against the economical argument in behalf of such 
 
 ~ o 
 
 schools. According to the economic view, skill in produc- 
 tion is the primary object aimed at by introducing the train-
 
 94 MANUAL TRAINING. 
 
 ing of the hand into schools. But M. Sluys, the Belgian 
 normal school director who reports on the Swedish system, 
 says that when the child is compelled to manufacture large 
 numbers of a given object in order to acquire skill in the 
 work, the educative value of the work diminishes. " From 
 the third or fourth sample his interest wanes ; mechanical 
 repetition invariably excites disgust for an}- work. ' ' 
 
 Your committee would call attention here to the fact that 
 if an educative opportunity is gained by not requiring 
 mechanical repetition to the point of acquiring skill, there is 
 also an educative opportunity lost ; for the patience and per- 
 severance that pursues its work to the end, and bravely 
 keeps down any tendencies to disgust at the lack of novelty, 
 is a moral education indispensable to success in any manual 
 calling. No teaching in the studies of the schools as they 
 are would be esteemed of a high order if it did not train its 
 pupils to attack difficult studies like arithmetic and grammar 
 and courageously overcome them. Mere natural disinclina- 
 tion and impatience must be conquered before the child can 
 become a rational being. 
 
 Your committee would further suggest, that no justice as 
 yet has been done by the advocates of manual training to 
 the claims of industrial drawing as a training for the hand 
 and eye and the aesthetic scene. If the pupil pursues this 
 stud}' by the analysis of the historical forms of ornament, 
 and acquires familiarity with graceful outlines and a genuine 
 taste for the creation of beautiful and tasteful forms, he has 
 done more towards satisfying the economic problem of in- 
 dustry than he could do by much mechanical skill. The 
 great problem in the industry of nations has come to be the 
 aesthetic one how to give attractive and tasteful forms to 
 productions so as to gain and hold the markets of the world. 
 The object of the study of drawing in our schools is not the 
 acquirement of a " new art of expression," to use the stale 
 definition put forward by some of the advocates of the self- 
 styled " new education," because it is not worth the pains
 
 THK COUNCIL REPORT. 95 
 
 to learn the art of drawing merely to make pictures of what 
 is seen or what is fancied. Rather is drawing the best means 
 of acquiring familiarity with the conventional forms of beauty 
 in ornament forms that express the outlines of freedom 
 and gracefulness and charm all peoples, even those who 
 have not the skill to produce such forms. Some nations, 
 like the French, for example, have educated their working 
 classes for many generations in this matter of taste, and it 
 has become a second nature. Other nations, the Anglo- 
 Saxon among them, are not naturally gifted with a taste for 
 the production of the beautiful, but rather with a tendency 
 to look for the dynamic, the lines of force rather than of 
 freedom. They are content to produce what is strong and 
 durable and useful. But this has led them o the discovery 
 that they must also be content with inferior places in inter- 
 national expositions, and with a virtual exclusion from the 
 markets of the world. Only a high tariff can force any con- 
 siderable consumption of useful articles of clumsy and un- 
 sightly shapes. 
 
 In view of these facts, your committee have deemed it 
 desirable to mention industrial drawing and the true method 
 of teaching it by the analysis and production of the standard 
 ideals in ornament, as worthy of most careful consideration 
 on the part of all, and especially on the part of all interested 
 in manual-training instruction, either for its economical or 
 its educative advantages. Respectfully submitted. 
 
 GEORGE P. BROWN, S. S. PAHR, 
 J. H. HOOSE, W. T. HARRIS, 
 
 Committee on Pedagogics.
 
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 ST. Louis, Mo.