se of doing, but
doing for the purpose of testing the learning, which is quite another
matter, and not a very natural procedure with young children. Many
people have tried to make things from printed directions, a woman may
try to make a blouse and a man to make a knife-box; their procedure is
not to separate the doing and the learning process; probably they have
first tried to do, found need for help, and gone to the printed
directions, which they followed side by side with the doing; and in the
light of former failures or in the course of looking or of
experimenting, they stumbled upon knowledge: this is learning by doing.

Therefore the making of a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a
buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of
dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the
only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way;
there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very
careful discrimination in selection of knowledge, and to pains taken to
retain it. If this is fully understood by a teacher and she is content
to take nature's way, and abide for nature's time to see results, then
her methods will be appropriately applied: she will see that she is not
training a race of box-makers, but that she is guiding children to
discover things that they need to know in a natural way, and ensuring
that as these facts are discovered they shall be used. Consequently
neither haste nor perfection of finish must cloud the aim; it is not the
output that matters but the method by which the children arrive at the
finished object, not forty good boxes, but forty good thinkers. Dewey
has put it most clearly when he says that the right test of an
occupation consists "in putting the maximum of consciousness into
whatever is done." Froebel says, "What man tries to represent or do he
begins to understand."

This is what we should mean by saying that handwork is a method of
learning.

But handwork has its own absolute place as well. A child wants to
acquire skill in this direction even more consciously than he wants to
learn: if he has been free, in the nursery class, to experiment with
materials, and if he knows some of his limitations, he is now, in the
transition class, ready for help, and he should get it as he needs it.
This may run side by side with the more didactic side of handwork which
has been described, but it is more likely that in practice