Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/353

Rh potent industrialism, is becoming each year more educational, and this is most encouraging.

To stimulate this many-sided interest, and to cultivate genuine sentiment and æsthetic appreciation, are large elements in the method of manual training, but it shares this with other schemes of education. The part of its method which is distinctive is physiological. It is the cultivation of the brain through the body, and more especially the cultivation of the brain through the activities of the hand, the setting up of definite mental reactions as the result of definite muscular movements. Experiment shows that the brain does not act as a whole in its reactions with the outer world, but that for the various activities of life there are specialized local brain centers. Furthermore, function is shown to be directly dependent upon organ. If the organ be impaired, the function is crippled. If the brain center be destroyed, the function is annihilated. The reverse is also true—the inhibition of the function, and the organ atrophies. The exercise of the function means the health and growth of the corresponding center. The localization of brain function is one of the most interesting results of modern experimental psychology, and is well worth the attention of all interested in social movements. If these local brain centers could be stimulated and developed by increased contact of their tributary extremities with the outer world, we should have a strengthening of the brain tissue, a more sensitive organism, and, as a final result, a general increase of intellectual power. The most complete power would come from the most perfect development of all the parts. We want no repression, no thwarting, no deadening. We want the expansion of all the parts by the wholesome exercise of all the functions. And this expansion must go on pari passu, not the abnormal growth of one center through the undue exercise of its corresponding function, with the starving of surrounding centers and functions, but the normal and wholesome growth of all. As the hand is the chief instrument of touch, its exercise will cultivate the tactile and visual centers. By the skillful framing of these manual activities, and their arrangement in due sequence, we shall bring about a corresponding series of mental reactions of the highest evolutionary and educational value. Manual training means hand training; sloyd means skill; but the hand training is in reality the training of that part of the brain which directs the hand, and skill is in reality a mental quality. One's cleverness in arranging the manual work comes in right here. It is not in securing a series of mental reactions, for they would come willy-nilly, but it is in securing a series of mental reactions of the most desirable sort.

The term manual work is often used very loosely to include all