Some Axioms of .Corporate Education. 55 



That something must stringently base its validity on particular 

 knowledge of the human factors it has to deal with. 



The main questions to be dealt with will be " What in the given man 

 of young humanity to be cultivated, are the undeveloped capacities." 

 ' ; What is the environment of which the best is to be made " and ' ; What 

 type of development may desirably and economically be aimed at under 

 all the circumstances." 



Prominent among the capacities common to and distinctive of 

 humanity of all races there is one which has been sadly ignored in 

 education. That is the capacity of manipulation. It is of all other 

 things elementary, not only in the history of the emergence of humanity 

 but, I am disposed to think, in the development of mentality in the 

 individual. Yet you may search the Code under which we educate our 

 children in vain for a recognition of this fact. A distinguished man of 

 science the other day pointed out that an analysis of the University 

 records showed that the men whose names were prominent in the playing- 

 fields and on the river held much more than a proportional place in the 

 honours lists of the schools. He goes the length of assertiug. on the 

 basis of this and other facts collated, that mental and physical growth, 

 despite apparent exceptions, proceed pari passu in the average human 

 development. Even though we may dispute this, there is very much less 

 room to question the interdependence of manipulative power and the 

 faculties of observation, comparison, imagination, and that complex of 

 associated intellectual nervous and operative powers by which the grouping 

 of parts and application of known laws to some useful end is ordered. 



It is a matter of common observation that the weaver, the gardener, 

 the wright and blacksmith show a much higher average of intellectual 

 power than clerks and storekeepers drawn from the same class of 

 society and if there has been a decadence amongst craftsmen in recent 

 years, it is due probably to the factory swamping handicraft. 



It will be admitted by most people that but for the gift of making 

 implements, either the human race would have gone under in the struggle 

 for existence, or we should in this second decade of the Twentieth 

 Century still be spending our life in tree-tops, cracking nuts and catching- 

 locusts. Certain it is that in a strenuous argument with a cave bear or 

 tiger, the finest periods of all the orators from Gorgias to Bright would 

 not for a moment compare in vital efficiency with a well made club. 

 More than this, the manipulative skill of a people broadly defines its place 

 in the scale of humanity. Greek culture is as inconceivable without 

 Greek arts and handicrafts as is Japanese civilization. The progress of 

 a race in arts and industries may be taken as a very fair index to its 

 brain convolutions. 



Yet so vainly conventional is our conception of cultivated manhood 

 that it is not uncommon to meet with people quite proud of the delicate 

 refinement of a nurture that has left them taper fingers incapable oi 



