326 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was all in the direction of commercialism and away from handicraft, 

 and finally that the boy who braved social opinion and went in for 

 hand work had to do it almost by stealth. The old institution of 

 apprenticeship had died, and the present order of artisan had been 

 so far tainted with the commercial spirit as to be jealous of his skill. 

 He hoarded it like a miser, unwilling to pass it on from generation 

 to generation. The ranks of skilled workmen in America were and 

 are renewed from the more fertile soil of Europe. Furthermore, in 

 1876, education in America was even more a mechanical process than 

 it is to-day. All these forces conspired to give manual training a 

 distinctly industrial trend. And this trend was manifestly strength- 

 ened by the fact that manual training had been originally appre- 

 hended as a form of industrial education. It had indeed appeared 

 in the literature under that name, and under that name was being 

 advocated in Switzerland, in France, and in parts of Germany. I 

 do not think that in 1876 manual training was anywhere being put 

 forward as a culture branch. The movement in America began 

 largely as an artisan movement. The schools that were started in 

 the decade following the Centennial Exhibition were all conceived 

 in this spirit. Some of them have experienced no change of heart 

 since then, but others, I am happy to say, have been transformed 

 and transfigured. Like Saul, the son of Kish, we unexpectedly 

 found a kingdom. Later schools have had much the same history. 

 In some the leaven of the new idea has worked; in others not. 



But even within the bounds of the artisan spirit, a restraining 

 grace came into play, which illustrates very well, I think, the tend- 

 ency of education to continue its search for underlying principles, 

 however unfavorable the conditions, and so to substitute the general 

 for the specific. Manual training, even in the hands of these indus- 

 trialists, never developed into the teaching of specific trades — the 

 manual training schools were always distinct from the trade schools. 

 Whether the industrialists were appalled by the diversity of trades to 

 be taught, or were restrained by some vague notion that the state 

 ought not to foster one craft rather than another, or were frightened 

 by the prospective antagonism of the trades unions, I do not know, 

 but certain it is that the movement gained educationally with each 

 repetition of the assertion that no trades were taught, but only the 

 principles underlying all trades. The growth of this universalizing 

 spirit has made possible a far broader conception of the true function 

 of manual training. 



But meanwhile the manual training idea had been making its 

 way into the curriculum from the other direction, from the lower 

 schools, and from them it came purely as an educational idea. The 

 educational conception has come from the kindergarten, from sloyd. 



