THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 325 



was, I believe, quite devoid of any idea of physiological or mental 

 reactions of definite and independent educational value. 



This system was seized upon in America by men of the industrial 

 type of mind, and was valued for what I may call its bread-and- 

 butter reaction. While I do not sympathize with their main 

 thought, I do not wish in any way to discredit that part of it 

 which was undoubtedly admirable. These men looked upon the 

 high schools of America and saw that many of them were not educa- 

 tional. They saw that they were commercial, that they were teach- 

 ing commercial geography, commercial arithmetic, commercial pen- 

 manship, commercial bookkeeping, and the like, and that as a result 

 they were turning out a race of clerks with ideas little above those 

 of trade and bargains, who could be had by the thousand in any of 

 our great cities for from five to ten dollars a week — perhaps I ought 

 to say from three dollars a week upward. Meager as is the ideal of life 

 presented by industrialism, it was a great step forward as compared 

 with the commercialism which it is meant to supplant. Viewed from 

 the human standpoint, it is a step forward just in proportion as the 

 thoroughgoing artisan, with his strong, lithe body, his quick eye, his 

 skillful hand, his somewhat independent habit of mind, is better 

 than the thoroughgoing clerk, with his endowment of all that is 

 commonplace and subservient. But the men who introduced manual 

 training into America saw that these commercial young people from 

 the high schools had not deliberately chosen so mean a plan of life, 

 but had rather been forced into it by the absence of any better plan. 

 I do not mean to go into the vexed question of free will and necessity, 

 but I think as students of education that we can not shut our 

 eyes to the fact that the young person we are considering, now 

 midway in his teens, is still the victim of his own inexperience, 

 and is very far from free, and that the older half of society has 

 very obvious duties to this same young person, not only in cre- 

 ating generous ideals of life, but not less in inaugurating a social 

 regime which will open the way to their realization. It is quite use- 

 less to allow, or perhaps I ought to say force, boys and girls to 

 grow up in the atmosphere of a low social ideal, and then blame them 

 for it. It is quite useless to consent to a social order which presses 

 sadly upon the majority of men, and then despise humanity for not 

 making way against the inevitable. 



And the Centennial Exhibition opened the eyes of the nation to 

 another fact. It showed us that despite our boasted Yankee in- 

 genuity, American workmen were far less skillful than their Euro- 

 pean and particularly their Continental brethren, and the fact had to 

 be accounted for. It was seen that in America manual labor was 

 looked down upon, that the social as well as the educational pressure 



