te this understanding to others
or give the right spirit to those we teach. And "the realities of life"
may stand as a name for all those things which have to be learned in
order to live, and which lesson-books do not teach. The realities of
life are not material things, but they are very deeply wrought in with
material things. There are things to be done, and things to be made, and
things to be ordered and controlled, belonging to the primitive wants of
human life, and to all those fundamental cares which have to support it.
They are best learned in the actual doing from those who know how to do
them; for although manuals and treatises exist for every possible
department of skill and activity, yet the human voice and hand go much
further in making knowledge acceptable than the textbook with diagrams.
The dignity of manual labour comes home from seeing it well done, it is
shown to be worth doing and deserving of honour.

Something which cannot be shown to children, but it will come to them
later on as an inheritance, is the effect of manual work upon their
whole being. Manual work gives balance and harmony in the development of
the growing creature. A child does not attain its full power unless
every faculty is exercised in turn, and to think that hard mental work
alternated with hard physical exercise will give it full and wholesome
development is to ignore whole provinces of its possessions. Generally
speaking, children have to take the value of their mental work on the
faith of our word. They must go through a great deal in mastering the
rudiments of, say, Latin grammar (for the honey is not yet spread so
thickly over this as it is now over the elements of modern languages).
They must wonder why "grown-ups" have such an infatuation for things
that seem out of place and inappropriate in life as they consider it
worth living. Probably it is on this account that so many artificial
rewards and inducements have had to be brought in to sustain their
efforts. Physical exercise is a joy to healthy children, but it leaves
nothing behind as a result. Children are proud of what they have done
and made themselves. They lean upon the concrete, and to see as the
result of their efforts something which lasts, especially something
useful, as a witness to their power and skill, this is a reward in
itself and needs no artificial stimulus, though to measure their own
work in comparative excellence with that of others adds an element tha