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In Working with the Hands, Washington attempted to answer such criticism by enlarging upon an idea that he had only briefly developed in Up From Slavery: that industrial education involved not merely the training of the hands but rather the simultaneous training of the hands, head, and heart. A significant shift in Washington’s conceptualizing of industrial education takes place in this text. In earlier works, Washington had often posed traditional academic education against manual training, as when he often asked what possible use there could be in teaching students mired in abject poverty how to speak French. While Washington’s educational program did not of course altogether ignore traditional education, its focus was always on mastering a trade, not an academic discipline. In Working with the Hands, however, there is a more integrated vision of academic and industrial education, with the two areas working together to create well-rounded, skilled craftsmen. “Mere hand training, without thorough moral, religious, and mental education, counts for very little,” Washington declares in the preface. “The hands, the head, and the heart together, as the essential elements of educational need, should be so correlated that one may be made to help the others. At the Tuskegee Institute, we find consistently that we can make our industrial work assist in the academic training, and vice versa” (v).