778 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



boy to school — but in reality it does not yet do this. It puts his hands 

 and by necessity his eyes to school, and I shall always feel, no matter 

 what the future of manual training may be, that it has done yeoman 

 service in breaking ground along rational, causational lines, and in 

 inviting our attention to the immense possibilities of a culture that is 

 organic. 



The rational scheme of education to which such an examination as 

 we have just been making would unavoidably lead us, must include 

 manual training as an integral element. If we substitute for man- 

 ual training some more general and comprehensive term, such as 

 faculty training, organic training, or, better still, if we dismiss all 

 special terms of any kind whatever, and use education to mean the 

 conscious process of human evolution, we shall have reached the 

 rational scheme of education itself, and may feel that our search is 

 ended. In such a scheme, manual training must occupy a most 

 prominent place, for it has to do with the most obvious forms of 

 touch. I wonder if you ever reflected that our entire contact with 

 the outer world, our entire knowledge of it, is in the last analysis de- 

 pendent upon but one sense, the sense of touch, and that the sensory 

 nerves, those telegraphic lines between our consciousness and the 

 outer world, respond to but one operator, direct contact? Yet this 

 is strictly so. We see, because waves of light break upon the shores 

 of vision; we hear, because waves of sound strike against the ear 

 drum; we smell, because minute particles of the odoriferous sub- 

 stance, or perhaps because peculiar and as yet unnamed waves in- 

 duced by such a substance, impinge against our noses; we taste, be- 

 cause of the direct impact of food and drink against the sensitive 

 nerve ends of the tongue. We have but one sense, a tactile sense, and 

 if instead of manual training we should say tactile training, we 

 should pretty nearly hit the mark. 



The full organic results which this rational scheme contem- 

 plates can never be reached, I am afraid, through the current cur- 

 riculum, or through anything likely to grow out of it. The whole 

 idea is too radically different. The present curriculum makes a 

 brave assault upon the intellectual life along a road cut straight 

 through the empyrean. The new education is after a still more com- 

 plete intellectuality — and we are apt to forget this when the indus- 

 trial view presses — but it proceeds along the road of the organism. 

 It is not, then, simply choice that would lead us to part company with 

 the old curriculum. It is something more imperative. It is bare 

 necessity. And the radical scheme which I am about to propose must 

 be accepted in some such spirit, not as indicating an idle love for 

 things that are new, but because the things that are old will no 

 longer serve. 



