This invests labor
with a beauty and power, and confers upon it a dignity, to be gained
in no other way. It makes every task, however lowly, a joy, because
all the higher faculties are brought into action. Much so-called "busy
work," where pupils of the "A class" are allowed to stick a thousand
pegs in a thousand holes while the "B class" is reciting arithmetic,
is quite fruitless, because it has so little thought behind it.
Unless we have a care, manual training, when we have succeeded in
getting it into the school, may become as mechanical and unprofitable
as much of our mind training has been, and its moral value thus
largely missed. The only way to prevent it is to borrow a suggestion
from Froebel. Then, and only then, shall we have insight with power
of action, knowledge with practice, practice with the stamp of
individuality. Then doing will blossom into being, and "Being is the
mother of all the little doings as well as of the grown-up deeds and
heroic sacrifices.
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