THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAN^UAL TRAINING. 503 



yourself. You remember, perhaps, that Jesus was a carpenter. You 

 recall good Adam Bede and Dinah Morris. You see again the touch- 

 ing little wooden saints and angels on the stalls of the Antwerp 

 Cathedral, and quite before you know it the occupations of the wood- 

 worker have become idealized and have passed from labor into joy. 

 It is pleasant, too, to go again from day to day, and, as one term melts 

 into another, to note the growing skill, the quickened intelligence, 

 the greater aliveness on the part of the little workers. At first they 

 are so awkward and helpless; they seem to have so small control 

 over their organisms, and they are half ashamed of their pitiful 

 little efforts. But all this changes. There comes not only skill, but 

 a sense of skill, and a sturdy self-reliance that amuses while it 

 pleases you. They seem to be passing into control of themselves and 

 to know it. They are delightfully unconscious of you, and quite 

 regardless, too, of your criticism, unless indeed it coincide with 

 their own. They soon come to know whether a piece of work is 

 good or not, and are as generous in praising the skill of a neighboring 

 worker as they are frank in ridiculing his failures. I should like 

 to give you an instance of this sturdiness: I had once a very solemn 

 little boy in my science classes, whose delight it was to read Forney's 

 Catechism of the Locomotive. He kept a little notebook in which he 

 entered his difficulties in the form of questions. When he had a suf- 

 ficient cargo of these, perhaps ten or a dozen, he would come sailing 

 into the lecture room after school and present them one by one. I 

 had answered seven or eight of such questions one afternoon, when 

 we came to some detail of the steam cut-off. I could only answer 

 on general principles, and told him that the answer was a partial one. 

 He looked at me very solemnly and said : " I will take this question 

 to Mr. Whitaker. I think he can answer it better than you can." I 

 was immensely pleased. 



But, as I say, the first impression on going into these workshops 

 is not with the work, but with the workers, and I think it is high 

 commendation when in any school you are more taken up with the 

 children than with the process. 



The work in joinery mainly involves the use of the saw, plane, 

 chisel, and rule. Hammer and nails, sandpaper, glue, and shellac 

 are taken for granted. The sandpaper and shellac are secondary, 

 and are quite discountenanced if used to cover up defects. The term 

 joinery is well chosen. The work covers all sorts of joints and 

 frames, and joinable and fittable things. The wood turning, I think, 

 is less valuable than the stricter hand work, though it does undoubt- 

 edly cultivate an accuracy and delicacy of touch, combined with 

 quickness that might not result from slower operations. It is also 

 possible that the inartistic forms produced by our turning mills and 



