Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/169

Rh human soul; if duty consists in a daily death, in the ceaseless thwarting of one's nature, in self-sacrifice in place of self-realization; if Satan be the reality that God is, then I believe that the new education is a sad mistake, a thing quite false, and that I could render best service by presenting manual training pathologically as a thing to be known in order to be avoided.

In thus seeking the philosophy of the new education, we assuredly stand at the parting of the ways. It is useless to blink the fact. Indeed, it is worse; it is cowardly. Let us frankly admit it—everything is involved. When you scrutinize your educational creed, you scrutinize your religious creed, your ethical creed, and your social creed as well. And until there is harmony among these, until your religion and your ethics and your sociology have been settled upon some rational basis, it is impossible for your education to be other than a poor makeshift thing, like the work of the architect and builder, showing an excess of action and a deficiency of thought.

Until one makes such a thoroughgoing examination of one's fundamental beliefs and reaches some degree of consistency, one can not teach one's self, one can not direct the teaching work of others. One can go through the emotions of teaching and can do infinite harm. Do you remember the story of the man who led the little ones astray, and the sad comment on his life—it were better that a millstone had been hanged about his neck and he had been drowned in the depths of the sea? It would be horrible in the end to feel that these words applied to us. If you have not the time to make such an examination, or, having attempted it, if you have not been able to reach any broad and human philosophy of life, it were better not to teach; it were better not to concern yourself with education; it were better, like Thoreau, to go to raising beans, for this at least you can do honestly. How can you hope to renovate others until you have renovated yourself?

As I see the matter, then, the philosophy of manual training, and of the new education generally, is plainly monistic. It sees in man not body and mind, with independent powers of action, and astonishing possibilities for conflict, but the contrary, a unit organism, with thinking and feeling among its essential characteristics quite as much as extension and impenetrability. And this organism is a sensitive one, responding to the stress and strain of desire and emotion, quite as readily as to mechanical forces, to the push and pull of bodily contact. What affects one aspect of this organism affects the other. If you touch the body you touch the spirit. If you touch the spirit you touch the body. One reacts on the other. The unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit is the object of manual training, as it is of all education.