(rw^ <^f-y , ^ £**<-*. ^-«t 
 
 Pm, Mjiyi-'■**' '^*' s • l ^ 1 _ l4j 
 
 „_ c^r, e*h ■ ^ ^ _s I 
 
 ft-, 5^., -c 
 
 t 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V. . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2018 with funding from 
 Getty Research Institute 
 
 https://archive.org/details/onneedforestabliOOashb 
 
ON THE NEED FOR THE 
 ESTABLISHMENT OF COUN¬ 
 TRY SCHOOLS OF ARTS & 
 CRAFTS. 
 
 NE of the ways of attaining once 
 again to that higher standard of 
 work and life in country crafts at 
 whichmany of us are aiming in these 
 days,is the establishment of country 
 schools of art and craft; & the object 
 of this paper is to indicate what 
 should be their purpose and service 
 for the community, and what they 
 should mean for us in England in 
 our present state of development. I postulate country, not 
 town, conditions—that is to say, the conditions of any com¬ 
 munity where the population does not exceed from 4,000 to 
 5,000 souls—and the school I have in mind should be possible 
 in villages where the population is not less than 500. Where 
 there is energy & earnestness and a little intelligent enthusiasm 
 on the part of resident landlord or parson it can be carried on 
 in a humbler form with even smaller numbers. 
 
 Now, while I would look at such a school first from the point The Art in 
 of view of the producer, & in more particular detail from that Modern 
 of the builder and his allied crafts, its service must not be for Education is 
 the producer alone. The net must be spread for the whole the Art of 
 village. The art we have by modern education to find is, as it Life 
 always has been, the art of life; and to build well or to do any¬ 
 thing else well, means first and foremost that we must well 
 live. All that I have said in other writings of mine as to 
 craftsmanship, tradition, the failure of industrialism, the need 
 
 1 
 
for the sense of beauty as a recognised factor in life once again, 
 points to the desirability of instituting such schools. We need 
 give ourselves no concern as to the number of their pupils. If 
 the population of our village be growing, tending toward the 
 town, there will be the more scope for classification of students 
 and variety of subjects. If the place be small, there will be the 
 more scope for the human quality which made for the greatness 
 and sweetness of old work. 
 
 The Three Often has it been insisted that all social reconstruction, like the 
 Conditions of serpent devouring its own tail, begins and ends with education. 
 a Rightly We cannot give good education until we have citizens suffi- 
 Lducated ciently intelligent to see the need of it: we cannot attain to a 
 
 Life high ideal of citizenship until we educate. Or, looking at the 
 
 circle from the other side, we cannot give work to the unem¬ 
 ployed because he is unemployable; he is unemployable be¬ 
 cause we have never rightly educated him to work. Education 
 and workshop reconstruction must proceed side by side. Now 
 there are three conditions for a well educated life, and they are 
 these—health, joyousness or interest in our work, and good 
 citizenship. They are not unlike the tests by which we judge 
 a good piece of work when we come across it; and it is curi¬ 
 ous to observe how the Christian morale is one and the same, 
 whether we apply it to the things we make or to the men that 
 make the things. 
 
 It will be seen that I rule out religion. I do so because I regard 
 it as the basis of all education. No educated life is possible 
 without it. But we have to be sure ourselves what we mean by 
 it. Among my friends I count members of the Church of Eng¬ 
 land, the Church of Rome, a dozen different English sects. 
 Agnostics, Unitarians, Positivists, German Lutherans, Scotch 
 Calvinists, Mahometans, and Japanese. I find they all have 
 definite views on varying doctrinal questions, but that, when 
 they make each their own reservation upon them, there are 
 certain fundamentals in education on which they agree. “I 
 find nothing in Christianity,” a Japanese educationalist once 
 2 
 
said to me, “ that conflicts with Bushido.” If then we rule out 
 doctrinal religion, I think all those of us who are educational¬ 
 ists can say with the Japanee: “I find nothing in Christianity 
 that conflicts with the right education of the citizen.” But we 
 must set aside our own pitiful squabbles as to whether the egg 
 should be eaten from the big or the narrow end. 
 
 Now the assumption upon which rests our judgment of the The Chris - 
 old workmanship of the past is perhaps a faulty assumption, tian Morale 
 but it is this—that the Christian morale which once underlay in the Reor- 
 the organisation of the workshop was sound. That morale we ganisation 
 have lost. On the hypothesis, then, that its practical reintro- of the 
 duction into industry, and more particularly the industry of Workshop 
 building, is not only a thing to be aimed at, but a means to¬ 
 wards the attainment of some of the things I would like to 
 plead for, let us ask ourselves from the point of view of the 
 art of building and the village crafts what should our ob¬ 
 jective be. 
 
 I would plead for good country building as the expression of 
 practical needs in life. I would plead for the human quality 
 in it and for the checking and limitation of waste, the waste 
 particularly of machine production. I would plead for tradi¬ 
 tion, for its reverent regard in old work, and its carrying on 
 into the new work we have yet to do. I would plead for an 
 awakened understanding among landlords & country builders 
 of these questions that affect the craft, and for an intelligent 
 examination of their economic significance. And, finally, I 
 would plead for a definite study of the right and wrong in 
 machine production—for the treatment of the machine as an 
 ethical, not merely an economic, problem. 
 
 To bring all this about will take a long time and means much 
 work in other lines of life besides building, but it will come ; 
 and one of the ways of bringing it about is by the formation of 
 schools of art and craft in country districts—the secondary 
 as distinct from the elementary school developed in a sane, 
 comprehensive and practical manner. 
 
 3 
 
The Neces- Now it is not only possible to establish such schools of arts 
 sityofthe and crafts in most country districts, but it is educationally 
 Secondary sound and serviceable. We cannot reconstruct the old work- 
 a School under shop system, but we can adapt what remains of it to modern 
 Modern conditions and use it as part of our educational material to 
 
 Industrial work upon. In every place of over 500 inhabitants there is 
 
 Conditions almost certainly a blacksmith, a builder, a carpenter, perhaps 
 a plumber, perhaps a few other crafts; there are certainly 
 labourers & boys of no training; there are constant repairs and 
 object lessons in construction to hand; there are long winter 
 evenings unemployed. It should be the object of our village 
 schools of craft to get hold of these fellows, to observe these 
 local needs, to employ these vacant hours. The newer develop¬ 
 ments of our Educational legislation make the work of con¬ 
 structive experiment in villages much easier; and the doing 
 of this sort of work will more help to keep people on the land 
 than all the theories, will more help to improve & cheapen our 
 building than all the architects. It will do something else too. 
 Its Function It will help to pick up again the broken threads of building tra- 
 in the Vil- dition.Terrible it is to observe how, owing to the disintegrating 
 lage and in forces of machinery, craft after craft has been driven out of the 
 Reference to villages, not necessarily to be destroyed, but to be swept up & 
 Building centralised in the factories of large towns. Thus simple pieces 
 of plumbing, portions of smith’s work, the leading of case¬ 
 ments, joinery framing, indeed numberless things about a 
 building that one could mention are now no longer practised 
 in English villages at all: they have died out. If they are wanted 
 they have to be sent for from afar. In my district of the Cots- 
 wolds, where the tradition of centuries has been to lead light 
 the beautiful stone work, it was, until we revived the industry, 
 practically impossible to get lead glazing done, and when we 
 needed it we sent the dimensions up to an “art factory” in 
 Birmingham; or if we could not, as impoverished landlords, 
 small shopkeepers or cottagers, afford that, we had to do worse 
 — we made shift with stock patterns formed of zinc bars, 
 4 
 
and produced also in a factory, without even the “art” as a 
 solatium. 
 
 Thus do we ruin what is left of our building tradition, and at 
 the same time waste what we have of the good human stuff in 
 our villages—the stock that would only be too willing, if given 
 the opportunity, to be allowed to work at such simple crafts 
 once again. 
 
 I am sanguine enough to believe that this will not continue. 
 
 F or human reasons, if for none another, it must not be allowed 
 to continue. We have got to a point in the development of the 
 history of machinery in this country where, as I have insisted, 
 it is quite possible for us to say that development in one direc¬ 
 tion is right, in another wrong. The problem of machinery has 
 become an ethical one, and as such must be dealt with in our 
 educational, in our social legislation. When once the County 
 Councils are sufficiently enlightened to see this, & the county 
 ratepayers sufficiently far-sighted to appreciate the need of 
 spending more money in order to keep the people out of the 
 towns, it is likely that great reforms may ensue. To the craft 
 of building in our villages, this problem of determining the 
 limitations of machinery is vital. 
 
 What then is to be the plan upon which we are to build up our 
 educational work, our country school of arts and crafts—based, 
 as it should be, upon the elementary school system ? 
 
 I think we should set before ourselves a four-fold objective, The Four 
 and it is this. We should, in the first place, get into direct touch Objectives 
 with local wants. We should, in the second place, be frankly of a School 
 experimental, always trying something new and testing ever of Arts and 
 the changing value of old methods. We should, thirdly, teach Crafts 
 citizenship, making this a definite end and giving all our prac¬ 
 tical & technical subjects a bearing upon it. We should, fourth¬ 
 ly, make the last object of our study the ethics of production. 
 
 (©.To take the first: By getting into touch with local wants, 
 
 I do not alone mean what these wants appear to those in power 
 —the kindly and benevolent landlords who reside upon their 
 
 5 
 
i. To get into estates, the humdrum parsons, the often excessively conserva- 
 Touch with tive farmers, who for the time being have the future of our 
 Local Wants country districts in hand. Still less do I mean what his wants 
 appear to be to the labourer. Beyond an immediate increase in 
 his weekly wage, the latter poor fellow does not know what he 
 wants ; and it is affectation to pretend that we shall get from 
 him a far-seeing constructive policy in education. When you 
 are supporting a family on 12s. a week it requires every bit 
 of your brain to do it well. 
 
 To discover the local wants we must examine closely what are 
 the actual social conditions. What do the people live on? what 
 do they earn? what land have they that they can till? what is 
 the family budget? what social ramifications are there with 
 other grades of life? is there a carpenter cousin, a sailor brother, 
 a colonist away? We must look at the boys standing at the 
 street corners, and ask why they stand there and what we can 
 do to stop it. We must ask at the same time why so many fields 
 are covered with thistles, & why the roofs of so many cottages 
 are falling in. Any conscientious examination of local wants 
 will quickly reveal what they are; and we shall then be able to 
 discriminate the particular wants of certain districts: the craft, 
 the trade, the special wants of farmer, labourer, carpenter, 
 builder, plumber and so forth, and the general wants that go to 
 building up character and fitness, and that apply to all alike. 
 Nowwhether they be special orwhether they be general, these 
 wants will vary in all places. They will vary with the standard 
 of intelligence and the occupation of the people in each case; 
 but we shall find that in most places there is a percentage of 
 the population who are badly fed, badly clad, badly housed, 
 and as far as secondary education goes, not taught at all. We 
 shall find that the agencies of local charity, however well ad¬ 
 ministered, are often inapplicable to these wants, and that the 
 parochial system is an inefficient & obsolete method for dealing 
 with them. The parochial system, excellent in its day, rested 
 on the assumption that industry and the conditions of labour 
 6 
 
were static, whereas they have been disintegrated by machin¬ 
 ery. Industry and the conditions of labour are now fluid. In old 
 days the squire and the parson were the units round which the 
 little community turned : now the squire often looks to outside 
 means for making his estates pay, the parson is often left high 
 and dry in his pulpit, while the people are drifting away. In 
 my part of the country the ratio of permanent employment to 
 acreage is given as one family unit to every ioo acres of land. 
 t©fThus there will always be wants that our school can supply. 
 
 We shall find, for instance, that the teaching in cleanliness, 
 order, intelligence, inventiveness, national history, social 
 duties, are always wanted ; we shall find that teaching in such 
 things as cookery, hygiene, physical drill, life saving, and all 
 that is implied in these, is always popular. 
 
 Our second objective is the experimental. We must, as I said, 2. To be Ex- 
 be perpetually trying new methods and testing old ones. In an perimental 
 age of fluidity such as ours, no educational system can have 
 any permanent value; the quickly changing wants of modern 
 industry, the equally rapid changing of our ideals of life, make 
 a frank experimen talism necessary. Moreover, to boldly do this 
 is a check upon the uniformity and dull levelling of modern 
 democracy. We want, in our schools of art and craft, variety, 
 diversity, individual character, both in system of teaching and 
 in the boy or girl product. 
 
 I would like to give a practical example of what I mean. I have 
 often thought that the somewhat rigid system of definite 
 classes in particular subjects is not sufficiently educative, and 
 that it should be supplemented by something that will give 
 more freedom to individual invention. To this end I started at 
 our village school an experimental shop, which was open at all 
 hours, under certain restrictions, to any student who cared to 
 use it. Metalworkers, plumbers, carpenters used it at different 
 times, and produced some quite good pieces of work there. But 
 two village lads had been observed with much mystery for 
 some time experimenting in various mechanical details of their 
 
 7 
 
own. Finally, after three months’ hard thinking, and much 
 collecting of odd scraps of copper, brass, zinc & wood, a model 
 ship appeared, whose boiler was a disinfectant tin. She was a 
 really beautiful little craft, who did several knots an hour by 
 means of methylated spirits on the miller’s pond. I was formally 
 invited to the launching, and no cruiser created more excite¬ 
 ment on her first trip. The peculiar interest attaching to this 
 example is that neither of the young constructors had ever 
 seen a ship or been far out of the county. I could no more con¬ 
 struct a model steamship myself than fly, & yet it was a product 
 of my experimental shop. While my heart was set upon build¬ 
 ing and the allied crafts—lead glazing, metalwork, carpentry, 
 smithing—those two boys were thinking of something quite 
 different. I anticipated we should turn out good examples of 
 the builder’s craft, we did as a matter of fact; but we did better 
 still, we turned out two boys who were using their own brains 
 and invention in a manner that was entirely original & entirely 
 off my lines. That is as it should be. But no class system would 
 have quite provided this. 
 
 3. To Teach Our third objective is the teaching of citizenship. This I 
 
 Citizenship conceive should not merely be done by classes in the rights and 
 duties of the citizen, but by showing the bearing of everything 
 taught in the school upon life. Our school, therefore, should be 
 so comprehensive as to include every form of village activity 
 from the highest to the lowest.There should be in it something 
 for everybody. 
 
 I have found in our Cotswold village of 1300 inhabitants that it 
 is quite possible to get together some 200 to 300 students, men, 
 women and children, in various branches of secondary teach¬ 
 ing, and teaching often that leads indirectly to a better under¬ 
 standing, not only of the crafts but their relation to life. Cookery, 
 needlework, laundry, gardening, hygiene, carpentry, physical 
 drill, life saving, carving, drawing, various branches of crafts¬ 
 manship in metalwork, music, lectures and discussions on a 
 number of different topics—all these subjects are dealt with in 
 8 
 
different ways. We spread the net as wide as we can, with the 
 result that we can show cases of the labourer’s lad doing his 
 course of physical drill and attending biographical lectures in 
 the same week, and the village plumber’s apprentice keeping 
 his school garden, and attending a class on lead glazing one 
 night, and music on another. The school, in short, is getting to 
 have a definite meaning in life to these lads; and that also is 
 as it should be. In the appendix I show some pictures of this 
 little school of craft which illustrate what I mean. The main 
 building, which has been carefully repaired and which stands 
 in the village street, is given on the cover. The workshops and 
 technical school proper are at the back, and have been formed 
 out of a derelict malthouse and stables. 
 
 Few things are so distressing in modern English social condi¬ 
 tions as the waste of educational opportunity observable in 
 boys and girls of from 13 upwards—lads when they leave the 
 elementary school, when the loafing period begins; girls of the 
 same age when there are several in the family. The facts of the 
 craft, the realities, must always be taught in the workshops, on 
 the jobs, in the household. But in these days, when machinery 
 has centred industry into factories and taken the home crafts 
 away from the home, the principles, the theory, and above all, 
 the taste, or as I would prefer to call it, the feeling, for what is 
 right and wrong in workmanship must be taught in the secon¬ 
 dary school. It is the school that must be the bulwark against 
 the brutalising, the ugliness, the uniformity of the machine. 
 
 And this brings me to the fourth objective of our village 
 schools of art and craft, the need for a wise study of the ethics 
 of production. This is a thing we can only attain to by slow 
 degrees. We have not yet come as a community to realise that 
 the complete destruction of the handicrafts which has resulted 
 from the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries 
 has transformed the whole purpose of education. From the 
 universities, so remote from the practical wants of life, at one 
 end of the scale, to the elementary schools, so equally remote 
 
 9 
 
 4. To Study 
 the 'Ethics of 
 Production 
 
from the higher wants, at the other, the relation of men to 
 things is no longer understood as of old; and the ethical mean¬ 
 ing of the things we touch and use is lost to us. Of old it was 
 not so. Almost all old handicrafts were educative in themselves: 
 they contained within them that graded skill and thought 
 which is necessary for the right development of the individual; 
 they had in them a direct connection between mind and hand; 
 they touched life immediately. Not only this, life was so con¬ 
 stituted that everybody came into direct contact with the 
 crafts practised by others; human beings were nearer to one 
 another in consequence. Hundreds of stories from the work¬ 
 shops, all well authenticated, might be quoted to illustrate 
 this.The story of Caparra the blacksmith and the municipality 
 of Florence, of William of Wykeham the master mason of 
 Windsor and his repartee to Edward III., of Hans Sachs the 
 cobbler of Nurenberg singing over his shoes, of Caradosso the 
 goldsmith piqued by the haughty Spanish nobleman over his 
 fine jewel in the little shop in Milan, of Ucello the cabinet¬ 
 maker and his humiliation at the shrunken panels of his price¬ 
 less cabinet, of Grinling Gibbons and his pot of carven flowers 
 before the queen. The tales are innumerable to show how the 
 man was educated in and by his craft. The artist can see it in 
 the work; to him who has no eyes to see it thus, let him read 
 the written record in Theophilus, in Cennino, in Vasari, in 
 Cellini, in Henry Eveleigh, in Rabelais, in Sir Christopher 
 Wren, in Sir Joshua Reynolds. Nay, let him study again those 
 English poets who more particularly sympathise with the 
 craftsmen—Chaucer, Langland, Blake—let him do this and 
 he will realise how the crafts of old contained in them those 
 fundamentals of education which we are seeking to reintroduce 
 into modern life. Sometimes we term the object of our search 
 humanism, sometimes technical skill, sometimes labour or¬ 
 ganisation, sometimes merely efficiency; but all these things 
 were stored as a treasure in the crafts of old before the coming 
 of the machine. 
 
 10 
 
To go back is impossible; and why should we repine ? The 
 machine has brought immense good with its evil; but it is ne¬ 
 cessary to understand, and above all it is necessary to determine, 
 how much of what is lost we can and should consciously re¬ 
 introduce into our educational system. In short, we have to 
 diagnose the good and bad, the right and wrong, in the things 
 we make and handle ; the problem of the ethics of production 
 is the ultimate problem of our schools of art and craft. 
 
 I have pictured our secondary education school from the stand¬ 
 point of the village craftsman and the country builder. I am an 
 architect, hence my practical bias. Educationally any other 
 craft or calling would have done equally well. The school may 
 start at a single craft, a single interest: it must become univer¬ 
 sal ; it must embrace everything, everything in petto; it must 
 give the little citizen the opportunity of making himself. To 
 repeat—the art we have in modern higher education to re¬ 
 discover is the art of life. 
 
 Campden, Glos. 
 1906. 
 
 C. R. ASHBEE. 
 
Works by C. R. Ashbee which may be procured at i6 A Brook St 
 Bond Street , London , /F. 
 
 £ d. 
 
 TRANSACTIONS OF THE GUILD AND 
 
 SCHOOL OF HANDICRAFT, 1889-90. - 7 6 
 
 FROM WHITECHAPEL TO CAMELOT. A 
 
 story, with illustrations by Roger Fry. - - 26 
 
 A MANUAL OF THE GUILD & SCHOOL 
 
 OF HANDICRAFT, 1891 - - - - 10 
 
 THE TREATISES OF BENVENUTO CEL¬ 
 LINI. Translated by C. R. Ashbee - - - 1 15 o 
 
 THE TRINITY HOSPITAL IN MILE END, 
 
 with illustrations by Joseph Pennell, &c. - - 1 1 o 
 
 TABLES OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS of the 
 
 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. - 3 o 
 
 CHAPTERS IN WORKSHOP RECON¬ 
 STRUCTION AND CITIZENSHIP. - 50 
 
 AN ENDEAVOUR TOWARDS the TEACH¬ 
 ING OF JOHN RUSKIN & WM. MORRIS. 1 o 
 AMERICAN SHEAVES & ENGLISH SEED- 
 
 CORN. - - - - - - -1100 
 
 A REPORT TO THE NATIONAL TRUST 
 for Places of Historic Interest & Natural Beauty 
 of similar undertakings in the United States. - 10 6 
 
 THE MASQUE of the EDWARDS of ENG¬ 
 LAND, with drawings by Edith Harwood. 3 3° 
 
 A KEY to the principal decorations in the Prayer 
 
 Book of KingEdward VII. - 26 
 
 A BIBLIOGRAPHY of the Essex House Press. - 10 
 
 REPORTS of the Campden School of Arts and 
 
 Crafts for the years 1904, 1905, and 1906 each 1 o 
 THE LAST RECORDS OF A COTSWOLD 
 
 COMMUNITY. Drawings by Edmund New. 12 6 
 
 ECHOES FROM THE CITY OF THE SUN. 12 6 
 
 BOOK OF COTTAGES & LITTLE HOUSES, 
 
 with 70 illustrations of buildings by the author. 12 6 
 
APPENDIX OF 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 

 
 
 
 
*1 ~• 
 
 Gampden School of Arts & Crafts , showing interior of a malt-house reconstructed as a gallery. 
 
1 
 
 Si 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 - 
 
 Campaen School of Arts & Crafts gallery fr 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cookery Class at the Campden School of Arts and Crafts. 
 
a ~ 
 
 Gardening at the Campden School of Arts and Graft. 
 

 
 
 
 :|f 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Physical Drill at the Campden School of Arts and Crafts . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Physical Prill at the Campaen School of Arts and Crafts. 
 

 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
f 
 
 Model steamship made by two lads in the experimental shop of tie 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Cup designed and executed by one of the students and 
 sent up to the National Competition from the Campden 
 School of Arts and Crafts , 1906 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Examples of the work of the Lead-glazing Class at the 
 Campden School of Arts and Crafts , 1906 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
Large carved panel designed and executed by one of the 
 students and sent up to the National Competition from 
 the Campden School of Arts and Grafts , 1906. 
 
 PRINTED AT THE ESSEX HOUSE PRESS, 
 CAMPDEN, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, A.D. 
 MDCCCCVI. 
 

 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V) 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 l 
 
"Jewel designed & executed by one of the students and 
 sent up to the National Competition 1906 ^from the 
 Campden School of Arts and Crafts. 
 
11 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 
 V