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 favor 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 mouth-pieces 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
recognize the necessity of specialization of knowledge, but we maintain
that specialization 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. 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
organized 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 admits boys not older than fifteen, and it requires 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 are received in the preparatory classes. The school is
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 leave it with a thorough
knowledge of higher mathematics, physics, mechanics, and connected
sciences--so thorough, indeed, that it is 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, they, the students of the Technical School, were much more
advanced in higher geometry, and especially in the applications of
higher mathematics to the most 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 honor, while
independent research was favored 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--according to a scheme elaborated by the founder of
the school, M. Dellavos, and now applied also at Chicago and Boston--in
the same systematical way as laboratory work is taught in the
universities. 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. 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, he 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. 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 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
versa_, 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. 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.
The Moscow Technical School surely is not an ideal school.[1] It totally
neglects the humanitarian education of the young men. But we must
recognize 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 laborer.
It has proved, moreover, that the best means for producing really good
skilled laborers 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
colored 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 paralyze that passion, or do not know
how to utilize 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.
* * * * * * * * *
The so-called division of labor 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 labor. But if we take into account how few are the
real producers of wealth in our present society, and how squandered is
their labor, we must recognize that Franklin was right in saying that to
work five hours a day would generally do for supplying each member of a
civilized nation with the comfort now accessible for the few only,
provided everybody took his due share in production. But we have made
some progress since Franklin's times. More than one-half of the working
day would thus remain to every one for the pursuit of art, science, or
any hobby he 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 organized 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.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] What this school is now, I don't know. In the last years of
Alexander II.'s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good
institutions of the early part of his reign.
[Illustration]
MOTHERHOOD AND MARRIAGE
By HENRIETTE FUERTH.
(_Translated from the German for_ MOTHER EARTH by ANNY MALI HICKS.)
Knowledge becomes understanding only when its scope includes the
origin, the development and the conclusion of things.--Bachofen,
"Right to Motherhood."
"THE future will endeavor to extend its power through its own ideas of
facts and appearances, however unfamiliar these may seem, rather than to
be influenced by a past and submerged civilization with a spirit far
removed from its own."
There could hardly be a more appropriate introduction to our remarks on
motherhood and marriage than these words of Bachofen's, for there are
few human relations whose traditional stages, taking through outside
causes and effects an established form, have become eternal law and
sacrament, as is the case in the realm of sex relations. Motherhood and
marriage! For most people these two conceptions are inseparably bound
together, or, rather, are in ratio connected as their ideas of morality
and religion are synonymous. Marriage in the Romish Church is a
religious sacrament, and in the collective Christian and Jewish worlds
the only sex relation acknowledged as customary and possible, is the one
based on a monogamous union. To work out logically from this
standpoint, the only condition of motherhood which is socially
justified, is that one which is the result of marital relations. In
consequence motherhood without the consent of the State or the benefit
of the clergy is just as logically condemned. And they who thus sit in
judgment, flatter themselves to be the prophets of an advanced and
enlightened era,--ingrafting their personal feelings and rights on the
religious and lawful order of the universe. Or, in common parlance, and
as our introduction so aptly put it, these good people wish to intend
the domination of the ideas of their own time over all the past and into
all the future. Marriage seems to them an everlasting institution, a
godly regulation, through which they can lend to their individual bias,
the dignity of that which is humanly purest and highest. Consequently it
also seems to them that the present form of marriage and its
accompanying conditions for motherhood, resting as these do on the
mutual consent of God and man, that these are to be in all eternity the
permanent form of sex relation.
But when we stop one moment only, to free ourselves from preconceived
and obsolete ideas, and look at motherhood and marriage from the calm
and unprejudiced standpoint of historical development and growth, how
differently do these in reality appear. Many advanced thinkers have done
this, and their views have here and there found adherents. Not so,
however, with the average seeker for light and truth, who if he wish to
succeed must stem the tide of prejudiced opinion.
But the day has come when, if all signs do not fail, spring is here, and
a thousand and one buds of promise are pushing toward the light, when a
wider and saner understanding of motherhood and marriage is at hand. And
it is not an untimely spring either, not one which the treacherous sun
of January calls forth only to blight with later snow and frost. No, it
is the real light and life-giving spring, which comes when the sap
begins to run, when the sun calls up smoky mists from out the brown
earth, ready to enclose the seed, which shall bring forth summer flowers
and autumn fruits.
And this same brown, misty earth, what a different aspect shall she
present to her children, for whom conditions are so changed, with truer
sex relations, encompassing the ethical and spiritual needs of the free
individual. Then only will it be _possible_ to base these needs and
demands on the surrounding world of realities filled with material and
spiritual phenomena.
But first it must be proven that the present form of marriage and its
effect on motherhood is not necessarily permanent, but, like all else,
subject to natural development and change. What indeed is the much
talked of marriage bond of to-day,--which is considered the cornerstone
of both Church and State? Is it something towards which the steps of
development in nature and history all go? No seriously minded person
could in truth make such a statement. In the plant and animal kingdoms,
whose species evoke as do those of the human race, we find no examples
of sex relations to which the term marriage would apply. And this is
also true of the historical development of man and social conditions. It
is not marriage but motherhood which has given permanence to sex
relations wherever they appear. Motherhood standing at the source of
life with its creative and ever recreative force.
"Goddesses enthroned in solitude,
Surrounded not by time or place,
These are the mothers!
About them formed and formless,
Eternal stability and endless change
In images of all created life."
Thus does Goethe describe the depths of being which enclose the eternal
mystery of motherhood, leading not into known, but unknown paths.
And truly, how far have we strayed from the path of true and natural
feeling when we seek to justify motherhood from the standpoint of
expediency and custom! It is something in itself holy, and is its own
reason for being. I ask all mothers, all real mothers, when their child
comes to them, with eyes brimming with childlike love and affection,
against which all else counts for naught, I ask them do they think
whether that child is legitimate or what is called an illegitimate
child? No! the joy of motherhood completely fills the heart, there is no
room for other feelings, and truly the answer comes, Nature does not
discriminate between the legitimate and illegitimate mothers, any more
than she labels the children brought into the world as such. And this
alone is the foundation to which we must hold fast. Nature acknowledges
motherhood only, wisely providing for its needs. Not so marriage, which
is a form men have given their sex relations, and established from the
standpoint of social and economic exigencies and considerations, it is
consequently subject to limitations and changes. Motherhood is an
eternal force lying at the root of life, not subjected to time or
change.
[Illustration]
OBJECT LESSON FOR ADVOCATES OF GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL.
By ARTHUR G. EVERETT, N--M.
THE best literary efforts possible have been exhausted in a vain effort
to convey to those fortunately not in San Francisco on the morning of
April 18, 1906, what terrible things resulted from the earthquake and
the fire which left that city a complete ruin; likewise has the kodak
and the camera--though busy at work while the flames roared around the
operator driving him, from one vantage point to another, before its
resistless power--failed to depict in its entirety the horrors, the
tragedies that followed in the wake of the crumbling walls, the
crackling flames that licked up alike palatial mansions and the squalid
homes of the poor, not content to feast upon the products of the forests
of California and the Eastern States alone, but, with the strategy of a
warrior, surrounded and penned within four walls hundreds of human
beings, stalwart men, delicate women, and babes at the breast, who were
then slowly roasted to death upon the funeral pyre of San Francisco.
Upon the minds and hearts of the survivors, alone, who walked between
the walls of fire those days, who escaped the frightful holocaust but by
a miracle while loved ones perished before their eyes, are written, are
recorded, too complete, too vivid, those terrible scenes, and fain would
they efface from their mind's negative those pictures of horrors which
now turn their dreams of the night into such a frightful nightmare that
they dread to close their eyes in slumber.
While the horrors of the earthquake and fire were so terrible, yet there
was something far worse, for the earthquake and fire were beyond human
control, but the still worse acts of the soldiers into whose hands the
control of the city were delegated could have been restrained by the
authorities had they so chosen; now that the world is being made aware
of the fact that the soldiers ruthlessly shot down men and women--yes,
women as well as men; in one case a woman was shot down by a soldier
because she dared to light a match to see where to lay her little sick
baby down--and that without any justification other than the order of
their superiors who likewise were so ordered by the authorities--a
natural result of governmental control--hence they are doing all they
can to controvert the facts regarding the brutal murders and worse of
the soldiers. In one case they went so far as to threaten the
confiscation of a printery if the editor did not call in and suppress an
issue in which was printed an article by a marine telling of seeing the
soldiers shoot down the inmates of a hotel so surrounded by fire it
seemed they else must be burned up--the excuse the soldiers gave for
shooting them--and so the soldiers shot them down to save (?) them. The
marine in this article did not tell how many of those thus shot down by
the soldiers were only wounded and writhed in agony on the increasing
heated floor until the fiery fiend ended their misery from the gun shot
wounds.