Mind and Hand: Manual Training the Chief Factor in Education

In tracing the course of invention and discovery, I found that I was moving in the line of the progress of civilization. I found that the great gulf between the savage and the civilized man is spanned by the seven hand-tools—the axe, the saw, the plane, the hammer, the square, the chisel, and the file—and that the modern machine-shop is an aggregation of these tools driven by steam.

I hence came to regard tools as the great civilizing agency of the world. With Carlyle I said, “Man without tools is nothing; with tools he is all.” From this point it was only a step to the proposition that, It is through the arts alone that all branches of learning find expression, and touch human life. Then I said, The true definition of education is the development of all the powers of man to the culminating point of action; and this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man—this must be the last analysis of educational truth.