Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/801

Rh the realization of their aims by looking too steadily at the dazzling ideals by which they are led, and not steadily enough at those humble means which, in the unalterable sequence of cause and effect, must first be realized. The process by which thought is excited in the brain is quite as definite as the process by which an electro-magnet is energized. You must have the magnet and you must have the exciting cause. You must have the brain and you must have the stimulus, an inner something induced by an outer something.

But about the data of education we are pretty much agreed. Out of the material of babyhood, half plastic, half stubborn, we are by our scheme of education to evolve the potential men and women who knock at the doors of our colleges. Looking at manual training as a method, and comparing the material given with the material wanted, it is very clear that manual training can only form a part of the complete method. To span the gap entirely, and cover the fourteen years between babyhood and college, manual training will have to be incorporated into a scheme of education more thoroughgoing and more psychological than any that has yet been proposed. If genius be the seeing eye, the feeling touch, the hearing ear, the efficient brain; and if the highest and most complete manifestation of our human nature depend, as we believe that it does depend, upon the sensitiveness and soundness of the organism, the educational process which is thus to unfold and perfect the human spirit must include the cultivation and development of all the faculties—touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, movement—that they may comprehensively and accurately report the outer world; must include the cultivation and development of the emotional life, that it may stimulate the senses to the full exercise of their powers, and, finally, must include the cultivation and development of those intellectual faculties which convert this rich phenomenal material into an evolved humanity. I can not in passing forbear the criticism that our current schemes of education, however lofty their ideals, devote themselves too exclusively to the intellectual life, and do not sufficiently concern themselves with the materials out of which that life is built, the sense impressions of the outer world, or with the tool that builds it, the human organism with all its emotional and artistic possibilities. Nor can I, in declaring manual training to be inadequate to the full demands of a rational education, omit to emphasize that it is the only scheme, including sloyd and the kindergarten, that has attempted to build up the educational process on organic grounds, and that it is inadequate, not because of any fundamental mistake in its philosophy, or inaccuracy in its methods, but simply because these methods do not yet go far enough. You know, perhaps, the rallying cry of manual training—put the whole