Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 6

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 6

For a fuller account of this theory see Burk: From Fundamental to

Accessory in the Nervous System and of Movements. Pedagogical

Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 6, pp. 17-23.]

 

[Footnote 10: A Preliminary Study of Some of the Motor Phenomena of

Mental Effort. American Journal of Psychology, July, 1896, vol. 7, pp.

491-517.]

 

[Footnote 11: Encyclopedia of Social Reform, Funk and Wagnalls, 1896,

p. 1095]

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

 

 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

 

 

Trade classes and schools, their importance in the international

market--Our dangers and the superiority of German workmen--The effects

of a tariff--Description of schools between the kindergarten and the

industrial school--Equal salaries for teachers in France--Dangers from

machinery--The advantages of life on the old New England farm--Its

resemblance to the education we now give negroes and Indians--Its

advantage for all-sided muscular development.

 

We must glance at a few of the best and most typical methods of

muscular development, following the order: industrial education,

manual training, gymnastics, and play, sports, and games.

 

Industrial education is now imperative for every nation that would

excel in agriculture, manufacture, and trade, not only because of the

growing intensity of competition, but because of the decline of the

apprentice system and the growing intricacy of processes, requiring

only the skill needed for livelihood. Thousands of our youth of late

have been diverted from secondary schools to the monotechnic or trade

classes now established for horology, glass-work, brick-laying,

carpentry, forging, dressmaking, cooking, typesetting, bookbinding,

brewing, seamanship, work in leather, rubber, horticulture, gardening,

photography, basketry, stock-raising, typewriting, stenography and

bookkeeping, elementary commercial training for practical preparation

for clerkships, etc. In this work not only is Boston, our most

advanced city, as President Pritchett[1] has shown in detail, far

behind Berlin, but German workmen and shopmen a slowly taking the best

places even in England; and but for a high tariff, which protects our

inferiority, the competitive pressure would be still greater. In

Germany, especially, this training is far more diversified than here,

always being colored if not determined by the prevalent industry of

the region and more specialised and helped out by evening and even

Sunday classes in the school buildings, and by the still strong

apprentice system. Froebelian influence in manual training reaches

through the eight school years and is in some respects better than

ours in lower grades, but is very rarely coeducational, girls' work of

sewing, knitting, crocheting, weaving, etc., not being considered

manual training. There are now over 1,500 schools and workshops in

Germany where manual training is taught; twenty-five of these are

independent schools. The work really began in 1875 with v. Kass, and

is promoted by the great Society for Boys' Handwork. Much stress is

laid on paper and pasteboard work in lower grades, under the influence

of Kurufa of Darmstadt. Many objects for illustrating science are

made, and one course embraces the Seyner water-wheel.[2]

 

In France it is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers

everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country.

Adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by

practice, so essential in the struggle for survival. In general this

kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the

tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view; and to these

health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever

more narrow and special. The standard here is maximal efficiency of

the capacities that earn. It may favor bad habitual attitudes,

muscular development of but one part, excessive large or small

muscles, involve too much time or effort, unhealthful conditions,

etc., but it has the great advantage of utility, which is the

mainspring of all industry. In a very few departments and places this

training has felt the influence of the arts and crafts movement and

has been faintly touched with the inspiration of beauty. While such

courses give those who follow them marked advantage over those who do

not, they are chiefly utilitarian and do little to mature or unfold

the physical powers, and may involve arrest or degeneration.

 

Where not one but several or many professes are taught, the case is

far better. Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for

motor development. This is due to its great variety of occupations,

healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reënforcement from

immemorial times. I have computed some three-score industries[3] as

the census now classifies them; that were more or less generally known

and practiced sixty years ago in a little township, which not only in

this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educational

environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only

physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise

proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and representing the ideal

of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by

the framers of our Constitution.

 

Contrast this life with that of a "hand" in a modern shoe factory, who

does all day but one of the eighty-one stages or processes from a

tanned hide to a finished shoe, or of a man in a shirt shop who is one

of thirty-nine, each of whom does as piece-work a single step

requiring great exactness, speed, and skill, and who never knows how a

whole shirt is made, and we shall see that the present beginning of a

revival of interest in muscular development comes none too early. So

liberal is muscular education of this kind that its work in somewhat

primitive form has been restored and copied many features by many

educational institutions for adolescents, of the Abbotsholme type and

grade, and several others, whose purpose is to train for primitive

conditions of colonial life. Thousands of school gardens have also

been lately developed for lower grades, which have given a new impetus

to the study of nature. Farm training at its best instills love of

country, ruralizes taste, borrows some of its ideals from Goethe's

pedagogic province, and perhaps even from Gilman's pie-shaped

communities, with villages at the center irradiating to farms in all

directions. In England, where by the law of primogeniture holdings are

large and in few hands, this training has never flourished, as it has

greatly in France, where nearly every adult male may own land and a

large proportion will come to do so. So of processes. As a student in

Germany I took a few lessons each of a bookbinder, a glassblower, a

shoemaker, a plumber, and a blacksmith, and here I have learned in a

crude way the technique of the gold-beater and old-fashioned

broom-maker, etc., none of which come amiss in the laboratory; and I

am proud that I can still mow and keep my scythe sharp, chop, plow,

milk, churn, make cheese and soap, braid a palm-leaf hat complete,

knit, spin and even "put in a piece" in an old-fashioned hand loom,

and weave frocking. But thus pride bows low before the pupils of our

best institutions for negroes, Indians, and juvenile delinquents,

whose training is often in more than a score of industries and who

to-day in my judgment receive the best training in the land, if judged

by the annual growth in mind, morals, health, physique, ability, and

knowledge, all taken together. Instead of seeking soft, ready-made

places near home, such education impels to the frontier, to strike out

new careers, to start at the bottom and rise by merit, beginning so

low that every change must be a rise. Wherever youth thus trained are

thrown, they land like a cat on all-fours and are armed _cap-à-pie_

for the struggle of life. Agriculture, manufacture, and commerce are

the bases of national prosperity; and on them all professions,

institutions, and even culture, are more and more dependent, while the

old ideals of mere study and brain-work are fast becoming obsolete. We

really retain only the knowledge we apply. We should get up interest

in new processes like that of a naturalist in new species. Those who

leave school at any age or stage should be best fitted to take up

their life work instead of leaving unfitted for it, aimless and

discouraged. Instead of dropping out limp and disheartened, we should

train "struggle-for-lifeurs," in Daudet's phrase, and that betimes, so

that the young come back to it not too late for securing the best

benefits, after having wasted the years best fitted for it in

profitless studies or in the hard school of failure. By such methods

many of our flabby, undeveloped, anemic, easy-living city youth would

be regenerated in body and spirit. Some of the now oldest, richest,

and most famous schools of the world were at first established by

charity for poor boys who worked their way, and such institutions have

an undreamed-of future. No others so well fit for a life of

respectable and successful muscle work, and perhaps this should be

central for all at this stage. This diversity of training develops the

muscular activities rendered necessary by man's early development,

which were so largely concerned with food, shelter, clothing, making

and selling commodities necessary for life, comfort and safety. The

natural state of man is not war, hot peace; and perhaps Dawson[4] is

right in thinking that three-fourths of man's physical activities in

the past have gone into such vocations. Industry has determined the

nature and trend of muscular development; and youth, who have pets,

till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary

processes and skills, are most truly repeating the history of the

race. This, too, lays the best foundation for intellectual careers.

The study of pure science, as well as its higher technology, follows

rather than precedes this. In the largest sense this is the order of

nature, from fundamental and generalized to finer accessory and

specialized organs and functions; and such a sequence best weeds out

and subordinates automatisms. The age of stress in most of these kinds

of training is that of most rapid increment of muscular power, as we

have seen in the middle and later teens rather than childhood, as some

recent methods have mistakenly assumed; and this prepolytechnic work,

wherever and in whatever degree it is possible, is a better adjunct of

secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that,

according to the best estimates, only a fraction of one per cent of

those who need this training in this country are now receiving it.

 

[Footnote 1: The Place of Industrial and Technical Training in Public

Education. Technology Review, January, 1902, vol. 4, pp. 10-37.]

 

[Footnote 2: See an article by Dr. H.E. Kock, Education, December,

1902, vol. 23, pp. 193-203.]

 

[Footnote 3: See my Boy Life in a Massachusetts Country Town Forty

Years Ago. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 192-207.]

 

[Footnote 4: The Muscular Activities Rendered Necessary by Man's Early

Environment, American Physical Education Review, June, 1902, vol. 7,pp. 80-85.]