training actually look toward vocational guidance; the social purpose involved
will vitalize the work.
There is a still more comprehensive social purpose which the city should
consider. Owing to the interdependence of human affairs, men need to be
broadly informed as to the great world of productive labor. Most of our civic and
social problems are at bottom industrial problems. Just as we use industrial
history and industrial geography as means of giving youth a wide vision of the
fields of man's work, so must we also use actual practical activities as means of
making him familiar in a concrete way with materials and processes in their
details, with the nature of work, and with the nature of responsibility. On the
play level, therefore, constructive activities should be richly diversified. This
diversity of opportunity should continue to the work level. One cannot really
know the nature of work or of work responsibility except as it is learned through
experience. Let the manual training adopt the social purpose here mentioned,
provide the opportunities, means, and processes that it demands, and the work
will be wondrously vitalized.
It is well to mention that the program suggested is a complicated one on the side
of its theory and a difficult one on the side of its practice. In the planning it is
well to look to the whole program. In the work itself it is well to remember that
one step at a time, and that secure, is a good way to avoid stumbling.
Printing and gardening are two things that might well be added to the manual
training program. Both are already in the schools in some degree. They might
well be considered as desirable portions of the manual training of all. They lend
themselves rather easily to responsible performance on the work level. There are
innumerable things that a school can print for use in its work. In so doing, pupils
can be given something other than play. Also in the home gardening, supervised
for educational purposes, it is possible to introduce normal work-motives. By the
time the city has developed these two things it will have at the same time
developed the insight necessary for attacking more difficult problems.