Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/802

778 boy to school—but in reality it does not yet do this. It puts his hands and by necessity his eyes to school, and I shall always feel, no matter what the future of manual training may be, that it has done yeoman service in breaking ground along rational, causational lines, and in inviting our attention to the immense possibilities of a culture that is organic.

The rational scheme of education to which such an examination as we have just been making would unavoidably lead us, must include manual training as an integral element. If we substitute for manual training some more general and comprehensive term, such as faculty training, organic training, or, better still, if we dismiss all special terms of any kind whatever, and use education to mean the conscious process of human evolution, we shall have reached the rational scheme of education itself, and may feel that our search is ended. In such a scheme, manual training must occupy a most prominent place, for it has to do with the most obvious forms of touch. I wonder if you ever reflected that our entire contact with the outer world, our entire knowledge of it, is in the last analysis dependent upon but one sense, the sense of touch, and that the sensory nerves, those telegraphic lines between our consciousness and the outer world, respond to but one operator, direct contact? Yet this is strictly so. We see, because waves of light break upon the shores of vision; we hear, because waves of sound strike against the ear drum; we smell, because minute particles of the odoriferous substance, or perhaps because peculiar and as yet unnamed waves induced by such a substance, impinge against our noses; we taste, because of the direct impact of food and drink against the sensitive nerve ends of the tongue. We have but one sense, a tactile sense, and if instead of manual training we should say tactile training, we should pretty nearly hit the mark.

The full organic results which this rational scheme contemplates can never be reached, I am afraid, through the current curriculum, or through anything likely to grow out of it. The whole idea is too radically different. The present curriculum makes a brave assault upon the intellectual life along a road cut straight through the empyrean. The new education is after a still more complete intellectuality—and we are apt to forget this when the industrial view presses—but it proceeds along the road of the organism. It is not, then, simply choice that would lead us to part company with the old curriculum. It is something more imperative. It is bare necessity. And the radical scheme which I am about to propose must be accepted in some such spirit, not as indicating an idle love for things that are new, but because the things that are old will no longer serve.