Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

But to what extent has the old school-master adopted the new education, to what extent occupied the old school-room with new ideas? How many school-masters of even the present régime comprehend with John Ruskin that “the youth who has once learned to take a straight shaving off a plank, or to draw a fine curve without faltering, or to lay a brick level in its mortar, has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him?” In other words, to what extent does the conviction pervade the ranks of the fraternity of teachers, whether of public-schools, private schools, colleges, or universities, that the employment of the hands in the useful arts is more highly educative than the acquisition of the rules of reading, writing, and arithmetic? Or, considering the subject of the history and career of George Stephenson, for instance, what, in the opinion of the modern school-master, contributed most to his development as a man and citizen of the world—the mental exercise of learning to read, write, and cipher, which task he accomplished while engaged in inventing the locomotive, or the combined mental and manual exercise of taking apart, repairing, and putting together the stationary engine used at the colliery where he was employed? If, in the course of our investigation, it should be found that doing things as Stephenson did is more conducive to intellectual development than memorizing words and reciting poetry, as the Greeks did, some light may be thrown on the general subject of existing educational methods. Their chief defect is their lack of moral power. Morality does not reside in the letters of the alphabet, but there is in the locomotive, for example, a great moral principle—the principle of the brotherhood of man. For, in devising the locomotive, Stephenson made man’s neighborhood coterminous with earth’s utmost bounds; thus, in a single act, achieving his own apotheosis, and assuring, ultimately, the moral and intellectual kinship of the race. For the hand stands for use, for service, and for unyielding integrity; and it may be confidently asserted on the conviction of observation, experience, and a studious consideration of historic facts, that its drill and discipline as enforced in the world’s workshops, and in the best of existing Manual-training schools, results in a far greater degree of mind development than is produced by any exclusively academic course, and hence that Manual Training is the most important of all methods of education.

The most sacred of human rights is the right of the poor child, born in a highly civilized, wealthy community, to the same kind and degree of education as that received by the child of the most opulent citizen.

It was long ago remarked that “the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass that in calculating its great revolutions they may safely be neglected;” and the late Henry George declared that the differences in men, intellectually, are no greater than their physical differences.

The perpetuity of free institutions depends upon social not less than upon political equality. But social equality is impossible without educational equality: the very thought of intimate relations with the ignorant is repulsive to the learned. Education, impartial and universal, is, therefore, the sole guarantee of an ideal civilization, and so of an imperishable state.

Old social evils constantly recur because the old crime of inequality in education is forever and ever repeated. It follows that we shall make all things equal through equal education. But what sort of education? We shall not train the child, as the ancients did, “to dispute in learned phrase as to whether we can be certain that we are certain of nothing!” Nor shall we stuff his memory with the grammar and rhetoric of an ancient tongue, in view of the profound observation of Dr. Draper, that a living thought can no more be embodied in a dead language than activity can be imparted to a corpse. But we shall rather instruct him in the principles of the Baconian philosophy, of which Macaulay so aptly says: “Its characteristic distinction, its essential spirit, is its majestic humility—the persuasion that nothing can be too insignificant for the attention of the wisest which is not too insignificant to give pleasure or pain to the meanest.”

The end sought in education by the ancients was ornament, and its strict analogy is found in barbaric life. Spencer has pointed out that the savage smeared his body with yellow ochre before he covered it with clothes, and that he adorned his head with feathers before he built a hut. So, under the laws of evolution, before a Bacon could arise, whole generations of philosophers were born, lived, speculated, and died, without leaving to mankind the smallest heritage of that common sense by which we nevertheless live.

A philosophy which scorned the useful in all its aspects was essentially barbaric; for art differentiates civilized from savage life: its law was stagnation, as the law of scientific investigation is progress. Use is the greatest thing in the material world, as service is the greatest thing in the moral world; and they are united in the philosophy of Bacon, which, beginning in observation and ending in art, multiplies useful things that are beautiful, and beautiful things that are useful.

The old education was an outgrowth of the old philosophy; the new education springs as logically from the new, or Baconian, philosophy. The old education was ornamental; the new is scientific, or useful. The old education was designed to make masters; the new is designed to make men.

President Eliot, of Harvard University, admits that his method of education is to compel the student to work. On the other hand, the method of the new education is to attract him. Genius has many definitions, one of which is “a capacity for taking infinite pains.” But its humblest equivalent is “attention”; and we propose to secure the student’s attention through his hands: for the most significant fact in all the realm of certitude is the fact that man impresses himself upon nature through the hand alone!

Let us then, in the new school, unite mind and hand in a crusade after the truths that are hidden in things. For Manual Training, educationally, is the blending of thought and action. The thought that does not lead to an act is both mentally and materially barren. For as it confers no benefit upon the human race, neither does it profit the mind that conceives it. Nay, more. An unprolific thought exhausts the mind to no purpose, as an unfruitful tree cumbers the ground. It follows that the integrity of the mind can be maintained only by the submission of its immature judgments to the verification of things. Hence the correlation of thoughts and things is as necessary to mental and moral growth as the application of the principles of abstract mechanics to the arts of peace is essential to human progress.