This idea has often been only half digested, and consequently it has led to a very trivial kind of application; a nature lesson of the “look and say” description has been followed by a painting lesson; a geography lesson, by the making of a model.  If the method of learning by doing was the accepted aim of the teacher then it was not carried out, for this is learning and then doing, not learning for the purpose of doing, but doing for the purpose of testing the learning, which is quite another matter, and not a very natural procedure with young children.  Many people have tried to make things from printed directions, a woman may try to make a blouse and a man to make a knife-box; their procedure is not to separate the doing and the learning process; probably they have first tried to do, found need for help, and gone to the printed directions, which they followed side by side with the doing; and in the light of former failures or in the course of looking or of experimenting, they stumbled upon knowledge:  this is learning by doing.

Therefore the making of a box may be arithmetic, the painting of a buttercup may be nature study, the construction of a model, or of dramatic properties may be geography or history, not by any means the only way of learning, but one of the earlier ways and a very sound way; there is a purpose to serve behind it all, that will lead to very careful discrimination in selection of knowledge, and to pains taken to retain it.  If this is fully understood by a teacher and she is content to take nature’s way, and abide for nature’s time to see results, then her methods will be appropriately applied:  she will see that she is not training a race of box-makers, but that she is guiding children to discover things that they need to know in a natural way, and ensuring that as these facts are discovered they shall be used.  Consequently neither haste nor perfection of finish must cloud the aim; it is not the output that matters but the method by which the children arrive at the finished object, not forty good boxes, but forty good thinkers.  Dewey has put it most clearly when he says that the right test of an occupation consists “in putting the maximum of consciousness into whatever is done.”  Froebel says, “What man tries to represent or do he begins to understand.”

This is what we should mean by saying that handwork is a method of learning.

But handwork has its own absolute place as well.  A child wants to acquire skill in this direction even more consciously than he wants to learn:  if he has been free, in the nursery class, to experiment with materials, and if he knows some of his limitations, he is now, in the transition class, ready for help, and he should get it as he needs it.  This may run side by side with the more didactic side of handwork which has been described, but it is more likely that in practice the two are inextricably mixed up; and this does not matter if the two ends are clear in the teacher’s mind; both sides have to be reckoned with.