324 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for the sake of a handle, name the two views the educational and the 

 artisan view. 



Manual training as a scheme of education occupies a curious 

 middle ground. It has not been evolved in the schools themselves. 

 Like most of our educational innovations, it has been forced upon the 

 schools from without. But the lack of harmony in our conception of 

 manual training does not grow out of this circumstance. Indeed, 

 were it a brand-new thought, offered us from any one of the world's 

 intellectual or industrial camps, we might expect it to present a unit 

 conception, to be accepted, or declined, as the case might be. But 

 such has not been the genesis of the manual training idea. It has 

 not been introduced into education as the embodiment of the educa- 

 tional creed of any one party. It has come into the schools from two 

 different directions, and in its outer form is the incarnation of two 

 distinct and radically different modes of thought. You can hardly 

 understand manual training as a system of education unless you 

 understand its history; and you will readily see that the methods 

 used by the teachers of manual training, while conforming in a 

 general way to one pattern, depend for their essential spirit upon the 

 path by which these teachers have approached the subject. While 

 manual training in some form is a part of all education and appears 

 in all grades, it began its career as a distinct scheme of education in 

 schools of high-school grade. All the early manual training schools 

 were high schools. Even now, when manual training has grown and 

 spread beyond our most sanguine expectations, the typical manual 

 training school is still a high school. Now, the high school occupies 

 a middle ground. It has, on the one side, the elementary school and 

 kindergarten, and, on the other, the college and technical institute. 

 The curriculum of the high school is consequently a composite, and 

 contains elements borrowed from the lower schools and from the 

 universities, or thrust upon it from one of these sources. But as a 

 rule each element in this composite has come into it from one direc- 

 tion, either up or down, and has not assailed it from both sides. 

 Manual training occupies the exceptional position of having come 

 from both directions, from above, from the technical schools, and 

 from below, from the kindergarten and from sloyd, and to have 

 brought from both of these sources fundamental ideas much at vari- 

 ance with each other. In the technical schools manual training is 

 pursued purely as an end in itself and absolutely without thought of 

 its culture value. It is wanted simply as a help to engineering 

 studies. The formal manual training had such an origin. It sprang 

 up in Kussia in the technical schools of Moscow, and first attracted 

 any general attention in America at the time of the Centennial Ex- 

 hibition in 1876. The thought back of it was purely utilitarian. It 



