Some one, I believe, has been pleased to calculate that the efficiency of school work depends upon the equipment to the extent of only fifteen per cent, and upon the personnel of the teaching force to the extent of eighty-five per cent. You remember, perhaps, what was said of Mark Hopkins: Put Mark Hopkins on one end of a plank, and a boy on the other end, and you have a university. I do not think these estimates are exaggerated. It is the human element that counts.
The bulk of our secondary education in America is carried on in the public schools, and there is much to be said in favor of this arrangement, and somewhat to be said against it. The fortunes of these schools are for the most part in the hands of boards of education, which are composed mainly of prominent and successful business men—men with a large turn for affairs, and scant patience with the theorizing of philosophers. It is noteworthy that the class of problems with which these men have principally to deal in their private affairs are concerned with material ends, and it is only natural that, when they come to turn their hands to public affairs, the material aspect of things should most claim their attention and energy. I say that it is only natural. It is none the less unfortunate.
Now, the personnel of the. teaching force is just one of those immaterial problems with which these popular committees are both by training and disposition least prepared to deal. It constitutes, I think, a particular weakness in public education, and one that we can only overcome by taking the practical conduct of education more and more out of the hands of those admirable citizens whom we may call the friends of education, and putting the matter more and more into the hands of men and women specially trained for this most important service.
When you come to the carrying out of a special scheme of education, such as manual training, you will readily see that its methods necessarily depend very largely upon teacher psychology, and I propose to devote the first part of this paper, which has to do with the methods of manual training, to an examination of the attitude of mind which the teacher of manual training brings to his work.
There are, of course, as many views of manual training as there are people thinking about it, but in a broad way there are two very distinct and I may say somewhat antagonistic views. These are not, however, views which men and women have looked upon and deliberately elected. They are much more organic than that. They are views which have grown out of their daily living, and represent their unconscious attitude toward life itself. This genesis gives them both the respectability that is inherent in all honest opinion, and. also the fixity that is the most hopeless quality in prejudice. I may,
