Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/659

Rh qualified to develop the individual and national life, and yet in the hands of men and women who did not understand its end and purpose, to give results so meager and undesirable as to make the whole scheme seem to stand self-convicted.

And I find lurking somewhere in the corner of my mind a second reason for this disclaimer. I should be unwilling to have the manual training movement, which seems to me so full of seriousness and of promise, suffer in your esteem by reason of the aberrations of any of its less enlightened exponents. We are sometimes murdered in the houses of our friends. And manual training, sloyd, and the kindergarten have suffered much at the hands of their friends. The real justification for manual training, let me repeat, is to be found, not in any aspect of its practice or results, but in a far deeper sense in that system of social ethics which growls out of an evolved philosophy of life. If this has seemed to you sound ground, the results flowing out of it must be equally sound. This may seem a somewhat sophisticated way of escaping a dilemma, but, believe me, it is nothing so trivial as that. It is a strong desire that your judgment should be on the essential and not on the accidental features of manual training, righteous judgment and not judgment according to appearances.

The human race is very old and human effort is very old; and education, whether systematic or unconscious, has been going on ever since the hand of man fashioned the little black tablet recently found by Dr. Hilprecht in Babylonia, and dating back to the sixth millennium before Christ. Education is a very old process, certainly eight or ten thousand years old, and probably very much older. It is, therefore, I think, entirely modest and reasonable, in speaking of anything so very modern as manual training, which in America can not yet claim a score of years in the matter of age, to speak both of the actual and possible results, since manual training has not been in. existence long enough to have come to anything like its full powers. And yet these actual results have already attained very respectable dimensions. I feel constrained to add still one more word of caution. Not only has manual training not yet perfected itself as a tool, but even as an imperfect tool its term of service is at present limited to about three years, and the actual results, under the most favorable conditions, can not be regarded as more than a mere fragment of the possible results.

Knowledge is a perception of relations. We have agreed upon this, I think, as a sound definition. The coming into knowledge is the coming into a perception of these relations. The coming into life is a coming into a realization of self, and of one's relation to all that is not self—to other individuals, to the social order, to Nature, and to the Supreme Intelligence of the world. All that helps on this