Educational Revolution in 1883-4. — Urgent Demand for Reform — Existing Schools Denounced as Superficial, their Methods as Automatic, their System as a Mixture of Cram and Smatter — The Controversy between the School-master of the Old Régime and the Reformer — The Leaders of the Movement, Col. Parker, Dr. MacAlister, and Others — Followers of Rousseau, Bacon, and Spencer — “The End of Man is an Action, not a Thought” — The Conservative Teachers Fall into Line — The New Education Becomes an Aggressive Force, Pushing on to Victory — The Physical Progress of Manual Training — Its Quality Not Equal to its Extent — The New System of Training Confided to Teachers of the Old Régime — Ideal Teachers Hard to Find — Teachers Willing to Learn Should Be Encouraged — The Effects of Manual Training Long Antedate its Introduction to the Schools — Bacon’s Definition of Education — Stephenson and the Value of Hand-work — Manual Training is the Union of Thought and Action — It is the Antithesis of the Greek Methods, which Exalted Abstractions and Debased Things — The Rule of Comenius and the Injunction of Rousseau — Few Teachers Comprehend Them — The Employment of the Hands in the Arts is More Highly Educative than the Acquisition of the Rules of Reading and Arithmetic — What the Locomotive has Accomplished for Man — Education Must be Equal, and Social and Political Equality will Follow — The Foundation of the New Education is the Baconian Philosophy as Stated by Macaulay — Use and Service are the Twin-ministers of Human Progress — Definitions of Genius — Attention — Sir Henry Maine — Manual Training Relates to all the Arts of Life — Mind and Hand — Newton and the Apple — The Sense of Touch Resides in the Hand — Robert Seidel on Familiarity with Objects — Material Progress the Basis of Spiritual Growth — Plato and the Divine Dialogues — Poverty, Society, and the Useful Arts — Selfishness Must Give Way to Altruism — The Struggle of Life — The Progress of the Arts and the Final Regeneration of the Race — The Arts that Make Life Sweet and Beautiful — The Final Fundamental Educational Ideal is Universality — Comenius’s Definition of Schools — The Workshops of Humanity — That One Man Should Die Ignorant who had Capacity for Knowledge is a Tragedy — Mental and Manual Exercises to be Rendered Homogeneous in the School of the Future — The Hero of the Ideal School.

Fifteen years ago a great wave of educational awakening swept over this country. It penetrated every nook and corner of the land, pervading both cities, large and small, and the rural districts. It took the shape of a demand, often almost inarticulate, for reform. The schools were denounced as superficial; their methods as automatic; their teachers as unintelligent and untrained, their system of instruction as a mixture of cram and smatter.

The school-master is a conservative, and with his champions he came promptly to the defence of the old schools and their old methods. The controversy became heated, and soon the rival forces joined battle. Col. Francis W. Parker, of the Chicago Normal School, and Dr. James MacAlister, now President of the Drexel Institute of Philadelphia, and others were prominent leaders of the new reform movement, whose banner was “Manual Training,” or “The New Education.”

Under this brilliant and enthusiastic leadership the movement became a crusade in the interest of the educational ideas of Montaigne, Rousseau, Bacon, Locke, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Spencer, Mann, and their long array of sympathizers and supporters, who, with Bacon, declare that “the end of man is an action, not a thought.”

But the work of the reformers was too serious to be long controlled, either by emotion or passion. The more intelligent and better educated and trained teachers gradually came to the support of the new system and methods, and the mass of the teaching fraternity caught something of the enthusiasm by which the reformers were inspired to struggle for a great cause. Thereafter Manual Training became an aggressive force openly demanding recognition, and pushing for victory and ultimate control.

In the Appendix hereto the physical progress of Manual Training is shown in tabulated form; and the extent of such progress is all, if not more, than its most ardent friends and advocates could rationally desire. But it is not to be doubted that the quality of the progress the new education has made in the period of fifteen years under consideration is far inferior to its extent. The statistics here presented relate mainly to the village, town, and city schools of this country, and especially to its public schools, with some general observations and facts in relation to the progress of the new education in England and the chief countries in Europe. In a few instances the tabulations include institutions designed for industrial rather than strictly educational purposes. But it is deemed wise to retain them, on the ground that whether so designed or not all industrial training is educative.

It is worthy of intelligent inquiry whether as a matter of fact, not only in this country, but in all countries, the progress of Manual Training has not been very unsatisfactory in quality. In most cases the new education was necessarily confided to teachers of the old régime, who, as a preliminary, were compelled to unlearn what was false and erroneous in the old system, to overcome the prejudices of years, sometimes of a lifetime, and to become faithful and laborious students of a new and scientific scheme of education. The main difficulty in matters educational has always been to secure ideal teachers. Education is the first of human considerations, and its professors should be the most learned of human beings. If the teachers who have been called to the Priesthood, of the New Education, have proved incompetent in many instances, instead of being hastily condemned they should be helped forward towards the goal of competency by all friends of that progress in education which is the sole hope of human perfection.

The most striking effects of Manual Training long antedate its introduction to the schools. For thousands of years, in every shop where the humble mechanic wrought; at every fireside where the domestic arts obtained a foothold; in every field where a step forward was made through the invention of some less crude implement of husbandry than the one that preceded it, the mind and the hand expressed their joint struggle towards the achievement of that skill in useful things which constitutes the very kernel of civilization. Bacon’s definition of education—“the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things”—is a recognition of the philosophic fact that the hand is the source of wisdom; and the life of George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, affords a most impressive illustration of the educative value of hand-work. At the coal-pit’s mouth Stephenson, meantime learning his “A B C’s,” invented the “Rocket,” while the bookish engineers were declaring it to be a mechanical impossibility. Stephenson’s achievement was the realization in things of Bacon’s luminous precept—“The end of man is an action, not a thought.”—This is the philosophy, the rationale, of Manual Training; it is the union of thought and action, and it therefore demands the elimination from educational methods of the abstract philosophy of the Greeks. In his declaration, “All the useful arts are degrading,” Plato defined the character of the revival of learning which was to occur hundreds of years afterwards; it was a revival of Greek methods, which exalted abstractions, and debased things. Mr. Herbert Spencer refers to its baleful effects upon the schools of England in the severest terms of condemnation. That Mr. Spencer’s arraignment of the schools is just, is shown by its antithesis expressed in the dictum of Dr. Dwight, of Yale College, who says: “Education is for the purpose of developing and cultivating the thinking power. It is to the end of making a knowing, thinking mind.”

Bacon discovered, and did not hesitate to declare, that “the understanding is more prone to error than the senses”; and this fact constitutes the basis of his philosophy of “things,” which is another name for the law of induction. “For if we would look into and dissect the nature of this real world,” he says, “we must consult only things themselves.” If we would find the corner-stone of education, we must consult labor. Nothing great is accomplished without a due mingling of drudgery and humility; for of all the virtues humility is the most excellent. The Greeks failed to comprehend the true educational idea because of their pride. They associated use with slavery, because in Greece all labor was performed by slaves; and, scorning labor, they scorned use, and, by consequence, service, the greatest of the moralities.

Upon the foundation laid by Bacon, Rabelais, and Montaigne, Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel raised a great superstructure of educational ideas. Words were subordinated, and things ennobled.

Comenius’s rule, to “leave nothing until it has been impressed by means of the ear, the eye, the tongue, the hand,” and the injunction of Rousseau that “the student will learn more by one hour of manual labor than he will retain from a whole day’s verbal instructions; that the things themselves are the best explanations”—these are the maxims of the new education.

But to what extent has the old school-master adopted the new education, to what extent occupied the old school-room with new ideas? How many school-masters of even the present régime comprehend with John Ruskin that “the youth who has once learned to take a straight shaving off a plank, or to draw a fine curve without faltering, or to lay a brick level in its mortar, has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him?” In other words, to what extent does the conviction pervade the ranks of the fraternity of teachers, whether of public-schools, private schools, colleges, or universities, that the employment of the hands in the useful arts is more highly educative than the acquisition of the rules of reading, writing, and arithmetic? Or, considering the subject of the history and career of George Stephenson, for instance, what, in the opinion of the modern school-master, contributed most to his development as a man and citizen of the world—the mental exercise of learning to read, write, and cipher, which task he accomplished while engaged in inventing the locomotive, or the combined mental and manual exercise of taking apart, repairing, and putting together the stationary engine used at the colliery where he was employed? If, in the course of our investigation, it should be found that doing things as Stephenson did is more conducive to intellectual development than memorizing words and reciting poetry, as the Greeks did, some light may be thrown on the general subject of existing educational methods. Their chief defect is their lack of moral power. Morality does not reside in the letters of the alphabet, but there is in the locomotive, for example, a great moral principle—the principle of the brotherhood of man. For, in devising the locomotive, Stephenson made man’s neighborhood coterminous with earth’s utmost bounds; thus, in a single act, achieving his own apotheosis, and assuring, ultimately, the moral and intellectual kinship of the race. For the hand stands for use, for service, and for unyielding integrity; and it may be confidently asserted on the conviction of observation, experience, and a studious consideration of historic facts, that its drill and discipline as enforced in the world’s workshops, and in the best of existing Manual-training schools, results in a far greater degree of mind development than is produced by any exclusively academic course, and hence that Manual Training is the most important of all methods of education.

The most sacred of human rights is the right of the poor child, born in a highly civilized, wealthy community, to the same kind and degree of education as that received by the child of the most opulent citizen.

It was long ago remarked that “the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected;” and the late Henry George declared that the differences in men, intellectually, are no greater than their physical differences.

The perpetuity of free institutions depends upon social not less than upon political equality. But social equality is impossible without educational equality: the very thought of intimate relations with the ignorant is repulsive to the learned. Education, impartial and universal, is, therefore, the sole guarantee of an ideal civilization, and so of an imperishable state.

Old social evils constantly recur because the old crime of inequality in education is forever and ever repeated. It follows that we shall make all things equal through equal education. But what sort of education? We shall not train the child, as the ancients did, “to dispute in learned phrase as to whether we can be certain that we are certain of nothing!” Nor shall we stuff his memory with the grammar and rhetoric of an ancient tongue, in view of the profound observation of Dr. Draper, that a living thought can no more be embodied in a dead language than activity can be imparted to a corpse. But we shall rather instruct him in the principles of the Baconian philosophy, of which Macaulay so aptly says: “Its characteristic distinction, its essential spirit, is its majestic humility—the persuasion that nothing can be too insignificant for the attention of the wisest which is not too insignificant to give pleasure or pain to the meanest.”

The end sought in education by the ancients was ornament, and its strict analogy is found in barbaric life. Spencer has pointed out that the savage smeared his body with yellow ochre before he covered it with clothes, and that he adorned his head with feathers before he built a hut. So, under the laws of evolution, before a Bacon could arise, whole generations of philosophers were born, lived, speculated, and died, without leaving to mankind the smallest heritage of that common sense by which we nevertheless live.

A philosophy which scorned the useful in all its aspects was essentially barbaric; for art differentiates civilized from savage life: its law was stagnation, as the law of scientific investigation is progress. Use is the greatest thing in the material world, as service is the greatest thing in the moral world; and they are united in the philosophy of Bacon, which, beginning in observation and ending in art, multiplies useful things that are beautiful, and beautiful things that are useful.

The old education was an outgrowth of the old philosophy; the new education springs as logically from the new, or Baconian, philosophy. The old education was ornamental; the new is scientific, or useful. The old education was designed to make masters; the new is designed to make men.

President Eliot, of Harvard University, admits that his method of education is to compel the student to work. On the other hand, the method of the new education is to attract him. Genius has many definitions, one of which is “a capacity for taking infinite pains.” But its humblest equivalent is “attention”; and we propose to secure the student’s attention through his hands: for the most significant fact in all the realm of certitude is the fact that man impresses himself upon nature through the hand alone!

Let us then, in the new school, unite mind and hand in a crusade after the truths that are hidden in things. For Manual Training, educationally, is the blending of thought and action. The thought that does not lead to an act is both mentally and materially barren. For as it confers no benefit upon the human race, neither does it profit the mind that conceives it. Nay, more. An unprolific thought exhausts the mind to no purpose, as an unfruitful tree cumbers the ground. It follows that the integrity of the mind can be maintained only by the submission of its immature judgments to the verification of things. Hence the correlation of thoughts and things is as necessary to mental and moral growth as the application of the principles of abstract mechanics to the arts of peace is essential to human progress.

Sir Henry Maine supports this doctrine in a graphic paragraph: “Unchecked by external truth the mind of man has a fatal facility for ensnaring and entrapping and entangling itself. But happily, happily for the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into every false system.”

Things are the source of ideas. Action generates thought. He who has tools in his hand thinks best as well as acts best. The man whose finger is on Nature’s pulse feels her heart-throbs, and so discovers and utilizes her secrets. The men and women who do the world’s work are better educated than the schoolmen who vainly tell them how to do it; and they are better educated because they are in closer relationship with things, through the supreme sense of touch, which refines and spiritualizes the hand—that wonderful member which differentiates man from the other animals, and makes him their master.

Manual Training educationally, then, relates to all the arts whose sum is the art of living. For whether it be the chair on which we sit; or the bed on which we lie; or the garments we wear; or the house that shelters us; or the railway train on which we cross continents; or the ship that takes us over seas; or the unspeakable marvels of the world’s museums and galleries upon which we gaze with rapture; or the orchestra of an hundred instruments, whose music enchants us; or the treasures of dead cities—long buried—now unearthed; or the temples in which we worship; or the monuments which commemorate our heroes and martyrs; or the tombs in which we moulder away to dust—they are all the work of the hand!

Manual Training is the acquisition by the hand of the arts through which man expresses himself in things. It is a series of educational generalizations in things. The purpose of it is to put the mind and hand en rapport with each other; to make the hand acquainted with the elementary manipulations of the typical arts, by actual exercises, as the mind is familiarized with the fundamental principles of the sciences by studying their laws.

Superior observation is only another name for genius. To the dull eye the falling apple taught no lesson, but to Newton’s quick apprehension it revealed the law of gravitation!

It is not alone, however, in the sense of sight that observation resides; nor is it keenest there. We have recently learned the value of object teaching; but we have yet to learn, popularly and practically, what has long been known to science—that the sense of touch is the master sense, whence all the other senses spring. It is because of this fact, and of the further fact that the sense of touch is most highly developed in the hand, that man is the wisest of animals.

It follows that more than in the sense of seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling—nay, more than in all these senses combined—the faculty of observation resides in the hand.

Dr. Wilson declares that touch “reigns throughout the body, and is the token of life in every part”; and Dr. Maudsley says: “It is the fundamental sense, the mother-tongue of language.”

How apt is this definition of the sense of touch—“the token of life in every part”—and how comprehensive this—“the mother-tongue of language!” And of this master sense the hand is the chief organ and minister. How versatile it is; what adaptability it possesses; what helpfulness! In the moment of danger how reassuring its supporting grasp; how consoling its gentle touch when grief overwhelms! In defeat how it trembles with emotion, and how tense with exaltation it becomes in the hour of victory! With what infinite loathing it shrinks from a hated contact, and with what sympathetic vibrations of ardor responds to the clinging pressure of love!

If we would become familiar with objects we must subject them to the test of touch, we must handle them. As Robert Seidel, a great teacher, well says: “We must stretch them, beat them, cool them, expose them to the sun, the water, the air—we must work them.”

It is through these processes of loving manipulation that the mechanic and the artisan transform things crude and ugly into forms of use and beauty. And it is in this way, and this way only, that man has trod the path of progress. It is a rugged road, whose steeps are to be climbed alone by those whose hearts are warm with holy zeal, whose souls are aglow with enthusiasm, and whose hands are endowed with the rich experiences of thoughtful toil. And we shall fit all mankind for this noble task by training them to usefulness—that is, by teaching them, not merely how to think, but how to act, how to work.

It is a broad and conclusive generalization of Herbert Spencer that since literature and the fine arts are made possible by the useful arts, manifestly that which is made possible must be postponed to that which makes it possible. Nor does this rational and sober view of art detract in the least from its dignity or sentiment. On the contrary, it provides a foundation for works of the imagination—a basis for that spirituality which is the fruit of the happy conjunction of a multitude of material conditions evolved from the humblest as well as the noblest of the useful arts—a basis without which the beautiful arts could never exist.

It thus becomes plain that social and economic conditions are the product of education in things. Art education differentiates the civilized from the savage man. The pathway of progress which now blazes with the glory of electricity stretches back to the gloom of the caves where our early ancestors dwelt; and the steps of this advance consist of improvements in the useful and beautiful arts. From gesture to speech; from pictures to types; from the canoe to the steamship, and from the canal to the locomotive, the race has moved forward, always and only, through art triumphs.

So all the generations of men have lived and toiled for us. We are the heirs of the hoarded learning, of the accumulated mental and moral fibre, and of the treasured arts of the ages. And we are hence the elders, as Bacon says, of the philosophers, the sages, and the inventors and discoverers of all time. Their achievements are heights whence we may discern and occupy new and wider fields of human endeavor.

The precise relation of the useful arts to social and economic conditions is, therefore, that of creator. As your art education is, so shall your society be. There are persons who unconsciously dissociate art and civilization—who think that things are not essential to spiritual development, who fail to realize the fact that the main reason of the barbaric character of the savage is the absence from his environment of the arts of peace and plenty. If, for example, Plato had not been provided with food and clothing and shelter, he would doubtless not have composed the divine dialogues; and if there had been neither mechanics, nor architects, nor sculptors to adorn with palaces and temples the Greek cities, his ideal republic would not have had a place in classic literature; and finally, if there had been no (slave) hand-workers in Greece (for art products are all, directly or indirectly, the work of the hand), instead of being the most venerated of philosophers, Plato might have been, perhaps, the most wretched of savages, prolonging a miserable existence by means the most inglorious. But so unconscious was he of the true relation of the useful arts to life that he denounced them all as “degrading”!

Poverty is the chief scourge of society; and it is a familiar economic fact that where the useful arts are most flourishing poverty is least pressing, so that to abolish poverty it would seem to be only necessary to multiply and extend the arts. And if poverty is to be abolished; if there is ever to be an ideal civilization, the controlling motive of humanity must be changed from selfishness to altruism; and this change can come only through love of work. So long as work shall be regarded as a “curse,” the paramount purpose of the individual will be to avoid it, and to compel others to submit to it. Hence the antagonisms that arise at every point of human contact. The sum of these antagonisms is what we call the struggle of life, which is merely the struggle of each to survive at the expense of his fellows, and is therefore barbaric.

Now as we have seen that it is through the arts that man has been civilized—that, in a word, the arts differentiate the civilized from the savage man—it is evident that the further regeneration of the race is to be wrought by analogous means—that is to say, by a wider expansion of the arts of peace. And the way to achieve this result is to transform our schools, which were modelled after the classic methods of Greece and Rome, into laboratories for the development of useful men and women, through the mastery of the useful arts; the arts that make life sweet and beautiful; the arts that adorn our homes, that render the earth fertile and make it blossom as the rose; the arts that annihilate distance and so promote man’s brotherhood by enlarging his neighborhood—these are the arts that inspire us with just and generous impulses, the arts in which the noblest moral sentiments are made manifest in things.

These, then, are the arts which ought to be made the subject of thorough and exhaustive education—the arts that led Comenius to define schools as the workshops of humanity. The final essential educational condition is universality; for it is obvious that inequality of educational opportunity is the grossest injustice of which organized society is capable. It is against this injustice that Carlyle exclaims: “That there should one man die ignorant, who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the minute.”

This is indeed the tragedy of tragedies—the tragedy on the heels of which slavery stalks; in whose train caste rides in scornful state; in whose hideous shadow war waits to shed blood and spread pestilence and famine. All these are the satellites of ignorance, and hardly less of partial education than of total unenlightenment; and hence the only hope that civilization shall finally triumph over barbarism rests in universal, impartial, and scientific education.

The contrasts between the old and the new school methods pointed out in this chapter show along what lines educational progress is to be sought. The ideal school is to consist, not of one academic department, and a department of Manual Training, but of mental and manual exercises so related as to produce homogeneity.

The tabulations of facts which will be found in the Appendix show that a vast number of schools have been dedicated to the new education. If they are to be developed into ideal schools thousands of ideal teachers must devote themselves to the arduous task. Each school transformed from the dull routine of mediocrity to the vigor and elasticity which wait on development will cost the life of a hero. The school that has no hero to struggle for its salvation will surely languish and die. Every great school of the future must therefore have its hero, for it is only the hero who toils without thought of reward. As Carlyle so well says: “The wages of every noble work do yet lie in heaven or else nowhere.” And he has left this message of advice and encouragement to the hero of the school of the future which is to revolutionize the world: “Thou wilt never sell thy life in a satisfactory manner. Give it like a royal heart; let the price be nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got all for it!”