490 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 



By C. HANFORD HENDEESON, 

 lecturer in harvard university. 



III.— THE MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL. 



THE educational sequence in America is not yet an established 

 order. The amount of schooling that a boy or girl is supposed 

 to need is not the same in the Carolinas that it is in Massachusetts. 

 In the more highly evolved communities the pressure is all in the 

 direction of an elaborate educational process. The gap between the 

 minimum and the maximum requirements is very great. It would 

 be unfortunate, however, to believe that virtue lies at either ex- 

 treme. It is quite possible to have an educational process so meager 

 as to be utterly inadequate to the needs of modern evolved living. 

 And this extreme is apt to be found in communities where either 

 Nature is too bountiful in her offer of a living, or where the invita- 

 tions to action are too strong to be resisted. It is difficult to imagine 

 the educational process as too comprehensive in Florida and Louisi- 

 ana, or at the present time in gold-smitten Alaska. But it is also 

 quite possible for the educational process to be so elaborate, so exact- 

 ing, so time-consuming, that it takes the juice quite out of life, and 

 gives us weakness instead of strength. The friends of action have, I 

 think, quite as just cause for complaint in the devitalized and 

 unattractive specimens of manhood and womanhood that the school- 

 men are apt to send them, as the friends of thought have in the 

 crude and ignorant youth who turn out of a holiday. 



It is impossible to overeducate, but it is very possible to over- 

 school. 



In my own experience I have found that I could accomplish more 

 with the boys who had been least in school. I have had boys graduate 

 at a high school whom I could not induce to take a college course. 

 They had been under instruction eleven long years — for remember 

 that in childhood the years are long — and they were simply tired 

 out. I could not blame them for wanting a change, though I did 

 feel very strongly that they had put in their time at the wrong end 

 of the sequence, and were giving up the far better part. And I have 

 talked with clever young fellows in high school and college and 

 have asked them if they could remember anything useful that they 

 learned below the high-school grade. They have replied that they 

 could not, or else they have mentioned something so trivial that when 

 balanced against six or eight years of human life it seemed abso- 

 lutely pitiful. I should be sorry to use a false standard in estimating 

 the value of these schools. Their work is to be judged not by the 



