Exclusively intellectual training may be sufficient for the
genius or for the few who have great initiative and
intellectual self-confidence, but for the great mass of boys
and girls this training is not sufficient. It does not prepare
the young for the kind of work that three fourths of them will
have to do. We are now beginning to recognize this and through
manual training, vocational guidance, etc., we are teaching
boys and girls how to do things, and this, too, has the
additional merit of being, in a measure, physical training.

Educators, until recently, have, in emphasizing the paramount
importance of mental training, lost sight of the needs of the
body. Their classical ideals and formal methods made dead
languages, mathematics, philosophy etc., the school diet of
boys whose normal hunger was for action, and for learning by
doing.

Sir William Hamilton, who wrote fairy tales in metaphysics for
a generation of Scotchmen, placed these lines over the doorway
of his lecture room.

In earth there 's nothing great but Man;
In Man there 's nothing great but Mind.

This sounds well, but it is poor philosophy. There is much in
earth that is great besides man and much in man that is great
besides his mind. The older type of metaphysician with his
staggering vocabulary and his bag of "categories" has now
chiefly a historic interest. In the modern view the
interdependence of mind and body is a fundamental fact of life.