Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 8

Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene 8

This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with

Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by

William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by

the ridicule of the comic opera "Patience," and lately revived in some

of its features by Cobden-Sanderson, and of late to some extent in

various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of

the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when

conscience and beauty inspired work, and the hand did what machines

only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor

culture harks back to, work, for which our degenerate age lacks even

respect, was indeed praise. Refined men and women have remembered

these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise

which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and

muslins; experimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple;

printing and binding by hand books that surpass the best of the

Aldine, and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging

locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and

leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture

and decoration, as well as architecture, stained glass, and to some

extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was _ad

majorem gloriam hominis_ [To the greater glory of man] in a new

socialistic state, where the artist, and even the artisan, should take

his rightful place above the man who merely knows. The day of the mere

professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone; and the day of the doer,

who creates, has come. The brain and the hand, too long divorced and

each weak and mean without the other; use and beauty, each alone

vulgar; letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are

henceforth to be one and inseparable; and this union will lift man to

a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by

the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott,

revering Wagner's revival of the old _Deutschenthum_ that was to

conquer _Christenthum_, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle--this was its

ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loyalty to the ancient

traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin

to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or

as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red

man.

 

Although this movement was by older men and women and had in it

something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no

more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it

is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate

the value of its creations and its possibilities, and really lives

again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence

it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it,

should be felt in all manual education, which is just as capable of

idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content,

beauty, taste. If not a polyphrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the

occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapük of reasons and

abstract theories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a

psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be

worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to

shape and reinforce the best tendencies of the present. The writings

of the above gospelers of work not only could and should, but will be

used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of

the less scholastic industrial courses; but each is incomplete without

the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be

the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work; who

design and draw patterns, carve or mold; or of those who study how to

shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or

certificates of fitness to teach all such things. The muse of art and

even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to

gather up the scattered, hence ineffective, elements of secondary

motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of

adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages

indicate, drawing, with this end supreme, upon all the resources that

history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make

work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more

unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its

own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more

abounding life.

 

I must not close this section without brief mention of two important

studies that have supplied each a new and important determination

concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.

 

The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per

minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not

very difficult and is often attained after two months' practise. This

standard for a receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at

schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of

those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not

employed. Bryan and Harter[2] explained the rate of improvement in

both sending and receiving, with results represented for one typical

subject in the curve on the following page.

 

From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the

dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall

short. Curves 1 and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3

to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Receiving is far less

pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates

will not bring a man to his maximum rate; he remains on the low

plateau with no progress beyond a certain point. If forced by stress

of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged

and intense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and

permanently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and

every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former

one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of receiving, which is a

more complex process, exceeds that of sending; and the curves of the

above figure would cross if prolonged. The expert receives so much

faster than he sends that abbreviated codes are used, and he may take

eighty to eighty-five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form.

 

[Illustration: Letters per Minute x Weeks of Practice.]

 

The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps

physiological limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This

seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In

learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and

hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps

this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of

habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower

order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic

enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The

second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through

automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of

attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective

speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of

units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack.

In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a

long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if

here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body

as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and

attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a

low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is

transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a

lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain

level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the

necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement

is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of

early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training

colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is

the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is

developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned

by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that

muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary

attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its

most adult form, and that the products of science, invention,

discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was

originally determined in the form of consciousness, are made by

rhythmic alternation of attack, as it moves from point to point

creating diversions and recurrence.

 

The other study, although quite independent, is part a special

application and illustration of the same principle.

 

At the age of four or five, when they can do little more than

scribble, children's chief interest in pictures is as finished

products; but in the second period, which Lange calls that of artistic

illusion, the child sees in his own work not merely what it

represents, but an image of fancy back of it. This, then, is the

golden period for the development of power to create artistically. The

child loves to draw everything with the pleasure chiefly in the act,

and he cares little for the finished picture. He draws out of his own

head, and not from copy before his eye. Anything and everything is

attempted in bold lines in this golden age of drawing. If he followed

the teacher, looked carefully and drew what he saw, he would be

abashed at his production. Indians, conflagrations, games, brownies,

trains, pageants, battles--everything is graphically portrayed; but

only the little artist himself sees the full meaning of his lines.

Criticism or drawing strictly after nature breaks this charm, since it

gives place to mechanical reproduction in which the child has little

interest. Thus awakens him from his dream to a realization that he can

not draw, and from ten to fifteen his power of perceiving things

steadily increases and he makes almost no progress in drawing.

Adolescence arouses the creative faculty and the desire and ability to

draw are checked and decline after thirteen or fourteen. The curve is

the plateau which Barnes has described. The child has measured his own

productions upon the object they reproduced and found them wanting, is

discouraged and dislikes drawing. From twelve on, Barnes found drawing

more and more distasteful; and this, too, Lukens found to be the

opinion of our art teachers. The pupils may draw very properly and

improve in technique, but the interest is gone. This is the condition

in which most men remain all their lives. Their power to appreciate

steadily increases. Only a few gifted adolescents about this age begin

a to develop a new zest in production, rivaling that of the period

from five to ten, when their satisfaction is again chiefly in

creation. These are the artists whose active powers dominate.

 

Lukens[3] finds in his studies of drawing, that in what he calls his

fourth period of artistic development, there are those "who during

adolescence experience a rebirth of creative power." Zest in creation

then often becomes a stronger incentive to work than any pleasure or

profit to be derived from the finished product, so that in this the

propitious conditions of the first golden age of childhood are

repeated and the deepest satisfaction is again found in the work

itself. At about fourteen or fifteen, which is the transition period,

nascent faculties sometimes develop very rapidly. Lukens[4] draws the

interesting curve shown on the following page.

 

[Illustration: Motor, creative or productive power. Sensory or

receptive interest in the finished product.]

 

The reciprocity between the power to produce and that to appreciate,

roughly represented in the above curve, likely is true also in the

domain of music, and may be, perhaps, a general law of development.

Certain it is that the adolescent power to apperceive and appreciate

never so far outstrips his power to produce or reproduce as about

midway in the teens. Now impressions sink deepest. The greatest

artists are usually those who paint later, when the expressive powers

are developed, what they have felt most deeply and known best at this

age, and not those who in the late twenties, or still later, have gone

to new environments and sought to depict them. All young people draw

best those objects they love most, and their proficiency should be

some test of the contents of their minds. They must put their own

consciousness into a picture. At the dawn of this stage of

appreciation the esthetic tastes should be stimulated by exposure to,

and instructed in feeling for, the subject-matter of masterpieces; and

instruction in technique, detail, criticism, and learned

discrimination of schools of painting should be given intermittently.

Art should not now be for art's sake, but for the sake of feeling and

character, life, and conduct; it should be adjunct to morals, history,

and literature; and in all, edification should be the goal; and personal interest, and not that of the teacher, should be the guide.