Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 7

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 7

CHAPTER IV

 

 

MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD

 

 

History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in

the development of the brain and its significance in the making of

man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach

but few--Very great defects in our manual training methods which do

not base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig

system--Sloyd is hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can

never satisfy educational needs--The gospel of work, William Morris

and the arts and crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic

effects of a brief period of intense work--The natural development of

the drawing instinct in the child.

 

Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted

form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its

best representation here in our new and often magnificent

manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public

schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more

practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the

accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that

underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike

Pestalozzi's "_keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten_," [No knowledge

without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and

doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend

to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to

the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for

some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school

period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful

preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well

founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic

agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids

perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual

areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical

centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument

in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is

no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for

but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty

per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and

twenty-four.

 

When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations

of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially

manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular

tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are

now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk

also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral

asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these

schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with

motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of

overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle

that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a

double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at

first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the

methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given

shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the

census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never

perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these

natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called

basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to

Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the

underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to

construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not

even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this

field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts

and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human

occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and

find their justification rather in their logical sequence and

coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be

attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a

brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of

the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more

intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master

in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp

an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide

repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3.

Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical

processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.

 

The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood

and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the

course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly

tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the

latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths,

mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they

hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of

every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge

is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical

drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and

repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value

or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few

trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because

unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect

it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these

schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic

methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of

the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination

is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the

object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content

to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of

degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are

always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their

invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent

refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be

introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,

hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades

certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as

tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and

photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus

more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the

material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.

 

As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is

no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical

institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so

that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought

best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms,

manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally,

extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader

methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of

departure from which future progress will loom up.

 

Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the

experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and

original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard

work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he

has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the

whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest

of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles,

metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines,

etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the

final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the

nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their

hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with

science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each

operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,

draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its

orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and

the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in

France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right,

left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to

individuality.

 

Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,

deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago

as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home

industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an

institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood

only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of

from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its

manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not

only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere

exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and

especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make,

and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It

aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and

to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its

best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change

of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor

development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it

originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its

origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique

features of which persist like a national school of art, despite

transplantation and transformation.[1]

 

Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises,

tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every

new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in

all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and

degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet

there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological

or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series,

and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say

nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development.

This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on

the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety,

etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the "45

tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned

by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four

years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many

series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of

powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork,

could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible

with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole

universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce

educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have

caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far

beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great

transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its

literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new

motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially

acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost

scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run

by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so

the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some

degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic

momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of

efferent training and resists coördination with them, and its

provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one

of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing

certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that

impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and

arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by

forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools

and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that

Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational

values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the

old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are

only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few educators.