Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

by Charles H. Ham

It is through these processes of loving manipulation that the mechanic and the artisan transform things crude and ugly into forms of use and beauty. And it is in this way, and this way only, that man has trod the path of progress. It is a rugged road, whose steeps are to be climbed alone by those whose hearts are warm with holy zeal, whose souls are aglow with enthusiasm, and whose hands are endowed with the rich experiences of thoughtful toil. And we shall fit all mankind for this noble task by training them to usefulness—that is, by teaching them, not merely how to think, but how to act, how to work.

It is a broad and conclusive generalization of Herbert Spencer that since literature and the fine arts are made possible by the useful arts, manifestly that which is made possible must be postponed to that which makes it possible. Nor does this rational and sober view of art detract in the least from its dignity or sentiment. On the contrary, it provides a foundation for works of the imagination—a basis for that spirituality which is the fruit of the happy conjunction of a multitude of material conditions evolved from the humblest as well as the noblest of the useful arts—a basis without which the beautiful arts could never exist.

It thus becomes plain that social and economic conditions are the product of education in things. Art education differentiates the civilized from the savage man. The pathway of progress which now blazes with the glory of electricity stretches back to the gloom of the caves where our early ancestors dwelt; and the steps of this advance consist of improvements in the useful and beautiful arts. From gesture to speech; from pictures to types; from the canoe to the steamship, and from the canal to the locomotive, the race has moved forward, always and only, through art triumphs.

So all the generations of men have lived and toiled for us. We are the heirs of the hoarded learning, of the accumulated mental and moral fibre, and of the treasured arts of the ages. And we are hence the elders, as Bacon says, of the philosophers, the sages, and the inventors and discoverers of all time. Their achievements are heights whence we may discern and occupy new and wider fields of human endeavor.

The precise relation of the useful arts to social and economic conditions is, therefore, that of creator. As your art education is, so shall your society be. There are persons who unconsciously dissociate art and civilization—who think that things are not essential to spiritual development, who fail to realize the fact that the main reason of the barbaric character of the savage is the absence from his environment of the arts of peace and plenty. If, for example, Plato had not been provided with food and clothing and shelter, he would doubtless not have composed the divine dialogues; and if there had been neither mechanics, nor architects, nor sculptors to adorn with palaces and temples the Greek cities, his ideal republic would not have had a place in classic literature; and finally, if there had been no (slave) hand-workers in Greece (for art products are all, directly or indirectly, the work of the hand), instead of being the most venerated of philosophers, Plato might have been, perhaps, the most wretched of savages, prolonging a miserable existence by means the most inglorious. But so unconscious was he of the true relation of the useful arts to life that he denounced them all as “degrading”!

Poverty is the chief scourge of society; and it is a familiar economic fact that where the useful arts are most flourishing poverty is least pressing, so that to abolish poverty it would seem to be only necessary to multiply and extend the arts. And if poverty is to be abolished; if there is ever to be an ideal civilization, the controlling motive of humanity must be changed from selfishness to altruism; and this change can come only through love of work. So long as work shall be regarded as a “curse,” the paramount purpose of the individual will be to avoid it, and to compel others to submit to it. Hence the antagonisms that arise at every point of human contact. The sum of these antagonisms is what we call the struggle of life, which is merely the struggle of each to survive at the expense of his fellows, and is therefore barbaric.

Now as we have seen that it is through the arts that man has been civilized—that, in a word, the arts differentiate the civilized from the savage man—it is evident that the further regeneration of the race is to be wrought by analogous means—that is to say, by a wider expansion of the arts of peace. And the way to achieve this result is to transform our schools, which were modelled after the classic methods of Greece and Rome, into laboratories for the development of useful men and women, through the mastery of the useful arts; the arts that make life sweet and beautiful; the arts that adorn our homes, that render the earth fertile and make it blossom as the rose; the arts that annihilate distance and so promote man’s brotherhood by enlarging his neighborhood—these are the arts that inspire us with just and generous impulses, the arts in which the noblest moral sentiments are made manifest in things.

These, then, are the arts which ought to be made the subject of thorough and exhaustive education—the arts that led Comenius to define schools as the workshops of humanity. The final essential educational condition is universality; for it is obvious that inequality of educational opportunity is the grossest injustice of which organized society is capable. It is against this injustice that Carlyle exclaims: “That there should one man die ignorant, who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen more than twenty times in the minute.”

This is indeed the tragedy of tragedies—the tragedy on the heels of which slavery stalks; in whose train caste rides in scornful state; in whose hideous shadow war waits to shed blood and spread pestilence and famine. All these are the satellites of ignorance, and hardly less of partial education than of total unenlightenment; and hence the only hope that civilization shall finally triumph over barbarism rests in universal, impartial, and scientific education.

The contrasts between the old and the new school methods pointed out in this chapter show along what lines educational progress is to be sought. The ideal school is to consist, not of one academic department, and a department of Manual Training, but of mental and manual exercises so related as to produce homogeneity.