THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 781 



tion to stop at eigliteen or even at twenty. There are mental func- 

 tions the most important and valuable of all that do not come to any- 

 thing like full fruition for a score or more of years. A modern m.an 

 living the most evolved life is now said to be in his prime at sixty- 

 five. But I do mean that this subsequent life of fulfilled promise is 

 largely, almost entirely, dependent upon the early life. The impres- 

 sions were recorded then, the senses were cultivated then, the motor 

 nerves were habituated then; in a word, the organism was prepared 

 for the intellectual life, and the intellectual equipment pretty well 

 determined once for all. To the after years remains the utilization 

 of this equipment, a utilization whose quality and whose extent will 

 depend upon the stimulus and circumstance of later life. It is well 

 recognized among musicians that to play the violin successfully one 

 must begin early in the teens. And it is so with many other arts. 

 The highest performance will result when with the other organic 

 equipment is wrapped up a potential stimulus, fundamental and 

 deep enough to operate in after life, even against unfavorable cir- 

 cumstances, against grief and loneliness and disappointment, and 

 still come out the victor. 



Literary critics wisely discriminate between books which possess 

 or do not possess that subtle something which we call the literary 

 quality. The books which have this quality have been well described 

 as the literature of power, for, however unliterary the reader may 

 himself be, they take hold of him and influence him in a very real 

 way. The books that are only tolerable because they record certain 

 facts of value, the material out of which books might be made, rather 

 than books themselves, have been described once for all as the litera- 

 ture of information. To serve the ends of the complete life we want 

 in our schools the literature of power, and in quite as imperative a 

 way we want the curriculum of power, as opposed to the curriculum 

 of information. I have told you earlier how little value I place upon 

 the informational results of the elementary schools, and how pro- 

 foundly I mistrust them in failing to awaken a more insatiable intel- 

 lectual curiosity. It has been my good fortune to have traveled 

 quite extensively in this country, literally from Maine to California 

 and from Georgia to Vancouver, for I have wanted to know what we 

 meant when we said America. And as a result of this experience I 

 have to report a very low standard of intellectual life among the 

 youth of America, a very tepid curiosity regarding the things of the 

 spirit. We are prone at Cambridge and at other centers of culture 

 to take too favorable a view of this matter. I think that Cambridge 

 is not typical of the culture of America any more than Oxford is typi- 

 cal of the culture of England. At both places we are studying 

 high tide. 



