* * * * * CHAPTER IV MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in the development of the brain and its significance in the making of man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach but few--Very great defects in our manual training methods which do not base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig system--Sloyd is hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can never satisfy educational needs--The gospel of work, William Morris and the arts and crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic effects of a brief period of intense work--The natural development of the drawing instinct in the child. Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike Pestalozzi's "_keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten_," [No knowledge without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four.