Professor James2 says: - "The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of manual training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fiber.

"Laboratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation. They confer precision; because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self-reliance, they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's disciplinary functions to a minimum".

1 Editor and publisher of The Craftsman, New York and Syracuse.

2 In "Talks to Teachers," page 35.

In this connection Scripture 1 says: "1. Manual training develops the intellectual side of the mind as nothing else can. 2. Manual training develops character as nothing else can. 3. Manual training furnishes the pupil with real knowledge; it teaches him something. The laboratory method - the method of learning by doing - is after all the only method of learning anything, whether it be drawing, or Greek, or chemistry, or mathematics. The attempt to commit facts to memory by reading books is hopeless. What is memorized in this way fades in a short time, leaving little or no trace.""Two of the direct results of art instruction and manual training," as Professor Charles A. Bennett2 puts it, "are, first, power to do, and, second, ability to appreciate what is done by others".

The importance of industrial work as a subject which helps to give definite ideas of the value of toil and the real worth of things that are made by the sweat of the brow cannot be overestimated. The rich boy works along with the poor boy, each endeavoring to produce something which will express tangible results. Manual training work to be valuable must be strenuous. Boys must be made to plane and saw and sweat. They must produce shavings that have the artistic curl of the craftsman, not meaningless chips. Shopwork should give ability to plan and execute work according to good technique. "The capacity for work," as Dr. Bagley1 expresses it, "is the capacity for sustained effort. It means concentration, organization, and permanency of purpose. The intense desire for activity is not in itself sufficient. Children and savages possess this in great abundance. Not activity alone, but sustained and directed activity, has been the keynote of human progress".

1 Edward W. Scripture, in "Manual Training and Mental Development," Manual Training Magazine, October, 1899, page 25.

2 In "The Development of Appreciation," Manual Training Magazine, January, 1907.

Through industrial efforts in education and through other influences at work in the world to-day the time may come when intellect and manual labor will be united. John Ruskin said: "We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers".

William Morris expresses the same truth in these words: "I had thought that civilization meant the attainment of peace and order and freedom, of goodwill between man and man, of the love of truth and the hatred of injustice, and, by consequence, the attainment of the good life which these things breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of incident; that was what I thought it meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cushions, and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat and drink - and therewithal more and sharper differences between class and class".

1 In "The Educative Process," New York, 1907, page 102.