528 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to develop the body by a series of physical movements physio- 

 logically arranged, to develop the mind by means of the rich mental 

 reactions which accomj^any all motor activities; and not less to 

 develop the heart by enlisting in all the work the child's good will 

 and unselfishness. Sloyd has been well defined by Mr. Gustaf 

 Larsson, the head master of the Sloyd Training School in Boston, 

 as " tool wprk so arranged and employed as to stimulate and promote 

 vigorous, intelligent self-activity for a purpose which the worker 

 recognizes as good." It is a capital definition and a noble aim. 



Sloyd constituted the second party in that triple alliance of which 

 I have sjDoken. But there is still a third element involved, one too 

 recent to have had any history, but destined, I am bound to believe, 

 to do great things and to win the day against the combined forces 

 of industrialism itself. The third element comes from the univer- 

 sities, but approaches the high school along the path of the lower 

 schools, and so allies itself with the kindergarten and sloyd in forcing 

 manual training into secondary education on purely educational 

 grounds. It is nothing less powerful and modern than experimental 

 psychology itself. The study of human physiology, and especially 

 the study of brain action, is showing us each day more and more con- 

 clusively that if you want good work you must have a good tool — 

 that is to say, a good organism — and that is precisely the educational 

 basis of all manual training. It is the search for organic power. 



These two conflicting ideals of manual training meet and do 

 battle in the manual training schools. If you take a school built up 

 on the educational ideal, and another built up on the industrial 

 ideal, you will find them both doing apparently the same thing, 

 but you can not, I think, get very far beyond the threshold 

 without observing a tremendous difference — a difference that you 

 will remark in many quarters, but nowhere so distinctly as in 

 the faces and persons of the boys themselves. The difference is 

 not due to any variation in the material equipment, perhaps to no 

 great change in the curriculum, but to a very subtle, intangible 

 thing, to the point of view of the head master. It all depends upon 

 him and upon which view of manual training he entertains and 

 would have prevail. I can not too much emphasize this point. Back 

 of all action there is an idea, a motive. If you would change the 

 action, you must first change the idea. It makes a tremendous differ- 

 ence what people are thinking about as they carry on their work. 

 This principle is the basis of all scientific pedagogical effort, of all 

 scientific reform, indeed, of all well-directed work of any kind which 

 has to do with human elements. It is the fault of the old education 

 and of the old schemes of reform, and, for that matter, of too much 

 of current education and current schemes of reform, that they address 



