C. M. Woodward

“ I confidently believe that the development of the manual elements in school will prevent those serious errors in the choice of a vocation which too often wreck the fondest hopes. It is not assumed that every boy who enters a manual-training school is to be a mechanic; his training leaves him free. No pupils were ever more unprejudiced, better prepared to look below the surface, less the victims of a false gentility. Some find that they have no taste for manual arts, and will turn into other paths—law, medicine, or literature. ”

“ Such boys will never become mere machine-men. They will never be content to put their brains away like a piece of ornamental toggery for which they have no daily use. If you wish boys to become narrow, unreflecting, bigoted, and helpless, when their machines break down and when they are thrown upon their own resources, don't send them to a manual-training school, for you will surely be disappointed. ”

“ Says Carlyle: "Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing; with tools he is all." To turn a crank, or to carry a hod, one needs only muscular power. But to devise and build the light engine, which, under the direction of a single intelligent master-spirit, shall lift the burden of a hundred men, requires a high degree of intelligence and manual skill. So the hewers of wood and the drawers of water are in this age of invention replaced by saw and planing mills, and waterworks requiring some of the most elaborate embodiments of thought and skill. ”

“ The one-sided training of the schools has divided active men into two classes—those who have sought to live by the work of their own hands, and those who have sought to live by the work of other men's hands.
Hitherto men who have aimed to cultivate their minds have neglected their hands; and those who have labored with their hands have found no opportunity to specially cultivate their brains. The crying demand to-day is for intellectual combined with manual training. It is this want that the manual-training school aims to supply. ”

“ From the observed influence of manual training upon boys and indirectly upon the parents, I am led to claim that when the last year of the grammar and the high schools include manual training, they will meet a much wider demand; that the education they afford will be really more valuable; and, consequently, that the attendance of boys will be more than doubled. Add the manual elements with their freshness and variety, their delightful shop exercises, their healthy intellectual and moral atmosphere, and the living reality of their work, and the boys will stay in school. ”

“ No education can be "free" which leaves the child no choice, or which gives a bias against any honorable occupation; which walls up the avenues of approach to any vocation requiring intelligence and skill, A truly liberal education educates equally for all spheres of usefulness ”

“ The weary intellects roll themselves up in self-defense, and suffer as patiently as they can, but the memory of those moments of torment lingers and throws its dreadful shadow over the exercise as it comes up again on the morrow ”

“ Now, I deny that the introduction of manual training does of necessity force out any essential feature of mental and moral culture. The cup may be, and probably is, full to overflowing, but it is a shriveled and one-sided cup. It is as sensitive and active in its own defense as are the walls of the stomach, which, when overfed with ill-assorted food, contracts, rebels, and overflows, but which expands and readily digests generous rations of a varied diet. ”

“ The thoroughly trained mechanic enjoys the extraordinary advantage of being able, like the well-taught mathematician, to apply his skill to every problem; with every new tool and new process he rises to new usefulness and worth. ”

“ Our graduates have been out of school less than a year, but I have seen enough to justify me in saying that their chances of material success are unusually good. As workmen, they will soon step to the front; as employers and manufacturers, they will be self-directing and efficient inspectors. They will be little exposed to the wiles of incompetent workmen.
On the other hand, communities will prosper when their young men prosper. This is the dynamic age; the great forces of Nature are being harnessed to do our work, and we are just beginning to learn how to drive. ”

“ The students of a well-conducted manual-training school are intellectually as active and vigorous as in any high-school. Nay, more, I claim, and I have had good opportunity to observe the facts, that even on the intellectual side the manual-training boy has a decided advantage. I have been in charge of both kinds of school, and I know whereof I speak. The education of the hand is the means of more completely and efficaciously educating the brain. ”

“ We hear much, and with good reason, of the value of directive intelligence. To be a director one must have good judgment. He who would successfully direct the labor of other men must first learn the art of successful labor himself; and he who would direct a machine properly must understand the principles of its construction, and be personally skilled in the arts of preservation and repair. ”

“ Not one useful invention in ten is made by a man who is not a skilled mechanic. But, as I have said, the mechanics have suffered from a one-sided education. They have paid too little attention to science and the graphic arts. Hence every manual pursuit will become elevated in the intellectual scale when mechanics are broadly, liberally trained.
Undoubtedly the common belief is, that it requires no great amount of brains or intelligence to be a mechanic; and those who go through the schools are not expected by their teachers to be mechanics. ”

“ It is not safe to reason that, because a boy can not succeed anywhere else, he must succeed in the shop. Brains are as essential to a good mechanic as to a good soldier or a good orator. Undoubtedly, more than half of our boys will find uses for their manual training, and they will have an immense advantage over the untrained boys. They are all fair draughtsmen. They have a wide acquaintance with hand and machine tools, and considerable skill in their use. ”

“ Manual dexterity is but the evidence of a certain kind of mental power; and this mental power, coupled with a familiarity with the tools the hands use, is doubtless the only basis of that sound, practical judgment and ready mastery of material forces which always characterize those well fitted for the duties of active, industrial life.
I go a step further. When the limit of sharp attention and lively interest is reached, you have reached the limit of profitable study. If you can hold the attention of a class but ten minutes, it is worse than a waste of time to make the exercise fifteen. ”

“ A score of young Vulcans, bare-armed, leather-aproned, with many a drop of honest sweat and other trade-marks of toil, stand up to their anvils with an unconscious earnestness which shows how much they enjoy their work. ”

“ Again, success in one branch or study (shop-exercises are marked like those of the recitation-room) encourages effort in others, and the methods of the shop affect the whole school. Gradually the students acquire two most valuable habits which are certain to influence their whole lives for good—namely, precision and method. As Professor Runkle says, "Whatever cultivates care, close observation, exactness, patience, and method, must be valuable training and preparation for all studies and all pursuits." ”

“ There can be no doubt that, in such cases, more time should be spent in the shop, and less in the lecture and recitation room. Some who develop both natural skill and strong intellectual powers will push on through the polytechnic school into the professional life, as engineers and scientists. Others will find their greatest usefulness, as well as highest happiness, in some branch of mechanical work, into which they will readily step when they leave school. All will gain intellectually by their experience in contact with things. ”

“ Sounder Judgments of Men and Things.—The proverbially poor judgments of scholars have led to the popular belief that theory is one thing and practice a very different thing; that theoretically a thing is one way, practically another. The truth is, that correct theory and practice agree perfectly. If in his theory one leaves out a single element of the problem, or fails to give each its due weight, his theory is false. ”

“ Some appear to think that the continued invention of tools and new machines will diminish the demand for men skilled in mechanical matters; but they are clearly wrong. True, they will diminish the demand for unintelligent labor—and some prominent educators, who take ground against manual training, have apparently no idea of labor except unintelligent labor. If there are more machines, there must be more makers, inventors, and directors. ”

“ Manual training is essential to the right and full development of the human mind, and therefore no less beneficial to those who are not going to become artisans than to those who are.... The work-shop method of instruction is of great educational value, for it brings the learner face to face with the facts of nature ”

“ The memory has its abundant uses, and should be carefully cultivated; but when it usurps the place of the understanding, when it beguiles the mind into the habit of accepting the images of words for the images of the things the words stand for, then the memory becomes a positive hindrance to intellectual development. ”

“ Harris, therefore, tells but a half-truth when he says that "The new discovery (the invention of a new tool) will make the trade learned to-day, after a long and tedious apprenticeship, useless to-morrow. The practical education, therefore, is not an education of the hand to skill, but of the brain to directive intelligence. The educated man can learn to direct a new machine in three weeks, while it requires three years to learn a new manual labor."— ("Education," May-June, 1883.) ”

“ Then, again, the habit of clear-headedness, of precision in regard to the minor details of a subject, which is absolutely essential in the shop—an exact and experimental knowledge of the full force of the words and symbols used—stretches with its wholesome influence into the study of words and the structure of language. As Felix Adler says, the doing of one thing well is the beginning of doing all things well. ”

“ Boys who put every theory to the practical test, who know something about what the idealists call "the total depravity of inanimate things," who probe and test every statement and appliance, with whom authority and tradition, the bane of too much "book-learning," have little influence, and who therefore are apt to take things at their true value, are fitted to focus correctly upon the problems of real life. ”

“ This loss of the best minds and the lack of the results of a generous education do much to keep down the estimation in which the working-classes are held, and throw the elements of society out of their proper balance.
Here is where the influence of manual training will be most beneficial. It will bring into the manual occupations a new element, a fairly educated class, which will greatly increase their value, at the same time that it gives them new dignity. ”

“ The school-men have been so accustomed to living in an ideal world, the world of books and books only, where they have found only ideal problems, and they have been so ignorant of the real world and the conditions of real problems, that their solutions have very generally been false. ”

“ Invention is in its youth, and manual training is the very breath of its nostrils.
7. The Elevation of Manual Occupations from the Realm of Brute, Unintelligent Labor to one requiring and rewarding Cultivation and Skill.—A brute can exert brute strength; to man alone is it given to invent and use tools. Man subdues Nature and develops art through the instrumentality of tools. ”

“ There is a wide conviction of the inutility of schooling for the great mass of children beyond the primary grades, and this conviction is not limited to any class or grade of intelligence. Wage-workers we must have, and the graduates of the higher grades are not expected to be wage-workers. ”

“ In like manner every occupation becomes ennobled by the transforming influence of thought and skill. The farmer of old yoked his wife with his cow, and together they dragged the clumsy plow or transported the scanty harvest. ”

“ We do not wish or propose to neglect or underrate literary and scientific culture; we strive to include all the elements in just proportion. When the manual elements which are essential to a liberal education are universally accepted and incorporated into American schools, the word "manual" may very properly be dropped. ”