Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/60

50 and are in daily conflict. Sometimes this conflict of ideals is between different schools of presumably the same grade and intent. In one, manual training is followed as an educational process, and in the other as an industrial end. The outer world—if it be discriminating enough to really get at what the schools are about—sees two institutions of similar name and curriculum, and interprets the school according to the one it happens to visit. Very frequently the conflict is a civil war, having its seat in one and the same school, a part of the faculty working in one spirit and a part in the other. But most perplexing of all, one sees the conflict going on even in the same individual, the educational idea uppermost at one moment, and the love of technical perfection dominant at another. There are few teachers of manual training who do not at some time find themselves dangling between these two poles of thought.

Now I am restating these opposing motives in the development of the manual training idea at so much length and with so much emphasis because this is to-day the vital issue in the whole movement. And the restatement is the more necessary because the direct work of teaching manual training must rest for some time to come in the hands of men drawn from the artisan class rather than from the cultured classes, and is, therefore, in the greater danger of being regarded merely as the work of teaching a handicraft.

Moreover, this is only another aspect of the same issue which is now at stake in the universities. One can not move in the inner circles of collegiate life and thought without being constantly aware of the fact that the old breach between the classical party, the upholders of the humanities, and the newer faction representing the scientific and technical training, has never been closed. However pronounced the amenities of daily intercourse, the antagonism, at best, is only latent. When the wisdom and graciousness of humanity were all stored up in Latin and Greek, it was a prerequisite of culture to know these languages. It was early discovered that the act of acquisition was itself a most helpful intellectual gymnastic. The study thus came to have a dual value, as an end in itself, and as of high disciplinary power. This is undeniable. It is quite as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago when the classics were synonymous with culture. But the problem is now complicated by the necessary introduction of other considerations. The humane spirit of Greece is reflected more or less perfectly in the renascent spirit of modern times. The best of Greece and Rome is a heritage already ours. Further, those who would drink at the direct literary fountains can do so on the average far more perfectly in the admirable translations now available than in any translations they could make for themselves.