Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

Fifteen years ago a great wave of educational awakening swept over this country. It penetrated every nook and corner of the land, pervading both cities, large and small, and the rural districts. It took the shape of a demand, often almost inarticulate, for reform. The schools were denounced as superficial; their methods as automatic; their teachers as unintelligent and untrained, their system of instruction as a mixture of cram and smatter.

The school-master is a conservative, and with his champions he came promptly to the defence of the old schools and their old methods. The controversy became heated, and soon the rival forces joined battle. Col. Francis W. Parker, of the Chicago Normal School, and Dr. James MacAlister, now President of the Drexel Institute of Philadelphia, and others were prominent leaders of the new reform movement, whose banner was “Manual Training,” or “The New Education.”

Under this brilliant and enthusiastic leadership the movement became a crusade in the interest of the educational ideas of Montaigne, Rousseau, Bacon, Locke, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Spencer, Mann, and their long array of sympathizers and supporters, who, with Bacon, declare that “the end of man is an action, not a thought.”

But the work of the reformers was too serious to be long controlled, either by emotion or passion. The more intelligent and better educated and trained teachers gradually came to the support of the new system and methods, and the mass of the teaching fraternity caught something of the enthusiasm by which the reformers were inspired to struggle for a great cause. Thereafter Manual Training became an aggressive force openly demanding recognition, and pushing for victory and ultimate control.

In the [Appendix] hereto the physical progress of Manual Training is shown in tabulated form; and the extent of such progress is all, if not more, than its most ardent friends and advocates could rationally desire. But it is not to be doubted that the quality of the progress the new education has made in the period of fifteen years under consideration is far inferior to its extent. The statistics here presented relate mainly to the village, town, and city schools of this country, and especially to its public schools, with some general observations and facts in relation to the progress of the new education in England and the chief countries in Europe. In a few instances the tabulations include institutions designed for industrial rather than strictly educational purposes. But it is deemed wise to retain them, on the ground that whether so designed or not all industrial training is educative.

It is worthy of intelligent inquiry whether as a matter of fact, not only in this country, but in all countries, the progress of Manual Training has not been very unsatisfactory in quality. In most cases the new education was necessarily confided to teachers of the old régime, who, as a preliminary, were compelled to unlearn what was false and erroneous in the old system, to overcome the prejudices of years, sometimes of a lifetime, and to become faithful and laborious students of a new and scientific scheme of education. The main difficulty in matters educational has always been to secure ideal teachers. Education is the first of human considerations, and its professors should be the most learned of human beings. If the teachers who have been called to the Priesthood, of the New Education, have proved incompetent in many instances, instead of being hastily condemned they should be helped forward towards the goal of competency by all friends of that progress in education which is the sole hope of human perfection.

The most striking effects of Manual Training long antedate its introduction to the schools. For thousands of years, in every shop where the humble mechanic wrought; at every fireside where the domestic arts obtained a foothold; in every field where a step forward was made through the invention of some less crude implement of husbandry than the one that preceded it, the mind and the hand expressed their joint struggle towards the achievement of that skill in useful things which constitutes the very kernel of civilization. Bacon’s definition of education—“the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things”—is a recognition of the philosophic fact that the hand is the source of wisdom; and the life of George Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, affords a most impressive illustration of the educative value of hand-work. At the coal-pit’s mouth Stephenson, meantime learning his “A B C’s,” invented the “Rocket,” while the bookish engineers were declaring it to be a mechanical impossibility. Stephenson’s achievement was the realization in things of Bacon’s luminous precept—“The end of man is an action, not a thought.”—This is the philosophy, the rationale, of Manual Training; it is the union of thought and action, and it therefore demands the elimination from educational methods of the abstract philosophy of the Greeks. In his declaration, “All the useful arts are degrading,” Plato defined the character of the revival of learning which was to occur hundreds of years afterwards; it was a revival of Greek methods, which exalted abstractions, and debased things. Mr. Herbert Spencer refers to its baleful effects upon the schools of England in the severest terms of condemnation. That Mr. Spencer’s arraignment of the schools is just, is shown by its antithesis expressed in the dictum of Dr. Dwight, of Yale College, who says: “Education is for the purpose of developing and cultivating the thinking power. It is to the end of making a knowing, thinking mind.”

Bacon discovered, and did not hesitate to declare, that “the understanding is more prone to error than the senses”; and this fact constitutes the basis of his philosophy of “things,” which is another name for the law of induction. “For if we would look into and dissect the nature of this real world,” he says, “we must consult only things themselves.” If we would find the corner-stone of education, we must consult labor. Nothing great is accomplished without a due mingling of drudgery and humility; for of all the virtues humility is the most excellent. The Greeks failed to comprehend the true educational idea because of their pride. They associated use with slavery, because in Greece all labor was performed by slaves; and, scorning labor, they scorned use, and, by consequence, service, the greatest of the moralities.

Upon the foundation laid by Bacon, Rabelais, and Montaigne, Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel raised a great superstructure of educational ideas. Words were subordinated, and things ennobled.

Comenius’s rule, to “leave nothing until it has been impressed by means of the ear, the eye, the tongue, the hand,” and the injunction of Rousseau that “the student will learn more by one hour of manual labor than he will retain from a whole day’s verbal instructions; that the things themselves are the best explanations”—these are the maxims of the new education.