e pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions
corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school,
therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to
do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take
measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult
authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often
laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title
of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for
the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement
which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the
introduction of the 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 fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between
accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into
the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which
once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. 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.

Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such
matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. Manual
training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced
into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to
traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are
destined ultimately to possess.

* * * * *

No impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic
fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something
instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in
continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a
moment ago, in the form of a still