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.]
* * * * *