Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/172

158 utterly false it must be if the spirit of man is one thing and his body another.

But the end of evolution is a moral end, and education, evolution made conscious, is also moral. The series of mental reactions brought about by the succession of bodily acts undertaken by manual training has a definite moral end. If the most evolved conduct is, as we have tried to show that it is, that which leads to the fullest measure of happiness for one's self and for one's fellows, and if morality, the art of right living, or right conduct, consists in the realization of the means of happiness, the end of the educational process is no less clear. It must be an attempt to lead man out of a narrow existence, poor in experience, in sensation, in thought, in feeling—poor, that is to say, in happiness—into a broader and more complete life, rich where the other is poor, rich in experience, in sensation, in thought, in feeling; that is to say, rich in happiness. Now, manual training is just such an attempt, and it has just such a warm, human end. It is an attempt through a succession of bodily acts to bring about a series of mental reactions of a definite, happiness-producing kind.

The exercise of every faculty short of the point of fatigue brings a strengthening of that faculty. Every demand upon the skill, judgment, and accuracy means a building up of those qualities, and this increase of power brings an increase of interest. We like to do what we do well. It is this development of a many-sided interest that enriches life and makes each day a welcome experience. It is loss of interest that makes the tragedy of old age. What a spiritual abyss is represented by the men and women who are killing time! The mental reactions of well-planned bodily work make for power, and for that power which leads to the complete full measure of life. Not only is the instrument itself, the brain, made more sensitive by this play of activity, but its power has more to work upon. An enlarged world of experience and sensation makes possible an enlarged world of thought. The effect is cumulative.

Manual training, believe me, is not practically or theoretically a scheme to merely train the hands, to make boys useful about the house, to supply the world with artisans, to take the place of a dead apprentice system, or to meet in education the demands of an industrial age. It has no such special and technical end. Its true end is the major end, the attainment of the complete life, the unfolding and the perfecting of the human spirit; and this end it proposes to gain by recognizing to the full the principle of cause and effect, and by setting into operation agencies adequate to bring about such large results. These agencies are organic. They have to do with the person of the child. Such work can not be exterior. It must be