Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/344

328 to develop the body by a series of physical movements physiologically arranged, to develop the mind by means of the rich mental reactions which accompany all motor activities; and not less to develop the heart by enlisting in all the work the child's good will and unselfishness. Sloyd has been well defined by Mr. Gustaf Larsson, the head master of the Sloyd Training School in Boston, as "tool wprk so arranged and employed as to stimulate and promote vigorous, intelligent self-activity for a purpose which the worker recognizes as good." It is a capital definition and a noble aim.

Sloyd constituted the second party in that triple alliance of which I have spoken. But there is still a third element involved, one too recent to have had any history, but destined, I am bound to believe, to do great things and to win the day against the combined forces of industrialism itself. The third element comes from the universities, but approaches the high school along the path of the lower schools, and so allies itself with the kindergarten and sloyd in forcing manual training into secondary education on purely educational grounds. It is nothing less powerful and modern than experimental psychology itself. The study of human physiology, and especially the study of brain action, is showing us each day more and more conclusively that if you want good work you must have a good tool—that is to say, a good organism—and that is precisely the educational basis of all manual training. It is the search for organic power.

These two conflicting ideals of manual training meet and do battle in the manual training schools. If you take a school built up on the educational ideal, and another built up on the industrial ideal, you will find them both doing apparently the same thing, but you can not, I think, get very far beyond the threshold without observing a tremendous difference—a difference that you will remark in many quarters, but nowhere so distinctly as in the faces and persons of the boys themselves. The difference is not due to any variation in the material equipment, perhaps to no great change in the curriculum, but to a very subtle, intangible thing, to the point of view of the head master. It all depends upon him and upon which view of manual training he entertains and would have prevail. I can not too much emphasize this point. Back of all action there is an idea, a motive. If you would change the action, you must first change the idea. It makes a tremendous difference what people are thinking about as they carry on their work. This principle is the basis of all scientific pedagogical effort, of all scientific reform, indeed, of all well-directed work of any kind which has to do with human elements. It is the fault of the old education and of the old schemes of reform, and, for that matter, of too much of current education and current schemes of reform, that they address