Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/17

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INTRODUCTORY
ix

since the three R's began to be taught to the masses by law! Are they, then, more learned than the scholars and leisured class? No, indeed. But it is a mistake to think that books contain the only record of humanity. If all the books in the world were burned to-morrow, the record of the race would still be written in the tools that have been made. There is, it would appear, a prophecy in work. There are museums where the tools are ranged in order like the letters of an alphabet. But they are not an alphabet. Each of them is a word—a sentence rather—and they tell a story. They throw a strange light on the doings of their makers. An awful method begins to reveal itself now even in the seeming madness of the people—and the tools reveal this method. It was the human hand that worked out language, just as it was the hand that first made tools. And the tools themselves are a language—a kind of literature.

To the hand labourer, and to the school doctor, much reference is made in this book. At the first blush it may seem that they have nothing to do with one another—that the artizan or hand labourer and the school doctor are far apart, and that neither have much to do with education! Well, this book is nothing more or less than an attempt to show