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Education used to be given almost exclusively through books. In recent
years there has come in another sort of education through tools,
machines, gardens, drawings, casts, and pictures. Manual training,
shop-work, sloyd, and gardening have come into use for the school ages;
the teaching of trades has been admitted to some public school systems;
and, in general, the use of the hands and eyes in productive labor has
been recognized as having good educational effects. The education of men
by manual labor was a favorite doctrine with Emerson. He had fully
developed it as early as 1837, and he frequently recurred to it
afterwards. In December of that year, in a course of lectures on Human
Culture, he devoted one lecture to The Hands. He saw clearly that manual
labor might be made to develop not only good mental qualities, but good
moral qualities. To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical
teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and
to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in
mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the
moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from
manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the
study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows
obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. He said explicitly that "a
man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture"; that
there is not only health, but education in garden work; that when a man
gets sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper by
simply signing his name to a cheque, it is the producers and carriers of
these articles that have got the education they yield, he only the
commodity; and that labor is God's education.
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