William James on manual training

William James:"The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of the manual training schools, not because they will give us a people more handy and practicable for domestic life and better skilled in trade, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shopwork engender a habit of observation—a knowledge of the difference between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which, once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They confer PRECISION; because, if you are DOING a thing you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give HONESTY; for, when you express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a habit of SELF-RELIANCE; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's disciplinary functions to a minimum." (Talks to Teachers.)