II. FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CHILD-STUDY FLETCHER B. DRESSLAR, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CAL.

Manual training is an expression variously used and variously interpreted. Without taking time to enter into details of these differences, the point of view here taken will be this: Manual training in its larger and, for the future, truer sense, means learning how to enter into organizing activity with the hands. It will be seen at once that this definition is not meant to make sharp distinctions but to call attention to the wider educational outlook for this much-discussed subject. In the first place, it includes plowing as well as sloyd; gardening as well as carpentry; digging in the ground as well as printing; feeding and caring for stock as well as work in metals; milking cows as well as making boxes; making hay as well as making furniture; caring for fruit trees as well as making a toy train; playing ball and tennis as well as upholstering; learning to drive nails as well as to sew; making garments for people as well as for dolls; cooking as well as crocheting; planning a house as well as trimming a hat; spinning and weaving as well as cutting and making; climbing trees as well as rope ladders in a gymnasium; swimming as well as knitting; washing fabrics as well as darning; disinfecting as well as making puddings; in short coming into active participation with all those fundamental and useful occupations which competently educated people must know about and appreciate in a vital and definite way, in order to understand the work-a-day world and the various forms of manual labor. Most people lack in breadth and depth of useful experience to knit their souls together and to give them a point of view worthy of modern demands.

As I have indicated, I am going to use this term manual training in the broadest possible way, because I am persuaded that the most serious hindrance to practical education in this direction has come through the illiberal attempt to make it synonymous with handwork in wood, iron, or some sorts of workable materials. Imitating sloyd models, whether in wood or cardboard, is all right, as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Making furniture and working with iron are very helpful processes, but they must not be considered other than useful forms of many kinds of manual training. And so with all the rest of the valuable lines of work suggested and carried out in some of our best and most helpful schools. And without further introduction may I plunge into the subject as I conceive it, and as it has been made plain to us thru the results of physiological investigations and the growth of our knowledge of child-nature.

In the first place it is fundamental to see that growth in consciousness is a direct result of the growth in the widening and organizing relations of sensory stimulation to motor response; likewise that a diminution of consciousness accompanies the growth of habitual responses made to a given set of sensory stimulations. For the most part we are not conscious of the movements of our limbs while walking, because the whole process has become so habitual and the flow of sensory stimulus over into motor excitation is not retarded or

prevented by having to overcome the native hindrances which once existed between the sensory and motor parts involved. But we have a right to say that the baby during the process of learning to walk is tremendously conscious of almost every movement involved in the process. Without further illustration, let us extend this notion to the learning or elaboration of any muscular adjustments. Consciousness is keen and vivid and radiant only at those times when the stimulations toward behavior, whether ideational or external, meet with resistance in passing over into their proper response. With the child in its earlier years the sensory or external stimulations play a much larger rôle than they do as life and organization harmoniously progress. That is to say, the conscious life of a child is far more dependent upon its immediate external environment and the demands of this environment, than upon the ideational products of reactions already organized. Now I submit that this is the fundamental doctrine about which all our programs of manual training should be organized. We must begin with the organization of those important muscular processes which are most readily called forth by objective stimulations, and gradually and in accordance with the growth of internal relations, proceed to work from and under the guidance of ideal stimulations. Of course these two processes are more or less united in all we do, but we must see to it that the natural and present value of each is properly estimated. But we should remember not to minimize the first. This precaution is especially necessary because the teacher has reached that degree of organization in which the ideal has become predominant.

But how, you ask, can this principle guide us in the active work of manual training?

1. It operates to vastly broaden the outlook and to expand the boundaries of our usual notions of a course in manual training. And what I am saying has reference chiefly to the grades, though it operates also in the higher reaches of schoolwork.

2. It will make clear why it is better and more helpful in the early school years of children to cultivate responses to those demands upon us that look toward natural and real work than to waste time and introduce difficulties by passing over into the field of the imaginary. It says in plain terms that learning to mow a lawn or plant a tree, to play tennis or drive a horse, to build a fence or cook a meal, is a more natural demand for organized behavior than learning to manufacture cornucopias out of cardboard or to make a never-to-be-used corner bracket out of wood. In the former the action demanded is an adjustment to external and variable stimulations, keeping consciousness keyed up and hence giving evidence every moment that the thought circuit is complete.

Mind has no significance save as a guide to behavior. If there were nothing to do, learning and teaching would be useless. Hence it follows that all learning in its final analysis can justify itself only when it clearly establishes its right to exist as a necessary help to worthy behavior Ability to react wisely and well is always based on adjustments between power to understand and power to perform.

The world of today with its myriad of transformations sets the standards; we cannot escape it if we would. Man must be more widely and clearly adjusted to the work he is now called to perform. And there is no royal road to this sort of adjustment. Mind and body can grow and develop into harmonious and useful relationship only thru action and reaction. The only way to organize motor and sensory is by doing things under the guidance of conscious intention, and correcting our understanding thru the consequent enrichment of experience.

The normal education of every child has taken this path from the beginning. Day by day, year by year, and century by century, children have been showing forth the needs of their lives by doing their best to exhibit the fundamental and necessary unity between thinking and doing. Despite this, schoolwork is still unnatural and largely artificial. And some of our manual-training work is the most artificial of all. Physical organization for worthy purpose is emotional training for worthy behavior; ability to do things well and beautifully is a fundamental condition for the satisfying feelings of capability and artistic power. He who does not know how to do, and cannot image thru the experience of having done many things, cannot enter into the spirit of humanity and appreciate how the people think and feel toward the duties it falls to their lots to perform.

In the second place, manual training is emotional training. By this statement I do not wish to narrow the discussion to that phase of the work where especial emphasis is placed on the making of some beautiful form or combination of forms. This is important, but I wish here to call attention to a deeper and a more serious problem. I believe it is pretty thoroly settled that emotion is the resulting state of consciousness growing out of present muscular activities or tensions, or the memory of the feeling resulting from like activities and tensions referred to the past. That is to say, our feelings are largely the outcome of possible muscular behavior which has been racially or individually established. Whenever, therefore, we enlarge thru manual training the sum of muscular adjustments possible to children or adults, we thereby directly affect their emotional lives. When these activities are directed along useful and liberal lines, the emotions are thereby broadened and deepened to greater responses in corresponding directions. If this be true, and the burden of evidence favors it, do you not see then that inability to adjust one's muscular nature to the objective and subjective demands of life in a many-sided way, would of necessity operate to limit the emotional life to its minimum, and this minimum would consist almost entirely of the emotions arising from instinctive and reflex behavior.

This minimum would not only lack the refinements of modern enlarged power and capability, but it would smack too largely and exclusively of those primitive protective adjustments begotten under the demands of an inferior social order. Richness of emotional life can never come to a specialist whose broader preparation does not include many-sided physical capability and

manual experience. I am persuaded that there would come a decided increase of interest in all our formal teaching and bookwork if we would see to it that children come to these tasks thru a broad and liberalizing touch with the world's work and play. Richness of physical powers and capabilities are essential conditions for richness of feeling and its educational accompaniments.

The very great capacity for learning by experience rendered possible by the vast mass of nervous elements not congenitally organized, distinguishes the mind of man and raises it immeasurably above that of the highest animals.1

In the next place, manual training is mental training. This has been iterated and reiterated during the last fifteen years until the school men of the country know it thoroly. But the average parent doesn't look at it so. The best way still to appeal to them seems to be from the economic possibilities of the subject. We therefore need to clear up the subject with the people and show them that the largest value is not to accrue from that sort of emphasis, tho there are decided values here.

I am thoroly persuaded that we need an organized movement in favor of larger opportunities for play in connection with our schools, more than we do for sloyd or carpentry. We need more vital touch with productive agriculture and horticulture than we do with ironwork. These statements are made, and held to be true, because these activities are far more natural and a thousand times more necessary for all, than are those with which they are contrasted. It seems to be a very difficult thing to get laymen to realize that nature would often lead us in a better path if we would only follow her guidance. I hope I shall not be misunderstood. I am not opposing sloyd or carpentry as such, but striving to present relative values made very plain to us by the results of child-study and physiological investigations. Normal growth of brain and muscle sets the standard, rather than the possible product of child-labor.

A large and well equipped playground with many tennis courts, handball courts, baseball diamonds, running-tracks, and opportunities for all sorts of well-established field games, is a necessary and a vital equipment for the natural and normal education of our children. For every thousand children ten acres of playground is not too much. No trainer of horses would be satisfied with even this relative amount of space.

You say this is impossible in cities. Then transport all the children above the third grade into the country and back each day, free of charge and see that it is made possible. One hour each day, whenever weather permits, should be spent at play, and all children should take part as in their lesson work. Of course I know the objection will be made immediately that this is a visionary and impossible scheme. I reply, that child-nature and its nurture demand nothing less and all objections must be set over against our values of children. No normal child has ever existed who did not crave opportunity for free play, and no child to whom it is denied will ever grow into the fulness of his normal

1 McDougall, Physiological Psychology, p. 23.

possibility. If Groos is right when he says "childhood is for play," then this emphasis is not only just but vitally necessary.

The other day some high-school lads were warned to keep away from cigar stores and billiard halls during intermissions, for it was urged that they would certainly acquire bad habits in such places. The leader retorted by saying "Where shall we go? You give us no playground, we are not allowed any freedom in the schoolhouse, and we are in serious need of some unhampered fellowship with each other. Tell us of a better place." The school authorities felt for the first time, I think, something of the significance of this almost inhuman treatment of vigorous boyhood in our cities. If they had dared to answer honestly, they would have been obliged to say, "It is the people's fault, not yours."

I therefore insist that if you call this plan visionary and impossible, that you do so because you undervalue our children. Play is not simply for fun and health, it is demanded by nature as the most natural and helpful process looking toward physical and spiritual enlargment and unification. Child-study

has brought emphasis to these demands in a most decided and unmistakable way.

We need to fully appreciate the truth of what Mandsley has said in many

ways:

Our brains would go on longer if they were properly fed with energy from below, but the organic functions decay and fail; it is their failure which causes desire to wane and the grasshopper to become a burden; they are the source of life's energy and relish and in their integrity and vigor lies the secret of a fresh and vigorous old age.

Again, each child should learn how to plant and care for plants. Not that he may become a gardener or a farmer, tho it would be a great blessing to many cities of this land if many city boys could be vitally and permanently interested in farm life, but chiefly that he may learn to do things worth doing, thereby enlarging his effective life and accordingly his general appreciative ability. This sort of manual training has back of it the instinctive bias of child-life toward the world of nature and immediately quickens this instinct into a lively interest. This sort of work need not absorb much of his time, but it is essential for him to learn to enter into co-operation with nature and to understand that she is no respecter of persons. Growing a potato or a rose is not like making a box. There are elements of active co-operation present in the former activity not in the latter. No person is safe who has not in some way proven his сарасity to do many things worth doing. City children need this far more than country children. But how can we get it? May I suggest what I have not time to elaborate. Every large city school system ought to have, and can have, a school farm where city boys, at least some of them, and especially of the grammar grades, may go for a brief period to see, do, and learn about just such things as I am talking about.

The boys on Thompson's Island and the McDonogh Farm are getting the sort of training in this regard that all our boys need. Learning to milk a