BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK.
Divorce between science and handicraft--Technical
education--Complete education--The Moscow system: applied at
Chicago, Boston, Aberdeen--Concrete teaching--Present waste of
time--Science and technics--Advantages which science can derive
from a combination of brain work with manual work.
In olden times men of science, and especially those who have done
most to forward the growth of natural philosophy, did not despise
manual work and handicraft. Galileo made his telescopes with his own
hands. Newton learned in his boyhood the art of managing tools; he
exercised his young mind in contriving most ingenious machines, and
when he began his researches in optics he was able himself to grind
the lenses for his instruments, and himself to make the well-known
telescope, which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship.
Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to
be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical
and philosophical speculations. Linnæus became a botanist while
helping his father--a practical gardener--in his daily work. In
short, with our great geniuses handicraft was no obstacle to abstract
researches--it rather favoured them. On the other hand, if the
workers of old found but few opportunities for mastering science,
many of them had, at least, their intelligences stimulated by the
very variety of work which was performed in the then unspecialised
workshops; and some of them had the benefit of familiar intercourse
with men of science. Watt and Rennie were friends with Professor
Robinson; Brindley, the road-maker, despite his fourteenpence-a-day
wages, enjoyed intercourse with educated men, and thus developed his
remarkable engineering faculties; the son of a well-to-do family
could “idle” at a wheel-wright’s shop, so as to become later on a
Smeaton or a Stephenson.
We have changed all that. Under the pretext of division of labour, we
have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The
masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than
their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education
of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven
into a mine or a factory from the age of thirteen, and there they
soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the men
of science, they despise manual labour. How few of them would be able
to make a telescope, or even a plainer instrument! Most of them are
not capable of even designing a scientific instrument, and when they
have given a vague suggestion to the instrument-maker, they leave it
with him to invent the apparatus they need. Nay, they have raised
the contempt of manual labour to the height of a theory. “The man
of science,” they say, “must discover the laws of nature, the civil
engineer must apply them, and the worker must execute in steel or
wood, in iron or stone, the patterns devised by the engineer. He must
work with machines invented for him, not by him. No matter if he does
not understand them and cannot improve them: the scientific man and
the scientific engineer will take care of the progress of science and
industry.”
It may be objected that nevertheless there is a class of men who
belong to none of the above three divisions. When young they have
been manual workers, and some of them continue to be; but, owing
to some happy circumstances, they have succeeded in acquiring some
scientific knowledge, and thus they have combined science with
handicraft. Surely there are such men; happily enough there is a
nucleus of men who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialisation
of labour, and it is precisely to them that industry owes its
chief recent inventions. But in old Europe, at least, they are the
exceptions; they are the irregulars--the Cossacks who have broken
the ranks and pierced the screens so carefully erected between the
classes. And they are so few, in comparison with the ever-growing
requirements of industry--and of science as well, as I am about to
prove--that all over the world we hear complaints about the scarcity
of precisely such men.
What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education
which has been raised at one and the same time in England, in France,
in Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a
general dissatisfaction with the present division into scientists,
scientific engineers, and workers? Listen to those who know industry,
and you will see that the substance of their complaints is this: “The
worker whose task has been specialised by the permanent division of
labour has lost the intellectual interest in his labour, and it is
especially so in the great industries: he has lost his inventive
powers. Formerly, he invented very much. Manual workers--not men
of science nor trained engineers--have invented, or brought to
perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of machinery which
has revolutionised industry for the last hundred years. But since
the great factory has been enthroned, the worker, depressed by the
monotony of his work, invents no more. What can a weaver invent who
merely supervises four looms, without knowing anything either about
their complicated movements or how the machines grew to be what they
are? What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together
the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing
beyond making a knot?
“At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers
_have_ invented; now they cease to do so. As to the inventions of
the engineers, specially trained for devising machines, they are
either devoid of genius or not practical enough. Those ‘nearly to
nothings,’ of which Sir Frederick Bramwell spoke once at Bath, are
missing in their inventions--those nothings which can be learned
in the workshop only, and which permitted a Murdoch and the Soho
workers to make a practical engine of Watt’s schemes. None but he
who knows the machine--not in its drawings and models only, but in
its breathing and throbbings--who unconsciously thinks of it while
standing by it, can really improve it. Smeaton and Newcomen surely
were excellent engineers; but in their engines a boy had to open the
steam valve at each stroke of the piston; and it was one of those
boys who once managed to connect the valve with the remainder of the
machine, so as to make it open automatically, while he ran away to
play with other boys. But in the modern machinery there is no room
left for naïve improvements of that kind. Scientific education on
a wide scale has become necessary for further inventions, and that
education is refused to the workers. So that there is no issue out
of the difficulty, unless scientific education and handicraft are
combined together--unless integration of knowledge takes the place of
the present divisions.”
Such is the real substance of the present movement in favour of
technical education. But, instead of bringing to public consciousness
the, perhaps, unconscious motives of the present discontent, instead
of widening the views of the discontented and discussing the problem
to its full extent, the mouthpieces of the movement do not mostly
rise above the shopkeeper’s view of the question. Some of them
indulge in jingo talk about crushing all foreign industries out of
competition, while the others see in technical education nothing but
a means of somewhat improving the flesh-machine of the factory and of
transferring a few workers into the upper class of trained engineers.
Such an ideal may satisfy them, but it cannot satisfy those who keep
in view the combined interests of science and industry, and consider
both as a means for raising humanity to a higher level. We maintain
that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of
society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth,
ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to
combine a thorough knowledge of science with a thorough knowledge of
handicraft. We fully recognise the necessity of specialisation of
knowledge, but we maintain that specialisation must follow general
education, and that general education must be given in science and
handicraft alike. To the division of society into brain workers and
manual workers we oppose the combination of both kinds of activities;
and instead of “technical education,” which means the maintenance of
the present division between brain work and manual work, we advocate
the _éducation intégrale_, or complete education, which means the
disappearance of that pernicious distinction.
Plainly stated, the aims of the school under this system ought to
be the following: To give such an education that, on leaving school
at the age of eighteen or twenty, each boy and each girl should be
endowed with a thorough knowledge of science--such a knowledge as
might enable them to be useful workers in science--and, at the same
time, to give them a general knowledge of what constitutes the bases
of technical training, and such a skill in some special trade as
would enable each of them to take his or her place in the grand world
of the manual production of wealth.[185] I know that many will find
that aim too large, or even impossible to attain, but I hope that if
they have the patience to read the following pages, they will see
that we require nothing beyond what can be easily attained. In fact,
_it has been attained_; and what has been done on a small scale could
be done on a wider scale, were it not for the economical and social
causes which prevent any serious reform from being accomplished in
our miserably organised society.
The experiment has been made at the Moscow Technical School for
twenty consecutive years with many hundreds of boys; and, according
to the testimonies of the most competent judges at the exhibitions of
Brussels, Philadelphia, Vienna, and Paris, the experiment has been a
success. The Moscow school admitted boys not older than fifteen,[186]
and it required from boys of that age nothing but a substantial
knowledge of geometry and algebra, together with the usual knowledge
of their mother tongue; younger pupils were received in the
preparatory classes. The school was divided into two sections--the
mechanical and the chemical; but as I personally know better the
former, and as it is also the more important with reference to the
question before us, so I shall limit my remarks to the education
given in the mechanical section.
After a five or six years’ stay at the school, the students left
it with a thorough knowledge of higher mathematics, physics,
mechanics, and connected sciences--so thorough, indeed, that it was
not second to that acquired in the best mathematical faculties of
the most eminent European universities. When myself a student of
the mathematical faculty of the St. Petersburg University, I had
the opportunity of comparing the knowledge of the students at the
Moscow Technical School with our own. I saw the courses of higher
geometry some of them had compiled for the use of their comrades; I
admired the facility with which they applied the integral calculus
to dynamical problems, and I came to the conclusion that while we,
University students, had more knowledge of a general character
(for instance, in mathematical astronomy), they, the students of
the Technical School, were much more advanced in higher geometry,
and especially in the applications of higher mathematics to the
intricate problems of dynamics, the theories of heat and elasticity.
But while we, the students of the University, hardly knew the use
of our hands, the students of the Technical School fabricated _with
their own hands_, and without the help of professional workmen,
fine steam-engines, from the heavy boiler to the last finely turned
screw, agricultural machinery, and scientific apparatus--all for the
trade--and they received the highest awards for the work of their
hands at the international exhibitions. They were scientifically
educated skilled workers--workers with university education--highly
appreciated even by the Russian manufacturers who so much distrust
science.
Now, the methods by which these wonderful results were achieved were
these: In science, learning from memory was not in honour, while
independent research was favoured by all means. Science was taught
hand in hand with its applications, and what was learned in the
schoolroom was applied in the workshop. Great attention was paid
to the highest abstractions of geometry as a means for developing
imagination and research.
As to the teaching of handicraft, the methods were quite different
from those which proved a failure at the Cornell University, and
differed, in fact, from those used in most technical schools. The
student was not sent to a workshop to learn some special handicraft
and to earn his existence as soon as possible; but the teaching
of technical skill was prosecuted in the same systematical way as
laboratory work is taught in the universities, according to a scheme
elaborated by the founder of the school, M. Dellavos, and now applied
at Chicago and Boston. It is evident that drawing was considered as
the first step in technical education. Then the student was brought,
first, to the carpenter’s workshop, or rather laboratory, and there
he was thoroughly taught to execute all kinds of carpentry and
joinery. They did not teach the pupil to make some insignificant work
of house decoration, as they do in the system of the _slöjd_--the
Swedish method, which is taught especially at the Nääs school--but
they taught him, to begin with, to make very accurately a wooden
cube, a prism, a cylinder (with the planing jack), and then--all
fundamental types of joining. In a word, he had to study, so to say,
the philosophy of joinery by means of manual work. No efforts were
spared in order to bring the pupil to a certain perfection in that
branch--the real basis of all trades.
Later on, the pupil was transferred to the turner’s workshop, where
he was taught to make in wood the patterns of those things which he
would have to make in metal in the following workshops. The foundry
followed, and there he was taught to cast those parts of machines
which he had prepared in wood; and it was only after he had gone
through the first three stages that he was admitted to the smith’s
and engineering workshops. Such was the system which English readers
will find described in full in a work by Mr. Ch. H. Ham.[187] As for
the perfection of the mechanical work of the students, I cannot do
better than refer to the reports of the juries at the above-named
exhibitions.
In America the same system has been introduced, in its technical
part, first, in the Chicago Manual Training School, and later on in
the Boston Technical School--the best, I am told, of the sort--and
finally at Tuskegee, in the excellent school for coloured young men.
In this country, or rather in Scotland, I found the system applied
with full success, for some years, under the direction of Dr. Ogilvie
at Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. It is the Moscow or Chicago system
on a limited scale. While receiving substantial scientific education,
the pupils are also trained in the workshops--but not for one special
trade, as it unhappily too often is the case. They pass through the
carpenter’s workshop, the casting in metals, and the engineering
workshop; and in each of these they learn the foundations of each of
the three trades sufficiently well for supplying the school itself
with a number of useful things. Besides, as far as I could ascertain
from what I saw in the geographical and physical classes, as also
in the chemical laboratory, the system of “through the hand to the
brain,” and _vice versâ_, is in full swing, and it is attended with
the best success. The boys _work_ with the physical instruments, and
they study geography in the field, instruments in hands, as well as
in the class-room. Some of their surveys filled my heart, as an old
geographer, with joy.[188]
The Moscow Technical School surely was not an ideal school.[189]
It totally neglected the humanitarian education of the young men.
But we must recognise that the Moscow experiment--not to speak of
hundreds of other partial experiments--has perfectly well proved
the possibility of combining a scientific education of a very high
standard with the education which is necessary for becoming an
excellent skilled workman. It has proved, moreover, that the best
means for producing really good skilled labourers is to seize the
bull by the horns, and to grasp the educational problem in its great
features, instead of trying to give some special skill in some
handicraft, together with a few scraps of knowledge in a certain
branch of some science. And it has shown also what can be obtained,
without over-pressure, if a rational economy of the scholar’s time
is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice.
Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem extraordinary at
all, and still better results may be expected if the same principles
are applied from the earliest years of education.
Waste of time is the leading feature of our present education. Not
only are we taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is
taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as possible.
Our present methods of teaching originate from a time when the
accomplishments required from an educated person were extremely
limited; and they have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense
increase of knowledge which must be conveyed to the scholar’s mind
since science has so much widened its former limits. Hence the
over-pressure in schools, and hence, also, the urgent necessity of
totally revising both the subjects and the methods of teaching,
according to the new wants and to the examples already given here and
there, by separate schools and separate teachers.
It is evident that the years of childhood ought not to be spent
so uselessly as they are now. German teachers have shown how the
very plays of children can be made instrumental in conveying to
the childish mind some concrete knowledge in both geometry and
mathematics. The children who have made the squares of the theorem
of Pythagoras out of pieces of coloured cardboard, will not look at
the theorem, when it comes in geometry, as on a mere instrument of
torture devised by the teachers; and the less so if they apply it
as the carpenters do. Complicated problems of arithmetic, which so
much harassed us in our boyhood, are easily solved by children seven
and eight years old if they are put in the shape of interesting
puzzles. And if the _Kindergarten_--German teachers often make of it
a kind of barrack in which each movement of the child is regulated
beforehand--has often become a small prison for the little ones, the
idea which presided at its foundation is nevertheless true. In fact,
it is almost impossible to imagine, without having tried it, how
many sound notions of nature, habits of classification, and taste
for natural sciences can be conveyed to the children’s minds; and,
if a series of concentric courses adapted to the various phases of
development of the human being were generally accepted in education,
the first series in all sciences, save sociology, could be taught
before the age of ten or twelve, so as to give a general idea of
the universe, the earth and its inhabitants, the chief physical,
chemical, zoological, and botanical phenomena, leaving the discovery
of the _laws_ of those phenomena to the next series of deeper and
more specialised studies.
On the other side, we all know how children like to make toys
themselves, how they gladly imitate the work of full-grown people if
they see them at work in the workshop or the building-yard. But the
parents either stupidly paralyse that passion, or do not know how to
utilise it. Most of them despise manual work and prefer sending their
children to the study of Roman history, or of Franklin’s teachings
about saving money, to seeing them at a work which is good for the
“lower classes only.” They thus do their best to render subsequent
learning the more difficult.
And then come the school years, and time is wasted again to an
incredible extent. Take, for instance, mathematics, which every one
ought to know, because it is the basis of all subsequent education,
and which so few really learn in our schools. In geometry, time
is foolishly wasted by using a method which merely consists in
committing geometry to memory. In most cases, the boy reads again
and again the proof of a theorem till his memory has retained the
succession of reasonings. Therefore, nine boys out of ten, if
asked to prove an elementary theorem two years after having left
the school, will be unable to do it, unless mathematics is their
speciality. They will forget which auxiliary lines to draw, and they
never have been taught to _discover_ the proofs by themselves. No
wonder that later on they find such difficulties in applying geometry
to physics, that their progress is despairingly sluggish, and that so
few master higher mathematics.
There is, however, the other method which permits the pupil to
progress, as a whole, at a much speedier rate, and under which he who
once has learned geometry will know it all his life long. Under this
system, each theorem is put as a problem; its solution is never given
beforehand, and the pupil is induced to find it by himself. Thus, if
some preliminary exercises with the rule and the compass have been
made, there is not one boy or girl, out of twenty or more, who will
not be able to find the means of drawing an angle which is equal to
a given angle, and to prove their equality, after a few suggestions
from the teacher; and if the subsequent problems are given in a
systematic succession (there are excellent text-books for the
purpose), and the teacher does not press his pupils to go faster than
they can go at the beginning, they advance from one problem to the
next with an astonishing facility, the only difficulty being to bring
the pupil to solve the first problem, and thus to acquire confidence
in his own reasoning.
Moreover, each abstract geometrical truth must be impressed on the
mind in its concrete form as well. As soon as the pupils have solved
a few problems on paper, they must solve them in the playing-ground
with a few sticks and a string, and they must apply their knowledge
in the workshop. Only then will the geometrical lines acquire a
concrete meaning in the children’s minds; only then will they see
that the teacher is playing no tricks when he asks them to solve
problems with the rule and the compass without resorting to the
protractor; only then will they _know_ geometry.
“Through the eyes _and_ the hand to the brain”--this is the true
principle of economy of time in teaching. I remember, as if it were
yesterday, how geometry suddenly acquired for me a new meaning, and
how this new meaning facilitated all ulterior studies. It was as
we were mastering at school a Montgolfier balloon, and I remarked
that the angles at the summits of each of the twenty strips of paper
out of which we were going to make the balloon must cover less than
the fifth part of a right angle each. I remember, next, how the
sinuses and the tangents ceased to be mere cabalistic signs when
they permitted us to calculate the length of a stick in a working
profile of a fortification; and how geometry in space became plain
when we began to make on a small scale a bastion with embrasures
and barbettes--an occupation which obviously was soon prohibited on
account of the state into which we brought our clothes. “You look
like navvies,” was the reproach addressed to us by our intelligent
educators, while we were proud precisely of being navvies, and of
discovering the use of geometry.
By compelling our children to study real things from mere graphical
representations, instead of _making_ those things themselves, we
compel them to waste the most precious time; we uselessly worry
their minds; we accustom them to the worst methods of learning; we
kill independent thought in the bud; and very seldom we succeed in
conveying a real knowledge of what we are teaching. Superficiality,
parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the
results of our method of education. We do not teach our children how
to learn.
The very beginnings of science are taught on the same pernicious
system. In most schools even arithmetic is taught in the abstract
way, and mere rules are stuffed into the poor little heads. The idea
of a unit, which is arbitrary and can be changed at will in our
measurement (the match, the box of matches, the dozen of boxes, or
the gross; the metre, the centimetre, the kilometre, and so on),
is not impressed on the mind, and therefore when the children come
to the decimal fractions they are at a loss to understand them. In
this country, the United States and Russia, instead of accepting the
decimal system, which is the system of our numeration, they still
torture the children by making them learn a system of weights and
measures which ought to have been abandoned long since. The pupils
lose at that full two years, and when they come later on to problems
in mechanics and physics, schoolboys and schoolgirls spend most
of their time in endless calculations which only fatigue them and
inspire in them a dislike of exact science. But even there, where the
decimal measures have been introduced, much time is lost in school
simply because the teachers are not accustomed to the idea that every
measure is only approximate, and that it is absurd to calculate with
the exactitude of one gramme, or of one metre, when the measuring
itself does not give the elements of such an exactitude. Whereas in
France, where the decimal system of measures and money is a matter
of daily life, even those workers who have received the plainest
elementary education are quite familiar with decimals. To represent
twenty-five centimes, or twenty-five centimetres, they write “zero
twenty-five,” while most of my readers surely remember how this same
zero at the head of a row of figures puzzled them in their boyhood.
We do all that is possible to render algebra unintelligible, and our
children spend one year before they have learned what is not algebra
at all, but a mere system of abbreviations, which can be learned by
the way, if it is taught together with arithmetic.[190]
The waste of time in physics is simply revolting. While young people
very easily understand the principles of chemistry and its formulæ,
as soon as they themselves make the first experiments with a few
glasses and tubes, they mostly find the greatest difficulties in
grasping the mechanical introduction into physics, partly because
they do not know geometry, and especially because they are merely
shown costly machines instead of being induced to make themselves
plain apparatus for illustrating the phenomena they study.
Instead of learning the laws of force with plain instruments which a
boy of fifteen can easily make, they learn them from mere drawings,
in a purely abstract fashion. Instead of making themselves an
Atwood’s machine with a broomstick and the wheel of an old clock,
or verifying the laws of falling bodies with a key gliding on an
inclined string, they are shown a complicated apparatus, and in
most cases the teacher himself does not know how to explain to them
the principle of the apparatus, and indulges in irrelevant details.
And so it goes on from the beginning to the end, with but a few
honourable exceptions.[191]
If waste of time is characteristic of our methods of teaching
science, it is characteristic as well of the methods used for
teaching handicraft. We know how years are wasted when a boy serves
his apprenticeship in a workshop; but the same reproach can be
addressed, to a great extent, to those technical schools which
endeavour at once to teach some special handicraft, instead of
resorting to the broader and surer methods of systematical teaching.
Just as there are in science some notions and methods which are
preparatory to the study of all sciences, so there are also some
fundamental notions and methods preparatory to the special study of
any handicraft.
Reuleaux has shown in that delightful book, the _Theoretische
Kinematik_, that there is, so to say, a philosophy of all possible
machinery. Each machine, however complicated, can be reduced to
a few elements--plates, cylinders, discs, cones, and so on--as
well as to a few tools--chisels, saws, rollers, hammers, etc.;
and, however complicated its movements, they can be decomposed
into a few modifications of motion, such as the transformation of
circular motion into a rectilinear, and the like, with a number of
intermediate links. So also each handicraft can be decomposed into a
number of elements. In each trade one must know how to make a plate
with parallel surfaces, a cylinder, a disc, a square, and a round
hole; how to manage a limited number of tools, all tools being mere
modifications of less than a dozen types; and how to transform one
kind of motion into another. This is the foundation of all mechanical
handicrafts; so that the knowledge of how to make in wood those
primary elements, how to manage the chief tools in wood-work, and
how to transform various kinds of motion ought to be considered as
the very basis for the subsequent teaching of all possible kinds of
mechanical handicraft. The pupil who has acquired that skill already
knows one good half of all possible trades.
Besides, none can be a good worker in science unless he is in
possession of good methods of scientific research; unless he has
learned to observe, to describe with exactitude, to discover mutual
relations between facts seemingly disconnected, to make inductive
hypotheses and to verify them, to reason upon cause and effect,
and so on. And none can be a good manual worker unless he has been
accustomed to the good methods of handicraft altogether. He must grow
accustomed to conceive the subject of his thoughts in a concrete
form, to draw it, or to model, to hate badly kept tools and bad
methods of work, to give to everything a fine touch of finish, to
derive artistic enjoyment from the contemplation of gracious forms
and combinations of colours, and dissatisfaction from what is ugly.
Be it handicraft, science, or art, the chief aim of the school is not
to make a specialist from a beginner, but to teach him the elements
of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give
him that general inspiration which will induce him, later on, to put
in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is
beautiful, both as to form and contents, to feel the necessity of
being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his
heart at unison with the rest of humanity.
As for avoiding the monotony of work which would result from the
pupil always making mere cylinders and discs, and never making full
machines or other useful things, there are thousands of means for
avoiding that want of interest, and one of them, in use at Moscow, is
worthy of notice. It was, not to give work for mere exercise, but to
utilise everything which the pupil makes, from his very first steps.
Do you remember how you were delighted, in your childhood, if your
work was utilised, be it only as a part of something useful? So they
did at Moscow. Each plank planed by the pupils was utilised as a part
of some machine in some of the other workshops. When a pupil came to
the engineering workshop, and was set to make a quadrangular block
of iron with parallel and perpendicular surfaces, the block had an
interest in his eyes, because, when he had finished it, verified its
angles and surfaces, and corrected its defects, the block was not
thrown under the bench--it was given to a more advanced pupil, who
made a handle to it, painted the whole, and sent it to the shop of
the school as a paper-weight. The systematical teaching thus received
the necessary attractiveness.[192]
It is evident that celerity of work is a most important factor in
production. So it might be asked if, under the above system, the
necessary speed of work could be obtained. But there are two kinds
of celerity. There is the celerity which I saw in a Nottingham
lace-factory: full-grown men, with shivering hands and heads,
were feverishly binding together the ends of two threads from the
remnants of cotton-yarn in the bobbins; you hardly could follow their
movements. But the very fact of requiring such kind of rapid work
is the condemnation of the factory system. What has remained of the
human being in those shivering bodies? What will be their outcome?
Why this waste of human force, when it could produce ten times the
value of the odd rests of yarn? This kind of celerity is required
exclusively because of the cheapness of the factory slaves; so let us
hope that no school will ever aim at this kind of quickness in work.
But there is also the time-saving celerity of the well-trained
worker, and this is surely achieved best by the kind of education
which we advocate. However plain his work, the educated worker makes
it better and quicker than the uneducated. Observe, for instance,
how a good worker proceeds in cutting anything--say a piece of
cardboard--and compare his movements with those of an improperly
trained worker. The latter seizes the cardboard, takes the tool
as it is, traces a line in a haphazard way, and begins to cut;
half-way he is tired, and when he has finished his work is worth
nothing; whereas, the former will examine his tool and improve it
if necessary; he will trace the line with exactitude, secure both
cardboard and rule, keep the tool in the right way, cut quite easily,
and give you a piece of good work.
This is the true time-saving celerity, the most appropriate for
economising human labour; and the best means for attaining it is an
education of the most superior kind. The great masters painted with
an astonishing rapidity; but their rapid work was the result of a
great development of intelligence and imagination, of a keen sense
of beauty, of a fine perception of colours. And that is the kind of
rapid work of which humanity is in need.
* * * * *
Much more ought to be said as regards the duties of the school, but
I hasten to say a few words more as to the desirability of the kind
of education briefly sketched in the preceding pages. Certainly, I do
not cherish the illusion that a thorough reform in education, or in
any of the issues indicated in the preceding chapters, will be made
as long as the civilised nations remain under the present narrowly
egotistic system of production and consumption. All we can expect, as
long as the present conditions last, is to have some microscopical
attempts at reforming here and there on a small scale--attempts which
necessarily will prove to be far below the expected results, because
of the impossibility of reforming on a small scale when so intimate
a connection exists between the manifold functions of a civilised
nation. But the energy of the constructive genius of society depends
chiefly upon the depths of its conception as to what ought to be
done, and how; and the necessity of re-casting education is one of
those necessities which are most comprehensible to all, and are most
appropriate for inspiring society with those ideals, without which
stagnation or even decay are unavoidable.
So let us suppose that a community--a city, or a territory which has,
at least, a few millions of inhabitants--gives the above-sketched
education to all its children, without distinction of birth (and we
_are_ rich enough to permit us the luxury of such an education),
without asking anything in return from the children but what they
will give when they have become producers of wealth. Suppose such an
education is given, and analyse its probable consequences.
I will not insist upon the increase of wealth which would result
from having a young army of educated and well-trained producers; nor
shall I insist upon the social benefits which would be derived from
erasing the present distinction between the brain workers and the
manual workers, and from thus reaching the concordance of interest
and harmony so much wanted in our times of social struggles. I shall
not dwell upon the fulness of life which would result for each
separate individual, if he were enabled to enjoy the use of both
his mental and bodily powers; nor upon the advantages of raising
manual labour to the place of honour it ought to occupy in society,
instead of being a stamp of inferiority, as it is now. Nor shall I
insist upon the disappearance of the present misery and degradation,
with all their consequences--vice, crime, prisons, price of blood,
denunciation, and the like--which necessarily would follow. In short,
I will not touch now the great social question, upon which so much
has been written and so much remains to be written yet. I merely
intend to point out in these pages the benefits which science itself
would derive from the change.
Some will say, of course, that to reduce men of science to the
_rôle_ of manual workers would mean the decay of science and genius.
But those who will take into account the following considerations
probably will agree that the result ought to be the reverse--namely,
such a revival of science and art, and such a progress in industry,
as we only can faintly foresee from what we know about the times of
the Renaissance. It has become a commonplace to speak with emphasis
about the progress of science during the nineteenth century; and it
is evident that our century, if compared with centuries past, has
much to be proud of. But, if we take into account that most of the
problems which our century has solved already had been indicated, and
their solutions foreseen, a hundred years ago, we must admit that
the progress was not so rapid as might have been expected, and that
something hampered it.
The mechanical theory of heat was very well foreseen in the last
century by Rumford and Humphry Davy, and even in Russia it was
advocated by Lomonosoff.[193] However, much more than half a century
elapsed before the theory reappeared in science. Lamarck, and even
Linnæus, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and several others
were fully aware of the variability of species; they were opening the
way for the construction of biology on the principles of variation;
but here, again, half a century was wasted before the variability
of species was brought again to the front; and we all remember
how Darwin’s ideas were carried on and forced on the attention of
university people, chiefly by persons who were not professional
scientists themselves; and yet in Darwin’s hands the theory of
evolution surely was narrowed, owing to the overwhelming importance
given to only one factor of evolution.
For many years past astronomy has been needing a careful revision of
the Kant and Laplace’s hypothesis; but no theory is yet forthcoming
which would compel general acceptance. Geology surely has made
wonderful progress in the reconstitution of the palæontological
record, but dynamical geology progresses at a despairingly slow
rate; while all future progress in the great question as to the laws
of distribution of living organisms on the surface of the earth is
hampered by the want of knowledge as to the extension of glaciation
during the Quaternary epoch.[194]
In short, in each branch of science a revision of the current
theories as well as new wide generalisations are wanted. And if the
revision requires some of that inspiration of genius which moved
Galileo and Newton, and which depends in its appearance upon general
causes of human development, it requires also an increase in the
number of scientific workers. When facts contradictory to current
theories become numerous, the theories must be revised (we saw it
in Darwin’s case), and thousands of simple intelligent workers in
science are required to accumulate the necessary facts.
Immense regions of the earth still remain unexplored; the study of
the geographical distribution of animals and plants meets with
stumbling-blocks at every step. Travellers cross continents, and
do not know even how to determine the latitude nor how to manage a
barometer. Physiology, both of plants and animals, psycho-physiology,
and the psychological faculties of man and animals are so many
branches of knowledge requiring more data of the simplest
description. History remains a _fable convenue_ chiefly because it
wants fresh ideas, but also because it wants scientifically thinking
workers to reconstitute the life of past centuries in the same way as
Thorold Rogers or Augustin Thierry have done it for separate epochs.
In short, there is not one single science which does not suffer
in its development from a want of men and women endowed with a
philosophical conception of the universe, ready to apply their
forces of investigation in a given field, however limited, and
having leisure for devoting themselves to scientific pursuits. In a
community such as we suppose, thousands of workers would be ready to
answer any appeal for exploration. Darwin spent almost thirty years
in gathering and analysing facts for the elaboration of the theory of
the origin of species. Had he lived in such a society as we suppose,
he simply would have made an appeal to volunteers for facts and
partial exploration, and thousands of explorers would have answered
his appeal. Scores of societies would have come to life to debate and
to solve each of the partial problems involved in the theory, and
in ten years the theory would have been verified; all those factors
of evolution which only now begin to receive due attention would
have appeared in their full light. The rate of scientific progress
would have been tenfold; and if the individual would not have the
same claims on posterity’s gratitude as he has now, the unknown mass
would have done the work with more speed and with more prospect for
ulterior advance than the individual could do in his lifetime. Mr.
Murray’s dictionary is an illustration of that kind of work--the work
of the future.
However, there is another feature of modern science which speaks
more strongly yet in favour of the change we advocate. While
industry, especially by the end of the last century and during the
first part of the present, has been inventing on such a scale as to
revolutionise the very face of the earth, science has been losing its
inventive powers. Men of science invent no more, or very little. Is
it not striking, indeed, that the steam-engine, even in its leading
principles, the railway-engine, the steam-boat, the telephone, the
phonograph, the weaving-machine, the lace-machine, the lighthouse,
the macadamised road, photography in black and in colours, and
thousands of less important things, have _not_ been invented by
professional men of science, although none of them would have refused
to associate his name with any of the above-named inventions? Men
who hardly had received any education at school, who had merely
picked up the crumbs of knowledge from the tables of the rich,
and who made their experiments with the most primitive means--the
attorney’s clerk Smeaton, the instrument-maker Watt, the brakesman
Stephenson, the jeweller’s apprentice Fulton, the millwright Rennie,
the mason Telford, and hundreds of others whose very names remain
unknown, were, as Mr. Smiles justly says, “the real makers of modern
civilisation”; while the professional men of science, provided
with all means for acquiring knowledge and experimenting, have
invented little in the formidable array of implements, machines, and
prime-motors which has shown to humanity how to utilise and to manage
the forces of nature.[195] The fact is striking, but its explanation
is very simple: those men--the Watts and the Stephensons--knew
something which the _savants_ do not know--they knew the use of their
hands; their surroundings stimulated their inventive powers; they
knew machines, their leading principles, and their work; they had
breathed the atmosphere of the workshop and the building-yard.
We know how men of science will meet the reproach. They will say: “We
discover the laws of nature, let others apply them; it is a simple
division of labour.” But such a rejoinder would be utterly untrue.
The march of progress is quite the reverse, because in a hundred
cases against one the mechanical invention comes before the discovery
of the scientific law. It was not the dynamical theory of heat which
came before the steam-engine--it followed it.
When thousands of engines already were transforming heat into motion
under the eyes of hundreds of professors, and when they had done
so for half a century, or more; when thousands of trains, stopped
by powerful brakes, were disengaging heat and spreading sheaves
of sparks on the rails at their approach to the stations; when
all over the civilised world heavy hammers and perforators were
rendering burning hot the masses of iron they were hammering and
perforating--then, and then only, Séguin, senior, in France, and
a doctor, Mayer, in Germany, ventured to bring out the mechanical
theory of heat with all its consequences: and yet the men of science
ignored the work of Séguin and almost drove Mayer to madness by
obstinately clinging to their mysterious caloric fluid. Worse than
that, they described Joule’s first determination of the mechanical
equivalent of heat as “unscientific.”
When thousands of engines had been illustrating for some time the
impossibility of utilising all the heat disengaged by a given amount
of burnt fuel, then came the second law of Clausius. When all over
the world industry already was transforming motion into heat, sound,
light, and electricity, and each one into each other, then only came
Grove’s theory of the “correlation of physical forces”; and Grove’s
work had the same fate before the Royal Society as Joule’s. The
publication of his memoir was refused till the year 1856.
It was not the theory of electricity which gave us the telegraph.
When the telegraph was invented, all we knew about electricity
was but a few facts more or less badly arranged in our books; the
theory of electricity is not ready yet; it still waits for its
Newton, notwithstanding the brilliant attempts of late years. Even
the empirical knowledge of the laws of electrical currents was in
its infancy when a few bold men laid a cable at the bottom of the
Atlantic Ocean, despite the warnings of the authorised men of science.
The name of “applied science” is quite misleading, because, in the
great majority of cases, invention, far from being an application
of science, on the contrary creates a new branch of science. The
American bridges were no application of the theory of elasticity;
they came before the theory, and all we can say in favour of science
is, that in this special branch, theory and practice developed
in a parallel way, helping one another. It was not the theory of
the explosives which led to the discovery of gunpowder; gunpowder
was in use for centuries before the action of the gases in a gun
was submitted to scientific analysis. And so on. One could easily
multiply the illustrations by quoting the great processes of
metallurgy; the alloys and the properties they acquire from the
addition of very small amounts of some metals or metalloids; the
recent revival of electric lighting; nay, even the weather forecasts
which truly deserved the reproach of being “unscientific” when
they were started for the first time by that excellent observer
of shooting stars, Mathieu de la Drôme, and by an old Jack tar,
Fitzroy--all these could be mentioned as instances in point.
Of course, we have a number of cases in which the discovery, or the
invention, was a mere application of a scientific law (cases like
the discovery of the planet Neptune), but in the immense majority of
cases the discovery, or the invention, is unscientific to begin with.
It belongs much more to the domain of art--art taking the precedence
over science, as Helmholtz has so well shown in one of his popular
lectures--and only after the invention has been made, science comes
to interpret it. It is obvious that each invention avails itself of
the previously accumulated knowledge and modes of thought; but in
most cases it makes a start in advance upon what is known; it makes
a leap in the unknown, and thus opens a quite new series of facts
for investigation. This character of invention, which is to make a
start in advance of former knowledge, instead of merely applying a
law, makes it identical, as to the processes of mind, with discovery;
and, therefore, people who are slow in invention are also slow in
discovery.
In most cases, the inventor, however inspired by the general state
of science at a given moment, starts with a very few settled
facts at his disposal. The scientific facts taken into account for
inventing the steam-engine, or the telegraph, or the phonograph were
strikingly elementary. So that we can affirm that what we presently
know is already sufficient for resolving any of the great problems
which stand in the order of the day--prime-motors without the use
of steam, the storage of energy, the transmission of force, or the
flying-machine. If these problems are not yet solved, it is merely
because of the want of inventive genius, the scarcity of educated
men endowed with it, and the present divorce between science and
industry.[196] On the one side, we have men who are endowed with
capacities for invention, but have neither the necessary scientific
knowledge nor the means for experimenting during long years; and, on
the other side, we have men endowed with knowledge and facilities
for experimenting, but devoid of inventive genius, owing to their
education, too abstract, too scholastic, too bookish, and to the
surroundings they live in--not to speak of the patent system,
which divides and scatters the efforts of the inventors instead of
combining them.[197]
The flight of genius which has characterised the workers at the
outset of modern industry has been missing in our professional men
of science. And they will not recover it as long as they remain
strangers to the world, amidst their dusty bookshelves; as long
as they are not workers themselves, amidst other workers, at the
blaze of the iron furnace, at the machine in the factory, at the
turning-lathe in the engineering workshop; sailors amidst sailors on
the sea, and fishers in the fishing-boat, wood-cutters in the forest,
tillers of the soil in the field.
Our teachers in art--Ruskin and his school--have repeatedly told
us of late that we must not expect a revival of art as long as
handicraft remains what it is; they have shown how Greek and mediæval
art were daughters of handicraft, how one was feeding the other. The
same is true with regard to handicraft and science; their separation
is the decay of both. As to the grand inspirations which unhappily
have been so much neglected in most of the recent discussions about
art--and which are missing in science as well--these can be expected
only when humanity, breaking its present bonds, shall make a new
start in the higher principles of solidarity, doing away with the
present duality of moral sense and philosophy.
It is evident, however, that all men and women cannot equally enjoy
the pursuit of scientific work. The variety of inclinations is such
that some will find more pleasure in science, some others in art, and
others again in some of the numberless branches of the production of
wealth. But, whatever the occupations preferred by everyone, everyone
will be the more useful in his own branch if he is in possession of a
serious scientific knowledge. And, whosoever he might be--scientist
or artist, physicist or surgeon, chemist or sociologist, historian
or poet--he would be the gainer if he spent a part of his life in
the workshop or the farm (the workshop _and_ the farm), if he were
in contact with humanity in its daily work, and had the satisfaction
of knowing that he himself discharges his duties as an unprivileged
producer of wealth.
How much better the historian and the sociologist would understand
humanity if they knew it, not in books only, not in a few of its
representatives, but as a whole, in its daily life, daily work, and
daily affairs! How much more medicine would trust to hygiene, and
how much less to prescriptions, if the young doctors were the nurses
of the sick and the nurses received the education of the doctors of
our time! And how much the poet would gain in his feeling of the
beauties of nature, how much better would he know the human heart,
if he met the rising sun amidst the tillers of the soil, himself a
tiller; if he fought against the storm with the sailors on board
ship; if he knew the poetry of labour and rest, sorrow and joy,
struggle and conquest! _Greift nur hinein in’s volle Menschenleben!_
Goethe said; _Ein jeder lebt’s--nicht vielen ist’s bekannt._ But how
few poets follow his advice!
The so-called “division of labour” has grown under a system which
condemned the masses to toil all the day long, and all the life long,
at the same wearisome kind of labour. But if we take into account
how few are the real producers of wealth in our present society, and
how squandered is their labour, we must recognise that Franklin was
right in saying that to work five hours a day would generally do for
supplying each member of a civilised nation with the comfort now
accessible for the few only.
But we have made some progress since Franklin’s time, and
some of that progress in the hitherto most backward branch of
production--agriculture--has been indicated in the preceding
pages. Even in that branch the productivity of labour can be
immensely increased, and work itself rendered easy and pleasant.
If everyone took his share of production, and if production were
socialised--as political economy, if it aimed at the satisfaction of
the ever-growing needs of all, would advise us to do--then more than
one half of the working day would remain to everyone for the pursuit
of art, science, or any hobby he or she might prefer; and his work in
those fields would be the more profitable if he spent the other half
of the day in productive work--if art and science were followed from
mere inclination, not for mercantile purposes. Moreover, a community
organised on the principles of all being workers would be rich
enough to conclude that every man and woman, after having reached
a certain age--say of forty or more--ought to be relieved from the
moral obligation of taking a direct part in the performance of the
necessary manual work, so as to be able entirely to devote himself
or herself to whatever he or she chooses in the domain of art, or
science, or any kind of work. Free pursuit in new branches of art and
knowledge, free creation, and free development thus might be fully
guaranteed. And such a community would not know misery amidst wealth.
It would not know the duality of conscience which permeates our
life and stifles every noble effort. It would freely take its flight
towards the highest regions of progress compatible with human nature.
FOOTNOTES:
[185] In their examination of the causes of unemployment in York,
based not on economists’ hypotheses, but on a close study of the
real facts in each individual case (_Unemployment: a Social Study_,
London, 1911), Seebohm Rowntree and Mr. Bruno Lasker have come to the
conclusion that the chief cause of unemployment is that young people,
after having left the school (where they learn no trade), find
employment in such professions as greengrocer boy, newspaper boy, and
the like, which represent “a blind alley.” When they reach the age of
eighteen or twenty, they must leave, because the wages are a boy’s
wages,--and they know no trade whatever!
[186] Unfortunately, I must already say “admitted” instead of
“admits.” With the reaction which began after 1881, under the reign
of Alexander III., this school was “reformed”; that means that all
the spirit and the system of the school were destroyed.
[187] _Manual Training: the Solution of Social and Industrial
Problems._ By Ch. H. Ham. London: Blackie & Son, 1886. I can add that
like results were achieved also at the Krasnoufimsk _Realschule_, in
the province of Orenburg, especially with regard to agriculture and
agricultural machinery. The achievements of the school, however, are
so interesting that they deserve more than a short mention.
[188] It is evident that the Gordon’s College industrial department
is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I cannot
help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards
combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome
of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the
Aberdeen daily schools.
[189] What this school is now, I don’t know. In the first years
of Alexander III.’s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good
institutions of the early part of the reign of Alexander II. But the
system was not lost. It was carried over to America.
[190] To those readers who are really interested in the education of
children, M. Leray, the French translator of this book, recommended
a series of excellent little works “conceived,” he wrote, “in the
very spirit of the ideas developed in this chapter. Their leading
principle is that ‘in order to be soundly educative, all teaching
must be objective, especially at the outset,’ and that ‘systematical
abstraction, if it be introduced into the teaching without an
objective (concrete) preparation, is noxious.’” M. Leray meant the
series of initiations published by the French publishers, Hachette:
_Initiation mathématique_, by C. A. Laisant, a book completed by the
_Initiateur mathématique_, which is a game with small cubes, very
ingenious and giving in a concrete form the proofs of arithmetics,
the metric system, algebra and geometry; _Initiation astronomique_,
by C. Flammarion; _Initiation chimique_, by Georges Darzens;
_Initiation à la mécanique_, by Ch. Ed. Guillaume; and _Initiation
zoologique_, by E. Brucker. The authors of these works had--it
would not be just not to mention it--predecessors in Jean Mace’s
_L’Arithmétique du grand-papa_, and René Leblanc, “whose excellent
manual, _Les Sciences physiques à l’Ecole primaire_”--M. Leray says
that from his own experience upon pupils from eleven to thirteen
years old--“gives even to the dullest children the taste or even the
passion for physical experiment.”
[191] Take, for instance, the description of Atwood’s machine in any
course of elementary physics. You will find very great attention
paid to the wheels on which the axle of the pulley is made to lie;
hollow boxes, plates and rings, the clock, and other accessories will
be mentioned before one word is said upon the leading idea of the
machine, which is to slacken the motion of a falling body by making
a falling body of small weight move a heavier body which is in the
state of inertia, gravity acting on it in two opposite directions.
That was the inventor’s idea; and if it is made clear, the pupils
see at once that to suspend two bodies of equal weight over a
pulley, and to make them move by adding a small weight to one of
them, is one of the means (and a good one) for slackening the motion
during the falling; they see that the friction of the pulley must
be reduced to a minimum, either by using the two pairs of wheels,
which so much puzzle the text-book makers, or by any other means;
that the clock is a luxury, and the “plates and rings” are mere
accessories: in short, that Atwood’s idea can be realised with the
wheel of a clock fastened, as a pulley, to a wall, or on the top of
a broomstick secured in a vertical position. In this case the pupils
will understand the _idea_ of the machine and of its inventor, and
they will accustom themselves to separate the leading idea from the
accessories; while in the other case they merely look with curiosity
at the tricks performed by the teacher with a complicated machine,
and the few who finally understand it spend a quantity of time in the
effort. In reality, all _apparatus used to illustrate the fundamental
laws of physics ought to be made by the children themselves_.
[192] The sale of the pupils’ work was not insignificant, especially
when they reached the higher classes, and made steam-engines.
Therefore the Moscow school, when I knew it, was one of the cheapest
in the world. It gave boarding and education at a very low fee. But
imagine such a school connected with a farm school, which grows
food and exchanges it at its cost price. What will be the cost of
education then?
[193] In an otherwise also remarkable memoir on the Arctic Regions.
[194] The rate of progress in the recently so popular Glacial Period
question was strikingly slow. Already Venetz in 1821 and Esmarck
in 1823 had explained the erratic phenomena by the glaciation of
Europe. Agassiz came forth with the glaciation of the Alps, the Jura
mountains, and Scotland, about 1840; and five years later, Guyot had
published his maps of the routes followed by Alpine boulders. But
forty-two years elapsed after Venetz wrote before one geologist of
mark (Lyell) dared timidly to accept his theory, even to a limited
extent--the most interesting fact being that Guyot’s maps, considered
as irrelevant in 1845, were recognised as conclusive after 1863. Even
now--more than half a century after Agassiz’s first work--Agassiz’s
views are not yet either refuted or generally accepted. So also
Forbes’s views upon the plasticity of ice. Let me add, by the way,
that the whole polemics as to the viscosity of ice is a striking
instance of how facts, scientific terms, and experimental methods
quite familiar to building engineers, were ignored by those who took
part in the polemics. If these facts, terms and methods were taken
into account, the polemics would not have raged for years with no
result. Like instances, to show how science suffers from a want of
acquaintance with facts and methods of experimenting both well known
to engineers, florists, cattle-breeders, and so on, could be produced
in numbers.
[195] Chemistry is, to a great extent, an exception to the rule. Is
it not because the chemist is to such an extent a manual worker?
Besides, during the last ten years we see a decided revival in
scientific inventiveness, especially in physics--that is, in a branch
in which the engineer and the man of science meet so much together.
[196] I leave on purpose these lines as they were in the first
edition. All these desiderata are already accomplished facts.
[197] The same remark ought to be made as regards the sociologists,
and still more so the economists. What are most of them, including
the socialists, doing, but studying chiefly the books previously
written and the systems, instead of studying the _facts_ of the
economical life of the nations, and the thousands of attempts at
giving to agriculture and industry new forms of organisation and new
methods, which are now made everywhere in Europe and America?