MANUAL TRAINING AND SLOYD
History of the movement--Its philosophy--The value of hand training in
the development of the brain and its significance in the making of
man--A grammar of our many industries hard--The best we do can reach
but few--Very great defects in our manual training methods which do
not base on science and make nothing salable--The Leipzig
system--Sloyd is hypermethodic--These crude peasant industries can
never satisfy educational needs--The gospel of work, William Morris
and the arts and crafts movement--Its spirit desirable--The magic
effects of a brief period of intense work--The natural development of
the drawing instinct in the child.
Manual training has many origins; but in its now most widely accepted
form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its
best representation here in our new and often magnificent
manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public
schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more
practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the
accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that
underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike
Pestalozzi's "_keine Kentnisse ohne Fertigkeiten_," [No knowledge
without skill] in that it lessens the interval between thinking and
doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend
to taste; interests many not successful in ordinary school; tends to
the better appreciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for
some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school
period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful
preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well
founded, and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic
agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids
perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual
areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical
centers are thus directly developed, the hand is a potent instrument
in opening the intellect as well as in training sense and will. It is
no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for
but an insignificant fraction of the nearly sixteen millions or twenty
per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and
twenty-four.
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations
of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially
manual and offers little for the legs, where most of the muscular
tissues of the body lie, those which respond most to training and are
now most in danger of degeneration at this age; the back and trunk
also are little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral
asymmetry are practically ignored. Almost in proportion as these
schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with
motives of economy and administrative efficiency on account of
overcrowding, have made them rigid and inflexible, on the principle
that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a
double misfortune; for the courses were not sufficiently considered at
first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the
methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given
shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the
census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never
perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these
natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called
basal types. This requires an effort not without analogy to
Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the marketplace the
underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to
construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an attempt worthy the name, not
even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this
field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts
and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human
occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and
find their justification rather in their logical sequence and
coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be
attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a
brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of
the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more
intricate and mazy. As H.T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master
in any art-craft must have a fourfold equipment: 1. Ability to grasp
an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide
repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3.
Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical
processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
The actual result is thus a course rich in details representing wood
and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the
course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly
tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the
latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths,
mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they
hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of
every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge
is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical
drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and
repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value
or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few
trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because
unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect
it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these
schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic
methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of
the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination
is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the
object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content
to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of
degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are
always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their
invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent
refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be
introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,
hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades
certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as
tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and
photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus
more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the
material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.
As in all hypermethodic schemes, the thought side is feeble. There is
no control of the work of these schools by the higher technical
institutions such as the college exercises over the high school, so
that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought
best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms,
manual training will prove to be historically, as it is educationally,
extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader
methods and be forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of
departure from which future progress will loom up.
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the
experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and
original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard
work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he
has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the
whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest
of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles,
metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines,
etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the
final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the
nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their
hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with
science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each
operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel,
draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its
orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and
the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in
France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right,
left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to
individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful,
deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago
as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home
industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an
institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood
only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of
from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its
manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not
only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere
exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and
especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make,
and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It
aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and
to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its
best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change
of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor
development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it
originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its
origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique
features of which persist like a national school of art, despite
transplantation and transformation.[1]
Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises,
tools, drawing, and models. Each must be progressive, so that every
new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in
all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and
degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet
there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological
or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series,
and the coördination of the series even with each other, to say
nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development.
This, if as pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on
the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in variety,
etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the "45
tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned
by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four
years, are overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many
series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of
powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork,
could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, incompatible
with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole
universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce
educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have
caused its enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far
beyond their modest bounds; and although its field covers the great
transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its
literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new
motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially
acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost
scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run
by a poor power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so
the mighty rent that sets toward motor education would give it some
degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic
momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of
efferent training and resists coördination with them, and its
provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one
of the last to accept its true but modest place as contributing
certain few but precious elements in the greater synthesis that
impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and
arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by
forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools
and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that
Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational
values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the
old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are
only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few
educators.
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.
Insistence on production should be eased, and the receptive
imagination, now so hungry, should be fed and reinforced by story and
all other accessories. By such a curriculum, potential creativeness,
if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at
first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay
the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and
lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is
original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative
painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in
literature or turning points in history, representations of the
loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. None who
deserve the name of artist copy anything now, and least of all with
objective fidelity to nature; and the teacher that represses or
criticizes this first point of genius, or who can not pardon the grave
faults of technique inevitable at this age when ambition ought to be
too great for power, is not an educator but a repressor, a pedagogic
Philistine committing, like so many of his calling in other fields,
the unpardonable sin against budding promise, always at this age so
easily blighted. Just as the child of six or seven should be
encouraged in his strong instinct to draw the most complex scenes of
his daily life, so now the inner life should find graphic utterance in
all its intricacy up to the full limit of unrepressed courage. For the
great majority, on the other hand, who only appreciate and will never
create, the mind, if it have its rights, will be stored with the best
images and sentiments of art; for at this time they are best
remembered and sink deepest into heart and life. Now, although the
hand may refuse, the fancy paints the world in brightest hues and
fairest forms; and such an opportunity for infecting the soul with
vaccine of ideality, hope, optimism, and courage in adversity, will
never come again. I believe that in few departments are current
educational theories and practises so hard on youth of superior gifts,
just at the age when all become geniuses for a season, very brief for
most, prolonged for some, and permanent for the best. We do not know
how to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most
indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during
the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is
good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at
its lowest ebb.
Finally, our divorce between industrial and manual training is
abnormal, and higher technical education is the chief sufferer.
Professor Thurston, of Cornell, who has lately returned from a tour of
inspection abroad, reported that to equal Germany we now need: "1.
Twenty technical universities, having in their schools of engineering
50 instructors and 500 students each. 2. Two thousand technical high
schools or manual-training schools, each having not less than 200
students and 10 instructors." If we have elementary trade-schools,
this would mean technical high schools enough to accommodate 700,000
students, served by 20,000 teachers. With the strong economic
arguments in this direction we are not here concerned; but that there
are tendencies to unfit youth for life by educational method and
matter shown in strong relief from this standpoint, we shall point out
in a later chapter.
[Footnote 1: This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms
of High School Physics and Manual Training and Mechanic Arts in High
Schools. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 193-204.]
[Footnote 2: Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the
Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, January, 1897, vol. 4, pp.
27-53, and July, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 344-375.]
[Footnote 3: A Study of Children's Drawings in the Early Years.
Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 79-101. See also
Drawing in the Early Years, Proceedings of the National Educational
Association, 1899, pp. 946-953. Das Kind als Künstler, von C. Götze.
Hamburg, 1898. The Genetic _vs._ the Logical Order in Drawing, by F.
Burk. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1902, vol. 9, pp. 296-323.]
[Footnote 4: Die Entwickelungsstufen beim Zeichnen. Die Kinderfehler,
September, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 166-179.]
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