Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/660

640 perception of relations among outer things, and helps on the realization of one's own relation with the world that is not self, is in the highest degree educative. The process of education being the conscious direction of evolution, the creation of a definite environment in order to realize definite moral and aesthetic ends, must produce results, if any, just along these lines, must bring one into a perception of relations, must help one to realize self, and not less materially must help one to realize one's relation with a world that is not self. The results of manual training, so far as they are educational, must be along some such lines as these. Let us look at the results so far as knowledge is concerned—a perception of relations.

We can know about a thing, and we can know the thing itself. There is a tremendous difference. We can know about verbs and adverbs, nouns and adjectives, and all the rest of the nine parts of speech, and we can decline, compare, conjugate, analyze, parse. But we can never know the parts of speech themselves until we know them as a reality of use, until we experience them either in literature or in our own efforts at expression. We can know about the world and about foreign countries, and can form vague mental images to correspond to them, but we can not know the world itself or other lands except through travel, through actual experience. We can know about the world of matter, about rocks and minerals and animals and plants, and be well read in regard to their appearance and qualities, but we can only know this world of matter by personal contact. It is the same in a less material world. We can know about the emotions, about love and friendship and conscience and duty and hate and remorse, but we can not know the emotions themselves until we ourselves have felt. It is a very unreal world that is built upon the report of others, rather than upon the report of our own senses, a world in which books take the place of life, in which maps take the place of lands, in which pictures and drawings take the place of Nature and of art—a flat world of two dimensions, lacking the third dimension of solid reality. Those only can know who live in a world of reality and of direct sensational experience.

I am stating one of the actual results of manual training when I say that it not only attempts to bring boys and girls into touch with reality in thoughts and things, but that it truly does so. And it does so by letting them alone, by providing an environment rich in its invitations to action, but one in which the action must be self-directed. Furthermore, it is an environment in which the world is very meagerly reported, only so much as is absolutely necessary, but in which the boy is thrown back upon the reports of his own senses and must taste life at first hand. One can not live in such a world, can not be constantly doing things with one's hands and eyes, without