Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/363

Rh toil, stand up to their anvils with an unconscious earnestness which shows how much they enjoy their work. What are they doing? They are using brains and hands. They are studying definitions, in the only dictionary which really defines the meaning of such words as "iron," "steel," "welding," "tempering," "upsetting," "chilling," etc. And, in the shop where metals are wrought cold (which, for want of a better name, we call our machine-shop), every new exercise is like a delightful trip into a new field of thought and investigation. Every exercise, if properly conducted, is both mental and manual. Every tool used and every process followed has its history, its genesis, and its evolution.

I have been speaking of the shops of the manual-training school, not of the ordinary factory. In the latter everything is reduced as much as possible to a dull routine. Intellectual life and activity are not aimed at. The sole object of the factory is the production of articles for the market. In a manual-training school, on the other hand, everything is for the benefit of the boy; he is the most important thing in the shop; he is the only article to he put upon the market. No one can learn from a book the true force of technical terms and definitions, nor the properties of materials. All descriptive words and names must base their meaning upon our own consciousness of the things they signify. The obscurities of the text-books (often doubly obscure from the lack of proper training on the part of the authors, who describe processes they never tried, and objects they never saw) vanish before the steady gaze of a boy whose hands and eyes have assisted in the building of mental images.

Then, again, the habit of clear-headedness, of precision in regard to the minor details of a subject, which is absolutely essential in the shop—an exact and experimental knowledge of the full force of the words and symbols used—stretches with its wholesome influence into the study of words and the structure of language. As Felix Adler says, the doing of one thing well is the beginning of doing all things well. I am a thorough disbeliever in the doctrine that it is ever educationally useful to commit to memory words which are not understood. The memory has its abundant uses, and should be carefully cultivated; but when it usurps the place of the understanding, when it beguiles the mind into the habit of accepting the images of words for the images of the things the words stand for, then the memory becomes a positive hindrance to intellectual development.

"Manual training is essential to the right and full development of the human mind, and therefore no less beneficial to those who are not going to become artisans than to those who are.... The work-shop method of instruction is of great educational value, for it brings the learner face to face with the facts of nature; his mind increases in knowledge by direct personal experience with forms of matter and manifestations of force. No mere words intervene. The manual