L^/^95- /f THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF MANUAL TRAINING lAMES PHINNEY MUNROE Reprinted from the Technology Rkvikw, Vol. V., No. 4 BOSTON Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 272 Congress Street 1903 THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF MANUAL TRAINING JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE Reprinted from the Technology Review, Vol. F., No. 4 BOSTON Geo. H. Ellis Co., Printers, 272 Congress Street 1903 13 1^1 ^ p. ^Ttthor. THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF MANUAL TRAINING* A friend of mine, who hated music, went once to hear the oratorio of "The Messiah," Describing it, he said that the chorus sang, " All we like sheep, all we like sheep," over and over, until sleep came to his relief. Then, in his dreams, he visited Europe, Asia and Africa, and experienced many adventures. Waking at last, he found the chorus still shouting, " All we like sheep," when, as a matter of fact, he declared, he hated mutton. Only after hours and hours, if one were to believe him, was that sentence finished by its necessary predicate, — " have gone astray." Somewhat as Handel's florid music called for the odd amputation of that sentence, so the exigencies of programme printing demanded — with my consent — the curtailing ot the title of my paper to-day. The programme assigns to me the impossible task of dealing with " The Educational Bearings of Manual Training." I will, if you please, lengthen my title but narrow my range by speaking upon " The Educational Bearings of Manual Training upon Co-ordination, Creativeness, Culture and Character." And' I use alliteration, not for its own sake, but because those, to my mind, are the four important bearings of this many- sided teaching process which we summarize as manual training. Upon those educational foundations manual training can stand " four-square to all the winds of heaven," maintaining itself triumphantly against the cold north wind of blind opposition, the chilling east wind of snobbish "cul- ture," the soft south wind of educational sentimentality, and the healthful west wind of intelligent conservatism. * An address before the Eastern Manual Training Association, July 7, 1903. Even the conservatives in matters of schooling are now agreed that co-ordination of the physical, mental and spir- itual powers is at the basis of all real education. From the wild waving of the infant's arms and the ghastly rolling of his untutored eyeballs up to the skill and self-poise of a greatest leader of mankind, the educational process is mainly one of co-ordination, of adjusting this marvellous human mechanism, of training the will to take intelligent command of the physical, mental and moral powers. But complete co-ordination cannot be brought about so long as that side of the physical, of the mental, and — let us not hesi- tate to say — of the spiritual nature reached, and reached only, by manual labor is left out of account. It is self- evident that there must be lines and areas of co-ordination which can be completed in no other way. It is of no moment that I cannot make a ship-shape box or forge a respectable hammer ; but it is of serious consequence to me that in my education the co-ordinative processes in- volved in the making of the box and hammer were left wholly out of account. Hand training would not simply have given me manual skill : it would have opened for me new channels of inter-communication ; it would have un- sealed for me mental and moral avenues now doubtless forever closed ; it would have strengthened markedly my poise and power of will. From the block-building of the kindergarten to the highest development of the fine arts every manual process not purely automatic, every manual process which requires co-operation of mind and muscle, is an important step forward in that general co-ordination which is the main end, and in which lies the chief use, of all human education. Therefore, simply as an aid to co- ordination manual training would justify itself, were that the sole point of its educational bearing. As a matter of 5 fact, however, this is its most elementary utility. It serves much higher uses in bringing out individuality, in awaken- ing desire for learning, in stimulating the will to take com- plete and wise command. It is an observation as old as time that to arouse interest one must promote activity, that " to do is to know." It was not Froebel who discovered, but it was he who most clearly insisted, that the way to learn is to learn by doing. Out of this doctrine have grown those laboratory methods of teaching which, starting in the kindergartens and the technological schools, have invaded even the most hide- bound colleges, and are sweeping up through the elementary and down through the secondary into that last stronghold of conservatism, the grammar schools. If, in teaching a child, one can make him actually do something himself, can lead him to create something really his own, then one has found a means surer than any other for arousing dormant and holding vagrant faculties, has opened a clear path to whatever capabilities the child may have, has established at least one point of contact between the trained individuality of the teacher and the, as yet, nebulous individuality of the growing child. But what opportunity did the old-fashioned curriculums offer for this important business of creative- ness ? They presented, as a rule, but one avenue, — and that the least likely for the child to follow, — the avenue of literary creation. Literary creation, however, is the most difficult of all arts, it presupposes the widest acquaintance with civilization and with life, it is one in which the child soonest meets insurmountable obstacles. Nevertheless, the old courses of study, feeling dimly the necessity for creat- iveness in education, set their pupils to the work of creat- ing ; and, as a result, we had in schools those worse than futile "compositions" on Faith, Hope or Charity, we had in colleges that abomination of educational desolation, the writing of Latin verse. In both exercises the creative element was about as genuine as in the conversation of a garrulous parrot. If teased by fond parents to admire those compositions or those verses, because of their inher- ent difficulty, one felt like making rude Sam Johnson's reply to the mother who asked him to admire her daughter's harpsichord playing because of the difficulty of the performance : " Difficult, madam ? Would God it were impossible ! " With manual training, however, — using the phrase so broadly as to include the feeblest " occupation " of the youngest flower in the kindergarten, — the immature faculties are not forced out of their normal path, the child is not compelled to lie to you and to himself by pretending to a literary power which he cannot have. One simply em- ploys the natural instinct of the child to use its hands, one merely seizes upon that passion of most children to make something, one but leads into regulated channels the brim- ming enthusiasm of healthy youth for the bending and shaping of inanimate things. One might show, of course, many directions in which the creative instinct stimulated by manual training serves, as no other educational process can, in the development of many a boy and girl ; but perhaps the most far-reaching use is in unlocking and then in forming and strengthening individuality. The most pressing educational question is how to save the child's individuality, how to keep him from becoming a mere cog in the monstrous social machine. In our pride at giving free education to milhons upon mill- ions of children, in our delight at the smoothness with which the day's programme glides by, at the precision with which, so to speak, the pupils present arms to us their of- ficers, we are falling into an easy but most dangerous uni- formity, we are securing a quiet in our school-rooms that is too often the death-quiet of spiritual collapse. Such pha- lanx-teaching is not education : it is pedagogical militarism. Real education forbids such uniformity, and demands instead that every boy and girl during every school-day be brought within the personal view and understanding, within the sphere of direct, humanizing influence of the human man or woman who is, or ought to be, the child's teacher. The first step towards this real education is, of course, to secure smaller classes in the schools, and over those smaller classes to place, in every instance, teachers who know how to teach. But a second step (and it will go far) is to infuse into our school programmes, from the very first to the very last year of school, much manual training of many kinds. For manual training, of whatever type, cannot be done by battalions : it must be performed by individuals. Hand- work cannot be slurred over in chorus : it must really be done, each piece and process, under the teacher's eye. A class in handicraft cannot be kept by any person with a voice harsh enough and an eye piercing enough to main- tain cowed silence among seventy children : it must be supervised by some one who knows how, who can stand the tangible test of his pupils' handiwork, and who, since he must personally watch every child's work, cannot in the very nature of things be insulted by being told to educate — save the mark ! — a greater number of human beings than is usually given of young pigs to a swineherd's custody. Manual training, then, makes for the intensive develop- ment of the individual under the vigilant eye and the really educating mind of the individual teacher. But education should be extensive as well as intensive. It should first, of course, develop the individual along the lines of his in- dividuality ; but, having done that, it ought next to broaden that individual along the lines of human civilization. In other words, having brought the child to a knowledge of himself, it should lead him next to know the human race. From the cultivation of the single boy or girl, it should widen out to the culture of humanity. Therefore, the third edu- cational bearing of manual training is upon the culture side. To join culture — a fetish word as blessed to the conser- vatives as " Mesopotamia" was to the old lady — to man- ual training is to scandalize the tories in education, is to amuse that lessening class of men who blandly assert that no useful study can be cultural. Nevertheless, to culture in its true meaning manual training has a most important relation. For to have culture is not merely to be learned in the classics and in literature : it is to have a mind fur- nished with many, and many different, things ; it is to have breadth of view, knowledge of the world, skill in dealing with men, ability to foresee and intelligence to grapple with the complex problems which meet one every day ; it is to possess an agreeable, an equable, a tolerant personality ; it implies tact ; it means, above all, power to understand and to deal with men. But how is one to be really broad, how is one to be able to meet all kinds of men, how is one to know life as the really cultured man ought to understand it, if that whole side of his experience which should look out towards industrialism, towards that manual labor which lies at the foundation of all arts and livelihood and life it- self, is little better than a blank wall? It is not to be main- tained, of course, that skill in carpentry will unravel for a man the labor question or enable him to deal wisely with the problems of the industrial world ; but he whose hands as well as his memory and judgment have been trained, he who has actually labored and has had experience, on how- ever small a scale, of what the industrial processes involve, — he is a far broader man, is a far more liberal man, is a far more all-around man, than one who has simply been delving, no matter how deeply, into literature, philosophy and abstract ethics. The former may possess less knowl- edge than the latter of the humanities, but he will know more of humanity ; and culture, in the modern understand- ing of it, is the science and art of living wisely and nobly with and for one's fellow-men. Fourthly, manual training bears strongly and with ex- cellent effect upon that goal of all education, — character. This follows naturally from its lesser function as a co- ordinative force. To educate is to co-ordinate; and to co-ordinate is to put the powers of the body and mind more and more under the command of an intelligent, a purposeful, an upward-striving will. What, indeed, is a formed character but one in which all the functions, all the thoughts, all the motives, all the desires, are mar- shalled, ruled and inspired by a strong and well-balanced will? To have taken a piece of wood and compelled it to the shape that lay in one's mind or upon one's paper, is not that an exercise in will-strengthening of the highest educative value ? To forge the iron, to carve the wood, to mould the clay, to draw the design, to conceive and to impress the pattern, is not each one of these a healthful, really educational development of will-power, accompanied by that sense of pleasure which comes from the act of construction, by that still higher delight arising from the contemplation of one's own finished work ? And let us note, in passing, the tremendous advantage of manual training as an educator of the will, in that its results do not have to be explained or accepted upon faith or looked forward to in some far future of postponed rewards. With lO the work of one's hands the effort, often hard and dis- agreeable, Is followed immediately by its result, good if that effort has been earnest and genuine, bad if that effort has not been sustained and real. Every piece of handwork preaches to the child, in tones which he cannot fail to understand, the awful law of cause and effect, the immuta- ble law that " whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." These, I maintain then, are the four chief bearings of manual training upon education. Rightly conceived and carried on, it promotes co-ordination, it develops creative- ness, it broadens culture, it strengthens character. What are some things essential, however, in order that it may do its perfect educational work in these four directions ? In order to further co-ordination, manual training in some form — and its forms are protean — must have an integral place and an uninterrupted sequence in the curriculum from the earliest kindergarten to and through the univer- sity. Co-ordination is not a process to be taken up to-day and dropped to-morrow ; and, if manual training is to play a vital part in co-ordination, it must not be chopped up and scattered about to suit fanciful programme-mongers. It must be built up logically and developed wisely, to serve the needs of a real, organic education. Next, to fulfil its function as a stimulus to creativeness, manual training must really create something : it must pro- duce things of use, things of beauty. The child or the youth, when set to work with tools, is not satisfied merely to learn an abstract principle : he seeks to do something tangible ; and it is educationally right that this craving should be gratified. His teachers must make certain only that this tangible creation of his is really useful and is truly beautiful with that genuine beauty which grows out of the fitness of an object to its purposes. II Thirdly, to fulfil its culture function, manual training must be representative of the life of the child's house and of its neighborhood, of the atmosphere of his town or city, of the larger genius of his nation and his race. It must identify the child closely with the general industries of his people, with the special industries of his community. It must connect him, hardly less closely, with the industrial and social history of mankind, with that age-long history of which his own developing life is the inconceivably rapid epitome. Above all, his training on this side must be towards genuine craftsmanship, towards the making of true things solidly, of solid things beautifully. The use of what he makes, the beauty of what he makes, must ever be clearly before him ; and use and beauty must be made to dwell, inseparable, in his thoughts and his ideals. In this way will he come, better than in any other, to a real con- ception, to a genuine appreciation, to a true understanding of aesthetics, and of the close interdependence of the aes- thetic and the ethical. As to the fourth bearing of manual training, its bearing upon character, — I have already dwelt upon it. We can- not do good handwork without sticking to honesty and truth ; we cannot, in manual training, hide or equivocate or slide over. The good work we do is there, the bad work we do is there, plain for all the world to see. And every effort made in such training is a discipline of the will, every success is a strengthening and stimulus of that will, every failure — if the child be good for any- thing — is a trumpet-call to the renewal of that fight in which, if good character is to result, the will must gain the mastery. The splendid opportunity of the manual trainer is that he may by his teaching prove what Browning said, that 12 *' It is the glory and the good of art That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth. " What, then, are some of the things which manual train- ing must work for and must secure if it would take its rightful place among the great educational agencies of mod- ern civilization ? As was said in the beginning, even the conservatives acknowledge co-ordination to be at the foun- dation of all education ; and a very little effort ought to persuade them of the value of manual training as a co-or- dinative force. Therefore, the first thing to demand would seem to be continuity in manual training throughout the whole school life. What have we now .? Excellent man- ual training in the kindergarten (when it is carried on for the simple reason that it is good for the child to create, and not in deference to some far-fetched symbolism). We have excellent manual training in some secondary schools. In the years between we find some coherent, much incoherent, drawing ; we find here some sloyd, there some cooking, elsewhere some sewing, and, scattered hither and yon, vari- ous more or less mad experimentations of sundry cranks and school committees. Most of these experiments are tried one year and are abandoned the next, are hotly pur- sued by one committee and are roundly denounced by its successor. But in this is neither cohesion of plan nor co- ordination of result. Secondary school men may lay out good courses; but, as a rule, they are superstructures with- out foundations, hanging in educational air. Those courses ought, however, to be the culmination of eight years of wisely planned, steadily pursued, widely varied manual training exercises. The pupils coming to a high school should not there first meet with tools ; these chil- dren should have been uninterruptedly using their hands 13 to create, just as they have been using their tongues to speak, from their earliest day at school. Manual train- ing cannot promote co-ordination until that training itself is made co-ordinate. Furthermore, it seems to me, manual training ought to stop apologizing and ought, if it must, to come out and fight. It was perhaps necessary, away back in the seven- ties, for this new kind of study, like the genius imprisoned in Sinbad's bottle, to speak low and make fair promises ; for it was indeed corked up tight by that then master of the educational situation, the nine-centuries-old monastic curriculum. It was probably the part of wisdom for man- ual training at that time to swear that it had no thought of being useful, that it did not dream of connecting itself with vulgar trades, that it would deal with principles, not with practices, that it would teach the driving of nails, but not the making of a living. That probation period, however, has gone by. The bottle has been uncorked, the genius of manual training, or, rather, of laboratory methods, has come out, and has expanded to enormous proportions; while before it kneels the old curriculum, in its turn apolo- gizing for existence, in its turn begging for the right to live. The " humanities " may not like manual training any better than they did thirty years ago ; but their dislike now IS the hate of fear, not of supercilious arrogance. Being, then, practically masters of the educational field, why longer maintain the fiction of academic uselessness, why longer declare that manual training intends to be only disciplinary, not economically serviceable ? Its use, as I have tried to show, is superlatively in the direction of physical, mental, and moral discipline ; but its power in those directions will be infinitely greater if it allies itself with life, with industry, with bread-and-butter getting. 14 For, after all, every one of us must get his bread-and- butter, the great majority must earn it by their own two hands. No school education, praise Heaven, can be so bad as to defraud us of the lifelong schooling of our daily toil. But during all these centuries (thanks mainly to its mon- astic origin) education has been acting as though it could stand apart from life and livelihood, has been holding itself aloof from the boy's and girl's real interests, has been covertly sneering at manual labor, has been filling thou- sands and tens of thousands of honest youth with a vague notion that the educated man can be a sort of lily of the field which, having arrayed itself in Greek and Latin, need neither toil nor spin. Therefore, we see such a host of starveling clerks, pettifogging lawyers, and political hangers- on, therefore we find it well-nigh impossible to get a good mechanic, therefore we observe the tendency of craftsman- ship — once jealous of its skill and reputation — to seek short hours and shoddy ways of work. The present curse of this country is glue. With it we stick senseless jig-saw work upon our furniture, foolish gew-gaws on our " Crazy- Jane " houses, hideous passementerie (I think they call it) on our slop-shop gowns, demoralizing smatterings of false cul- ture upon our boys and girls. Manual training, if it will, can carry on a crusade of the noblest kind, — a crusade against this spirit of veneer, sham, hypocrisy ; a crusade against any ornamentation, culture, or virtue that is only stuck on ; a crusade for that real beauty — whether in crafts- manship, in art, in architecture, in literature, in social and political life — which grows out of the honest dedication of anything, no matter how homely or common, to a noble use; a crusade against false, monastic, anti-social, self-centred culture ; a crusade for real culture, which, as I have already said, is the science and art of living wisely and nobly with and for one's fellow-men. 15 To these ends, it seems to me, manual training must go into every school ; and it must go, not as a fixed plan of study, but as a special means of meeting the particular needs of that school's children. What, it should ask, is the prevailing industry of this city, what the peculiar craft of this neighborhood, what are these particular boys and girls almost certain to be and do? Having ascertained these facts, manual training can then perform an educa- tional work such as has scarcely yet been dreamed of in ennobling those industries, in uplifting those children's ideals, in marrying education to life, in wedding true cult- ure to genuine industry. To perform this great work, however, manual training has still another fight to wage, — a fight against the absurd distinction between the arts called useful and the arts called fine. There is and should be no such discrimina- tion. No art is fine which does not, through its beauty as through an enhancing veil, exhibit its fundamental use. No art is useful which does not, even in its simplest forms, mount into the empyrean of the fine. Beauty and truth are one and the same, and every exercise in manual train- ing should emphasize both. The great fields of ethics and aesthetics can be reached through other avenues than Greek and Latin ; but we have scarcely yet surveyed these avenues, while we have allowed the old classical paths to be over- grown with grammatical and philological weeds. One of the broadest of the modern avenues to ethics and aesthetics is through manual training, whose possibilities as a true culture study are, in my opinion, almost wholly undeveloped. For in most instances the manual trainers have avoided use lest they offend the educational tories, have failed of beauty because, first, there cannot be beauty without use, and, secondiv, because aesthetics has been terra incognita to the i6 well-meaning mechanic-teacher, who, given a task to which he was unequal, has been as ignorant of child training as of true manual art. This brings us to the final, and what all educators know to be the crucial, problem of the manual training question : how to get teachers fit for the splendid work that they might do. In the beginning resort had to be, of course, to the ranks of the skilled mechanics, — sincere men, well- intentioned men, men seeking to do the best they could. But they were not trained teachers ; they were hampered by the absurd restrictions against usefulness in manual train- ing ; they were obliged to build for the high-school pupils whom they taught a superstructure without educational foundations. So there resulted something which was well called shop-work ; for it was little other than the 'prentice work of any shop, — interesting, somewhat stimulating, bet- ter than nothing. But it was not and is not manual train- ing in the sense in which we see its splendid possibilities ; it could not, in very great measure, aid in co-ordination, stimulate creativeness, promote culture, or build up char- acter. For that true work of manual training the schools must have broadly educated, completely trained, highly in- spired men and women, who see the many bearings of man- ual training upon life and character, who are wise in art, in ethics, and in that offspring of art and ethics which men call aesthetics. There are many such teachers now. When such are in the majority, manual training will surely be extended into all its many educative forms, will be then made con- tinuous throughout the whole school life, will be then up- lifted to its rightful place as the strongest single teaching force of modern times. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 019 744 290 6 % LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 019 744 290 6 HoUinger Corp. pH8.5