THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 491 



specific useful facts that the children remember in after years, but 

 by the general influence upon their lives. You perhaps remember 

 that incident of Garfield. He relates that he once heard Emerson 

 lecture, and that it was for him the beginning of a new life. Yet all 

 he could remember of the lecture was one of those bullet sentences 

 of Emerson's — " Men are as lazy as they dare to be." It is quite pos- 

 sible to fire the imagination of men and women, and have them 

 clean forget whether it was by an electric spark or a tallow candle — 

 or neither. 



But when we look at our educational structure, and note what 

 tremendously extended foundations it has, what an almost unending 

 vista is presented by the lower schools, and then see how palpably it 

 shrinks in rising upward to the high school and college, what a very 

 low pyramid it forms after all, I can not but feel that the influence 

 of these schools in arousing children to the higher life has been quite 

 as weak as has been their informational capacity. 



I do feel that in failing to impart abounding life and health, in 

 failing to arouse a keen interest in the many beautiful sides of life, 

 these schools are partly responsible for the apathy and ennui that 

 you read in the faces of middle-age and middle-class America. 



The wise sequence does not lie at either extreme — either seven 

 weeks a year for three or four years, or ten months a year for a 

 score or more of years. The present sequence in our older com- 

 munities runs somev/hat as follows: the kindergarten up to six 

 years; the elementary school for about eight years; the high 

 school, four years; the college, four years; the graduate, tech- 

 nical, or professional course, from three to six years. The edu- 

 cational process begins with very tender baby flesh, and ends with 

 pretty solid men and women. It is not one day too long if it lead 

 irresistibly to the radiant life. It is many years too long if it lead 

 to ill health, to apathy, to hopelessness, if it lead to loss of initiatory 

 power, to pedantry, to conventionality, to cowardice. It is a ques- 

 tion of the quality of the results. Even this elaborate process, how- 

 ever, is not yet correlated and continuous. The lower schools and the 

 high schools have been brought into pretty close relations, since both 

 are commonly under public administration, but even here, in many 

 of our cities, a remnant of the old apartness remains in the entrance 

 examination to which the children are obliged to submit at the doors 

 of the high school. Curiously, the public administration is not will- 

 ing to accept its own stamp of approval or blame as set by the lower 

 schools. But between the high schools and the colleges there is a 

 very noticeable gap. The two are under different administrations, 

 and in our less enlightened communities they are not infrequently 

 antagonistic. There are now, however, associations throughout the 



