Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/812

788 can not afford to neglect. And all this work, if it is to lead to the highest results, if it is to give us complete men and complete women, must be constantly touched with emotion, with the sentiment of kindness and love and unselfishness and justice and reverence. As I conceive our human needs and human possibilities, the very place where manual training, or rather a thoroughgoing organic training, would be of the utmost use, is the very place where in our whole scheme of secondary education it is found in the least measure—that is, in our elementary schools. When the high school is reached, there ought to be no change in the organic character of the work, but it will be safe to introduce a limited amount of formal and abstract study—geometry, algebra, arithmetic, grammar, history, civics—and to make the science work somewhat more analytic and searching. I must believe, both as a result of my experience with such measure of organic education as our present manual training, in tool work, music, and art represents, and as a result of my firm faith in the continuous and unalterable operation of cause and effect—I must believe, I say, that boys and girls under some such rational scheme of organic education as I have outlined would come to the college at eighteen, sound, vigorous, sensitive, well-equipped, magnificent material out of which to frame magnificent men and magnificent women.

My own conception of life is avowedly that of an artistic and moral possibility, and not at all as a commercial venture, I have come to believe that the wealth of the world is human; that the estimable things of life are personalities, are beautiful men and beautiful women and beautiful children, and I am quite willing that the scheme of organic culture which I am here advocating should stand or fall with this artistic and moral conception of life.

I believe most profoundly that the education which is to regenerate and redeem will be brought about by the setting up of permanent changes in the organism itself, changes brought about by the motive power of the affections, and through the cultivation of the senses, and having for their end and purpose the realization of a high social and moral and artistic ideal. And I believe, further, that in manual training we have the open door to a more rational and thoroughgoing education, and that we have only to enlarge manual training into a more complete organic training to make it satisfy the educational needs of the human spirit.

or circle of raised earth at Todmorten, Yorkshire, England, which has been popularly regarded as a Roman camp, has, upon excavation, been found to be a prehistoric burial place of the bronze age, and to have contained at least six urns, with other relics.