CHAPTER XV. MANUAL AND INDUSTRIAL TRAINING. MANUAL TRAINING: An exposition, not an argument, attempted-The manual training, the industrial training, and the conservative parties. I. AS A PROPAGANDA FOR EDUCATION: The ideal course-The genesis of the American system— Kindergarten principles and the "Russian System"-Manual training in Sweden, France, England, and Germany-What is meant by manual training as education-Argument of the propagandists— Argument of the conservatives-The arguments compared-Philosophical apparatus and scientific knowledge versus tools and "capacities for useful action "—The special need of manual training for the city boy-Manual training not urged in hostility to the theory of the public schools, but to supply seeming defects of the course with books only. II. STUDIES AND CURRICULA: Drawing-The kindergarten-"Construction," with course in “HandCraft" of the Moline (Ill.) schools-Tool instruction, with the course in the "Manual Arts" of New Haven (Conn.) schools; methods and means of Sloyd; the course in a Sloyd school-Sewing, with the course of the Springfield (Mass.) schools-Cooking, with the course of the Washington (D. C.) schoolsModified public school curriculum (“Manual training course of studies") of the experimental New York City schools, in full-The course in the public schools of France. III. STATISTICS OF THE COURSE (A) in the Public Schools: Introduction into the schools of New York City as a tentative-Opinions and discussions of the subject by other educational authorities, from printed reports of city superintendents, special communications, etc.-Associations-Table: Showing number of instructors and the pupils in the several branches of manual training-Table: Number and duration of lessons a week for manual training classes-Table: Cost of introducing and maintaining manual training-Abstract of the statistics, by cities, as returned by superintendents with their remarks, etc.-(B) In Manual Training (High) Schools, Public and Private: The Imperial Technical School of Moscow-The special professional schools (Gewerbliche Fachschulen) of Germany— French apprentice schools-American manual training schools-Their character as given by their directors-Table: Officers and connection with other institutions-Table: controlling bodies and methods of appointing them-Table: Admission requirements, fees, and length of course-Table: Literary and manual courses of study-Table: Number of instructors and pupils-Table: Finances and property values. INDUSTRIAL TRAINING: Difference of purpose between those urging manual work as a means of education and those who would foster industry-Both parties hope to remove prejudice against laboring with the hands-The socialistic feature of the Paris schools--“ Practical party's" view-Distinction between manual labor as manual training, and as industrial training defended, for the present, on difference of aim. I. INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENTS OF SCHOOLS FOR THE SPECIAL CLASSES: The workshop coeval with the foundation of these schools-Introduced from Europe-Instruction in schools for the deaf, statistics, and remarks-In schools for the blind, statistics, and remarks-In schools for the feeble-minded, statistics, and remarks-In reform schools, statistics, and remarks-In “Industrial schools" and statistics[For industrial instruction in schools for the colored race, see Chapter XVII.] II. TRADE SCHOOLS: The Williamson, Rindge, and the Pratt Schools-The New York Trade Schools-The Nautical School of New York City. MANUAL TRAINING. In treating of the subject of manual training it is a matter of some degree of delicacy to avoid giving offence either to those who are carrying on the great propaganda or to others who oppose their views; while, if an attempt is made to be non-partisan, a still more unfortunate result may follow, inasmuch as the displeasure of both may ensue. The witty remark of Sydney Smith, that the great object of a review article is to make men wise in ten pages who have no appetite for a hundred, is not in point here. We have no wisdom to dispense, much less a theory to support. To see adopted as a means of awakening thought operations which have for centuries been looked upon as mechanical, using the word in its figurative sense, to hear on one hand a demand for manual labor because the youth who go from the schools are educated against it, and on the other a demand that it shall be introduced because 90 per cent. of these follow a manual occupation, to hear on one side a demand made for manual training as a branch of education and on the other as a branch of industry, and to find the whole subject obscured by a cloud of words, are of themselves quite sufficient to prevent any exertions on our part, either in the field of novelty or paradox. If, then, this Office can put before the public in a succinct and intelligible manner its statistics and other information, which it finds meager and unsatisfactory, as the State superintendent of New Jersey did that he could get; if it can place in the hands of the reader a body of facts that will enable him to have an intelligent idea of the conflict waged by conservatism against the metaphysics of education by manual labor at one point and watered communism at an other, it will be abundantly satisfied to leave brilliancy, depth, and originality to the many competent hands who have been and are now developing or opposing the subject. On one side of this important question are ranged those who, maintaining that the present system of education gives entirely too much weight to the cultivation of certain faculties with which man is born and neglects the development of others more important to the practical affairs of daily life, while on the other are those who, content with the ground plan of our present school system, deny the so-claimed necessity for this extension of the pale of the public schools, demanding rather that every energy be used in improving the powerful engine of civilization that has gradually grown up among us-one of our most important social if not political institutions they would say, which should not be hampered by engrafting a business course upon it, the function of the public schools not being to produce mechanics. The members of the party of agitation seem to be divided among themselves, though working harmoniously to attain their common object: one party contending for manual training as education, the other considering it in a commercial point of view. Not only in the educational but in the public press, in every educational meeting whether for di cussion or for business, no topic is more common than the subject of introducing manual training into the public schools. While theory has been busy in finding arguments for and conservativisin against the introduction of the new department of study, bold spirits have not hesitated to put their views to a test; but experience has not yet had time to give judgment. It is hoped, therefore, that the pages that are devoted to this subject will be looked upon-and we say it again for the emphasis-as an endeavor to place it on a basis of fact, and not another effort to find reasons for or against it, which have escaped the attention of those whose mastery of the question entitle them to speak. I.-MANUAL TRAINING AS A PROPAGANDA. THE MANUAL TRAINING COURSE. The ideal course of manual training is said to begin in the kindergarten and close with graduation from the manual training (high) school. This ideal we believe has not yet been practiced by any system, though several only lack the kindergarten or one other feature to realize it. At St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston, kindergartens are a part of the public school system of the several cities, and it is not improbable that in a comparatively near future all children too young for books will be taught by Froebel's development of Pestalozzian methods. As the child grows older, new tangible work must be provided in course, and the gifts of the kindergarten are to be supplanted in this ideal by "construction work" in clay, card-board, and paper, as now transpires in New York and Washington, D. C. In the upper gramınar grade, however, tool work is introduced for the boys, and sewing and cooking for the girls, the first and last subjects requiring the pupils to leave their room, almost always their building. In the manual training school, which is the crown of this pleasing structure, the male pupil having now attained to suflicient strength, is brought face to face with the two great materials of construction, wood and iron, and is made familiar with the construction of that important feature of our age, the steam-engine. All this is but the tangible work of the instruction; hand in hand with it moves drawing, from slate work and the punching processes of the kindergarten through lines straight and curved, and their final conbinations into artistic forms in the intermediate and grammar grades, the study terminating at length in the manual training school with instrumental drawing and shading. As an artist is said to obtain the material for a picture from many different places, so is this ideal curriculum as whole but the composition of several realities, no system having yet adopted it in full. As the term manual training will be very frequently used in what follows, it is hoped that its meaning will be recognized as covering anything that occurs in the foregoing description that is taught as a means of intellectual development; and that the term industrial training does not mean manual training but another kind of training altogether, such as is given, for instance, at the admirable Trade Schools of New York City, or in schools for the deaf and other special schools. THE ELEMENTS WITH WHICH THE AMERICAN SYSTEM HAS BEEN FORMED. The first section of a remarkable body of doctrine, entitled the Theory of Education in the United States, relates that the American school system is an organic growth, meaning, of course, not that growth of feeling of the necessity of the thing which continued appreciation and time engender among a people grown accustomed to civilized life and its conveniences, but an orderly and consistent progress from crude simplicity to full de velopment. The manual training course is not such a growth, nor has it sprung into the world, like the goddess in the fable, full grown. This is not the place to recall the events of twenty years ago that resulted in the introduction into the schools of Massachusetts and other systems of the Union of what is called industrial drawing. The history of that event has been most elaborately dealt with by this Office. Suffice it to say that, Massachusetts having great manufacturing interests centered in large towns, it was but a natural business instinct that a body of highly respected citizens connected with great industries should petition the legislature to devise some plan for "introducing schools for drawing or instruction in drawing free to all men, women, and children in all towns of the Commonwealth of more than 5,000 inhabitants." The report of the State board of education, to whom the matter was re ferred, says: "Agents could be employed to go through the Commonwealth and interest the people in this most important subject. Wherever evening classes can be formed of the young and old, free instruction should be furnished in free-hand drawing, and in a few years our enterprising people will begin to discover in our own communities and schools as good artists and artisans as can be found in the most favored portions of other countries." It appears that the introduction of drawing was a matter of political rather than of educational economy, of material prosperity rather than of intellectual development. The kindergarten, already in the public schools of France, the place of beginning for manual training, was hardly intended by its American advocates to be an introductory course to the Russian system, but had far higher claims as a rational method of human development adapted to the extremely young; in fact, as a, if not as the, proper way to prepare a child for book work. 2 To a disinterested reader of the remarks of Mr. Della Vos, of the Moscow school, it does not appear from his language that he finds himself or those he represents on haying given a new development of Pestalozzian methods, but rather it will appear that he takes pride in having analyzed industrial processes, seized the essentials, tested and proved them; of having introduced "a systematical method of teaching the arts of turning, carpentering, fitting, and forging.' Of the introduction of tool work into the Boston schools we speak with some diffidence. About 1882 Prof. John M. Ordway, now in charge of the Manual Training Dopartment of Tulane University, made a report on the Swedish system of manual training, called, by those who can intelligently use the word, Slöjd.3 A committee of the State board of education, after dwelling on the great similarity of Swedish and American manners and institutions, advocated the introduction of the Swedish system as the only one that embraces the elements of manual training that aims, precisely as we aim, at manual training rather than industrial education proper." The instruction given in the Dwight school, the committee says, was illustrating that work of this kind could be done. As to the purpose of construction work, the last of the several features of manual training to appear, there can be no doubt that it was introduced in a purely pedagogical spirit. It has been advocated on such grounds for years by Dr. Felix Adler, of New York, and exemplified by his Workingman's School, a continuation of the Free Kindergarten School; and the gap between the kindergarten and the manual training school (Russian plan) signaled by the New York committee's report on manual training, is being supplied by the adoption of processes somewhat similar to those of the lower grades of this "Workingman's School." The kindergarten, then, and its extension, construction, are without doubt based on a pedagogical theory pure and simple, and not on the bread and butter argument. Drawing was introduced to foster industry, for "Drawing is the language of mechanics, and ability to use the pencil lies at the foundation of success in many mechanical pursuits." Prof. Della Vos's school is a preparatory institution to the foundry and machinery shop; while the tool work at the Boston grammar school was an isolated fact; no note is made of a preparatory course in construction work and in the kindergarten,' no future in a school on the Russian system. Art and Industry. Education in the Industrial and Fine Arts in the United States, by Isaac Edwards Clarke, A. M. Part 1. Drawing in the Public Schools. Other parts issuing. The title of this comprehensive work reflecting as it does the language of the original resolution by which it was called forth, evinces the ground lines upon which it has been or is being written or compiled by the gentleman who is carrying the work forward. It will be seen that in treating the subject we have spoken, from the educationist's view, as becomes us; our object being to elucidate, so far as in us lies, the value of manual training to our public schools and not the value of industrial training to our industries. 2 P. 829. Hereafter this word will be spelled as it is pronounced, Sloyd; the umlauted vowel and j having the sound of y, being utterly foreign. 4 See page 839. It will be there observed that kindergarten instruction is not industrial or manual instruction, but "another kind." Let it be noted, however, that the above is a report to the board by a committee, and that on page 839 is the report of the State board. Our distinguishing and peculiar characteristic, if we are to believe foreign critics, is the power we have as a people of adapting existing conditions to our advancement. In no other instance would this power of utilization be exemplified better than in this, were manual training to become universally a part of the public school course. Gradually but surely there appears to be organizing out of the elements never or only slightly attached to the public school curriculum a course of study, too thorough and comprehensive to be called either Russian or Swedish, that may well be styled American. 66 In its late report on manual training the committee of the New York Board of Education says that it appears "that the department of education now generally known as manual training was introduced into this country by certain broad-minded practical educators, to whom its educational possibilities presented themselves as its chief claim for adoption;" and further, speaking of manual training and the kindergarten, "Although of widely different origin and purpose, its [the kindergarten's] close pedagogical relations to manual training, and the identity of their fundamental principles, become upon investigation at once apparent." Now if these two "new and fresh conceptions of true education," as the committee calls them, are identical in "their fundamental principles," they are merely the same thing disguised under different names, and as one of them is "of widely" different "purpose" from the other, each must have, at least may have, two purposes, one conception presumably having been originated to serve one purpose and the other the other. What these purposes are the committee unfortunately do not tell us; and yet it is important to know, so that we may understand for which purpose these fundamental principles are being urged for our rational assent. A disciple of Froebel might beg to differ with the committee. When the manual training principles are pedagogical he might think with great propriety that they are not in relation with kindergarten principles, but are kindergarten principles. "Experience and history, too, teach," says Froebel', "that men truly and effectively promote human welfare much more by what they put forth from themselves than by what they may have acquired. Every one knows that those who truly teach gain steadily in knowledge and insight; similarly every one knows-for nature herself teaches thisthat the use of a force enhances and intensifies the force. Again, to learn a thing in life and through doing is much more developing, cultivating, and strengthening than to learn it merely through the verbal communication of ideas. Similarly plastic material representation in life and through doing, united with thought and speech, is by far more developing and cultivating than the merely verbal representation of ideas"; and, after a few lines, he continues, "For the purpose of teaching and instruction is to bring ever more out of a man rather than to put more and more into him."'" We are aware that philosophers, like those who would patent a device, endeavor to cover as much as possible; but that this is a fundamental-yes, the fundamental doctrine of Froebel-is distinctly claimed by his great disciple, the St. Paul of his system, the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow.3 "Pestalozzi, like Froebel," says this lady, "insists that there should be no such thing as instructing children without giving them corresponding sense-impressions and without affording them opportunities of observation and demonstration; in short, no mere word-teaching. Here, however, Pestalozzi stops short of Froebel, who insists still further that children should learn by means of original productiveness. Exercise of the limbs.and organs merely as such does not satisfy Froebel, who demands from the very first some result of this childish activity, and moreover a kind of activity which is never purely mechanical, but which exercises the mental powers at the same time as the bodily ones." But it is perfectly possible to agree with the committee when it says that "manual training," "industrial training," "the use and abuse of tools," as the term was understood or misunderstood before the committee in its valuable report taught us to use 1Education of Man (Die Menschenerziehung), translated and annotated by W. N. Hailmann, A. M., p. 278. 2 Mr. Herbert Spencer in his epoch making book on education, places the idea in another light; he says: "We are none of us content with unfolding our own individualities to the full in all directions, but have a restless craving to impress our own individualities upon others, and in some way subordinate them. And this it is which determines the character of our education." We have not attempted to note the influence which Mr. Spencer's celebrated book has had in bringing forward the manual training idea, the connection between the ideas of the writer of the book and the advocates of the new education being indicated by the common use of the expression "preparation for complete living." Such an attempt we feared would add rather to the completeness of our article than to whatever interest or novelty it may have. On page 443, however, under the proceedings of the Ohio teachers' association, there are some remarks on the subject by Supt. Ellis which should be consulted. Hand-work and Head-work (Die Arbeit und die neue Erziehung nach Fröbel's Methode), p. 9, English edition, translated by Alice M. Christie. the word properly, had a different purpose, at least in its origin. Let Director Della Vos, of the Moscow school, speak for himself: * * * * "In 1868 the school council considered it indispensable, in order to secure the symmetrical teaching of elementary practical work, as well as for the more convenient supervision of the pupils while practically employed, to separate entirely the school workshops from the mechanical works,1 * admitting pupils to the latter only when they have perfectly acquired the principles of practical labor." But this mere separation was not sufficient to accomplish the principal aim. "It was found necessary to work out a method of teaching the elementary principles of mechanical art. Everybody is well aware that the successful study of any art whatever, freehand or linear drawing, music, singing, painting, etc., is only attainable when the first attempts at any of them are strictly subject to the laws of gradation and successiveness, when every student adheres to a definite method or school, surmounting little by little and by certain degrees the difficulties to be encountered. All those arts which we have just named possess a method of study which has been well worked out and defined, because, since they have long constituted a part of the education of the wellinstructed classes of people, they could not but become subject to scientific analysis, could not but become the objects of investigation, with a view of defining those conditions which might render the study of them as easy and regulated as possible. If we except the attempts made in France in the year 1867 to form a collection of models for the practical study of the principal methods of forging and welding iron and steel as well as the chief parts of joiners' work, and this with a purely demonstrative aim, no one, as far as we are aware, has hitherto been actively engaged in the working out of this question in its application to the study of hand labor in workshops. To the Imperial Technical School belongs the initiative in the introduction of a systematical method of teaching the arts of turning, carpentering, fitting, and forging." * * * The widely different purpose is clearly shown here. It is a method of teaching the arts that are said to be the foundation of all mechanical pursuits, not the method of developing what, as Froebel says, is in the child as an undeveloped individual and is not yet the property of the world. 2 As to the pedagogic value of this remarkable doctrine of Froebel, that is a matter with which we have nothing to do. Year by year the kindergarten is bettering its condition. For those advocating manual training on pedagogical grounds it would be suicidal to deny the Froebelian doctrine; and the political economy and conservative parties are only at issue with the followers of its author in asserting that he was mistaken or dreaming. The arguments advanced by the contending parties will be given hereafter in an attempt to fix what one side, the innovating, means by manual training, and the other thinks the innovators mean. At present we will turn to MANUAL TRAINING IN EUROPE. Manual work was introduced into the schools of Sweden in 1872 under the name of Sloyd (meaning, it is said, manual dexterity), and in 1882, under the name of l'enseignement du travail manuel, into the schools of France. In Sweden the work is given to volunteers, meritorious scholars, out of school hours; in France it is compulsory on all. In Sweden the subject appears to be in the same condition as with us. In France, the study having been determined upon as beneficial and consequently introduced, is being carried out; the minister of public instruction having, in a circular of 1885, made pub The Office has taken the liberty of italicising in this and in several other instances words not so distinguished in the original. Some weeks after this chapter had been written we received the reports of the special committees on manual training and educational statistics of New Jersey, in which Mr. Butler, president of the New York industrial Education Association, expresses views that are very similar to those expressed here. "The principle underlying the kindergarten," he says, "and the manual training school is one and the same." And again, after speaking of the early acceptation of the term manual training which meant "exercises in the use of tools employed in working wood and iron," he says that when the St. Louis School and afterward the Chicago School were founded the connotation of the term was broadened to include drawing. But we will particularly ask the reader's attention to the following language, since to convey the thought put forth in it gave us more concern than all else," when the principle of the manual training school was attacked and criticised and it became necessary to show on what grounds it could appeal to the public funds for support it immediately became necessary to examine very critically not alone the economic arguments which were urged in its favor, but the educational ends which it was expected to serve. It was at once claimed by its advocates that the manual training school was not a trade school nor a school for apprentices, but an educational institution." So frank an admission from such an authority would have forestalled the preparation of much of this chapter, would have enabled us to assume things that we thought ourselves compelled to show. It is with pleasure that we find our conclusions in unison with the authority from which we have quoted not only here but in other parts of this chapter. Had manual training been introduced as mind training in the first place it is doubtful if it would now be understood to be trade training, and the change of front, an after-thought on the part of its intelligent advocates when challenged, is, no doubt, and will continue to be viewed with suspicion by many until experiment has proved such suspicions unfounded. |