THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 641 



coming more and more to adapt means to end, without growing more 

 and more into a realizing sense of the principle of cause and effect. 

 In a manual training scliool there are, of course, stupid boys who 

 never come into a full measure of knowledge, and there are clever 

 boys who quite of their own self-activity would have come into 

 a full measure of knowledge. Better than any training is it to be 

 well born. But the average boy, neither stupid nor clever, is cer- 

 tainly aroused to a keener perception of relations — that is, into a 

 deeper knowledge. The realization of self, the coming into possession 

 and control of one's self, is a large developmental process which 

 means many things. Take a boy as he is. Picture him as he 

 might be. The realization of self means nothing less than the 

 spanning of this considerable chasm. I do not for a moment be- 

 lieve that manual training accomplishes all of this, but I do believe 

 that one of the actual results is to bring a boy out of his smaller into 

 his larger self, and so points toward the realization of this ideal. The 

 necessity for adapting means to ends forced on a boy by his manual 

 work, the presence both of the principle and the idea of cause and 

 effect which he meets at every turn, conspire to give him a very 

 practical habit of mind, a habit which brings about a more complete 

 adjustment of acts to ends than you will find in boys who have not 

 had this special form of judgment training. And this complete 

 adjustment, as we have seen, is the mark of highly evolved conduct. 

 This result ought to follow from manual training, and I should in any 

 case count it among the possible results, but our experience is now 

 large enough to enable me to say that it does actually follow, and 

 that it follows in large measure. I have watched the boys very care- 

 fully inside the schools themselves, have watched their habit of deal- 

 ing with problems and facts, and I have followed their careers and 

 kept in correspondence with hundreds of them after graduation, 

 and I find them marked by a power of thought and action that quite 

 differentiates them from ordinary boys. 



I have been the head master in schools where manual training 

 was taught and where it was not taught, and have had an oppor- 

 tunity, therefore, to come in contact with both classes of boys; and 

 I have come to separate the two very distinctly in my mind, be- 

 cause I detect in them a marked difference of quality. 



But while this nice adjustment of acts to ends constitutes highly 

 evolved conduct, it is only touched with morality when the ends are 

 moral — that is, are happiness-producing in a very deep and genuine 

 sense. This disposes of an objection which is sometimes urged 

 against the moral claims of manual training, and quite naturally 

 urged, I think, that skillful workmen are not always good men, are 

 indeed often men of quite impeachable moral habits. Without know- 



VOL. LIII. — 44 



