The Author.
New York City, March, 1900.
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION.
In 1879 I read a paper before the Chicago Philosophical Society on the subject of “The Inventive Genius; or, an Epitome of Human Progress.” The suggestion of the subject came from Mr. Charles J. Barnes, to whom I desire in this public way to express my obligation for an introduction to a profoundly interesting study, and one which has given a new direction to all my thoughts.
At the conclusion of my labors in the preparation of the paper, I realized the force of Bacon’s remark, that “the real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.”
In tracing the course of invention and discovery, I found that I was moving in the line of the progress of civilization. I found that the great gulf between the savage and the civilized man is spanned by the seven hand-tools—the axe, the saw, the plane, the hammer, the square, the chisel, and the file—and that the modern machine-shop is an aggregation of these tools driven by steam. I hence came to regard tools as the great civilizing agency of the world. With Carlyle I said, “Man without tools is nothing; with tools he is all.” From this point it was only a step to the proposition that, It is through the arts alone that all branches of learning find expression, and touch human life. Then I said, The true definition of education is the development of all the powers of man to the culminating point of action; and this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this must be the last analysis of educational truth.
These ideas are not new. They pervade Lord Bacon’s writings, are admirably formulated in Rousseau’s “Emile,” and were restated by Mr. Herbert Spencer twenty-five years ago. More than this, Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel attempted to carry them into practical operation in the school-room, but with only a small measure of success. It remains for the age of steel to show how powerless mere words are in the presence of things, and so to emphasize the demand for a radical reform in educational methods.
In 1880 my attention was drawn to the Manual Training Department of the Washington University of St. Louis, Mo. In that school I found the realization of Bacon’s aphorism, “Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things.” I made an exhaustive study of the methods of the St. Louis school, and reached the conclusion that the philosopher’s stone in education had been discovered. The columns of the Chicago Tribune were opened to me, and I wrote constantly on the subject for the ensuing three years. Meantime the Chicago Manual-Training School (the first independent institution of the kind in the world) was founded and opened, and the agitation spread over the whole country, and indeed over the whole civilized world.
This work was commenced two years ago. I found the labor much more arduous than I anticipated, and its completion has hence been delayed far beyond the time originally contemplated for placing it in the hands of a publisher. It may be summarized briefly as consisting of four divisions: 1. A detailed description of the various laboratory class processes, from the first lesson to the last, in the course of three years. 2. An exhaustive argument a posteriori and a fortiori in support of the proposition that tool practice is highly promotive of intellectual growth, and in a still greater degree of the upbuilding of character. 3. A sketch of the historical period, showing that the decay of civilization and the destruction of social organisms have resulted directly from defects in methods of education. 4. A brief sketch of the history of manual training as an educational force.