Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/661

Rh coming more and more to adapt means to end, without growing more and more into a realizing sense of the principle of cause and effect. In a manual training school there are, of course, stupid boys who never come into a full measure of knowledge, and there are clever boys who quite of their own self-activity would have come into a full measure of knowledge. Better than any training is it to be well born. But the average boy, neither stupid nor clever, is certainly aroused to a keener perception of relations—that is, into a deeper knowledge. The realization of self, the coming into possession and control of one's self, is a large developmental process which means many things. Take a boy as he is. Picture him as he might be. The realization of self means nothing less than the spanning of this considerable chasm. I do not for a moment believe that manual training accomplishes all of this, but I do believe that one of the actual results is to bring a boy out of his smaller into his larger self, and so points toward the realization of this ideal. The necessity for adapting means to ends forced on a boy by his manual work, the presence both of the principle and the idea of cause and effect which he meets at every turn, conspire to give him a very practical habit of mind, a habit which brings about a more complete adjustment of acts to ends than you will find in boys who have not had this special form of judgment training. And this complete adjustment, as we have seen, is the mark of highly evolved conduct. This result ought to follow from manual training, and I should in any case count it among the possible results, but our experience is now large enough to enable me to say that it does actually follow, and that it follows in large measure. I have watched the boys very carefully inside the schools themselves, have watched their habit of dealing with problems and facts, and I have followed their careers and kept in correspondence with hundreds of them after graduation, and I find them marked by a power of thought and action that quite differentiates them from ordinary boys.

I have been the head master in schools where manual training was taught and where it was not taught, and have had an opportunity, therefore, to come in contact with both classes of boys; and I have come to separate the two very distinctly in my mind, because I detect in them a marked difference of quality.

But while this nice adjustment of acts to ends constitutes highly evolved conduct, it is only touched with morality when the ends are moral—that is, are happiness-producing in a very deep and genuine sense. This disposes of an objection which is sometimes urged against the moral claims of manual training, and quite naturally urged, I think, that skillful workmen are not always good men, are indeed often men of quite impeachable moral habits. Without