640 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



perception of relations among outer tilings, and helps on the realiza- 

 tion of one's own relation with the world that is not self, is in the 

 highest degree educative. The process of education being the con- 

 scious direction of evolution, the creation of a definite environment 

 in order to realize definite moral and aesthetic ends, must produce 

 results, if any, just along these lines, must bring one into a perception 

 of relations, must help one to realize self, and not less materially must 

 help one to realize one's relation with a world that is not self. The 

 results of manual training, so far as they are educational, must be 

 along some such lines as these. Let us look at the results so far as 

 knowledge is concerned — a perception of relations. 



We can know about a thing, and we can know the thing itself. 

 There is a tremendous difference. We can know about verbs and 

 adverbs, nouns and adjectives, and all the rest of the nine parts of 

 speech, and we can decline, compare, conjugate, analyze, parse. 

 But we can never know the parts of speech themselves until we 

 know them as a reality of use, until we experience them either in 

 literature or in our own efforts at expression. We can know about 

 the world and about foreign countries, and can form vague mental 

 images to correspond to them, but we can not know the world itself 

 or other lands except through travel, through actual experience. We 

 can know about the world of matter, about rocks and minerals and 

 animals and plants, and be well read in regard to their appearance 

 and qualities, but we can only know this world of matter by personal 

 contact. It is the same in a less material world. We can know about 

 the emotions, about love and friendship and conscience and duty 

 and hate and remorse, but we can not know the emotions themselves 

 until we ourselves have felt. It is a very unreal world that is built 

 upon the report of others, rather than upon the report of our own 

 senses, a world in which books take the place of life, in which maps 

 take the place of lands, in which pictures and drawings take the place 

 of N^ature and of art— a flat world of two dimensions, lacking the 

 third dimension of solid reality. Those only can know who live in a 

 world of reality and of direct sensational experience. 



I am stating one of the actual results of manual training when 

 I say that it not only attempts to bring boys and girls into touch 

 with reality in thoughts and things, but that it truly does so. And it 

 does so by letting them alone, by providing an environment rich in 

 its invitations to action, but one in which the action must be self- 

 directed. Furthermore, it is an environment in which the world is 

 very meagerly reported, only so much as is absolutely necessary, but 

 in which the boy is thrown back upon the reports of his own senses 

 and must taste life at first hand. One can not live in such a world, 

 can not be constantly doing things with one's hands and e\QS, without 



