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APPENDIX B
HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSTRUCTIONAL HANDWORK AS AN EDUCATIONAL SUBJECT[*]
The inclusion of Constructive Handwork in an educational curriculum is a comparatively modern idea Of the three nations of antiquity in whose life contemporary western civilisation has its roots, the Jews alone appear to have found a place for Handwork in their scheme of education. Among their literary class at the beginning of the Christian era, as amongst the Prussian nobility of the present day, it was a common practice for youths, while undergoing their regular studies, to learn some definite trade; but the object was rather utilitarian than educational, to provide against a possible reverse of fortune rather than to secure wider cultural training. To the Greek, on the other hand, constructional Handwork was associated with the idea of servile labour, or with the narrow routine of the uneducated craftsman. As such, it would have seemed irreconcilable with that harmonious cultivation of the bodily and mental powers which was his ideal of education. On the other hand, both in Athens and Sparta (which represent the two complementary types of Greek education) fundamental importance was attached to eurhythmics, which involved a training of the body, including the arms and hands as well as the feet, in obedience to the laws of rhythm. One object of eurhythmics was to secure through physical self-control that mental self-possession and development which is one aim of constructional Handwork in the school curriculum.
Roman education, in its later developments, derived its methods in large measure from the Greek tradition, though the influence of the latter was impaired by being transplanted into a different social order. An important part of Roman education for boys of the well-to-do classes lay in physical discipline, which, so far as it went, achieved the purpose of self-control aimed at in educational Handwork.
From the fall of the Roman Empire till the close of the Middle Ages, educational influence ran in two separate channels. The smaller of these (though intellectually not the less important) was bookish education, which was almost entirely in the hands of the clergy and designed for those who intended to take Holy Orders, or who desired to follow the profession of law. In this branch of mediæval education Latin was the basis of the curriculum. The second great branch of mediæval training, though not organised in schools, was even more intimately connected with the needs and habits of social life. Its main form was apprenticeship, whether artistic or industrial, the two being often closely united. On the spiritual side it derived its power from membership in a great spiritual community and from observance of its practices. On the side of apprenticeship, it was virtually limited to boys; but girls also came under the influence of this educational tradition in its social and spiritual aspects.
For the children of the aristocracy and of families connected with the aristocracy, no more elaborate form of social training was in vogue. This included much training of the body and of manual aptitude in those arts and exercises which were practised in the daily life, in the duties and in the amusements of the nobility and courtly families. At the time of the Italian Renaissance, this type of knightly or courtly education became highly developed and elaborate.
The Renaissance, viewed as a revival of learning (but not in its wider aspect as a renewal of the mental energy of Europe), brought with it great improvements in the bookish form of education, and led to improvement not
[*This Appendix contains the grossly offensive phrase 'inferior races'. I am uncomfortable about reproducing this on the web, but hope readers will regard it - as I do - as an example of the appalling attitudes which prevailed at the time this report was produced.]
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only in methods of linguistic teaching, but in the choice of literature used in the curriculum. It also led, in some favoured cases, to a more humanistic turn in courtly education, and to the higher education of some women.
In Protestant Europe, the influence of the Reformation led to a diffusion of the elements of literary education among the masses of the people, not with any professional purpose, but in order that the younger generation might be given direct access to the Bible. Thus the Reformation, where its influence was strongest, diffused throughout the people a type of elementary education which had hitherto been in the main confined to those boys who were destined for Holy Orders or for the legal profession. Side by side with this literary education, the practice of apprenticeship persisted. The two types of education were not co-ordinated, and the people's school of the Reformation became in Protestant Europe an elementary literary school in which the moral discipline was based on scriptural instruction and theological principles. In Catholic Europe the older form of educational tradition persisted, though, under the influence of the counter-Reformation, popular schools in which the elements of a literary training were imparted steadily increased in number.
It may be said, therefore, that the organisation of primary education for the people on a literary basis had its origin in those countries in which the Reformation prevailed. Its spirit was in great measure individualistic. At the same time, it was closely associated with theological discipline, and was designed as one part of a social discipline which rested upon a definite creed. But this purely literary tradition was progressively undermined by the speculations of a series of thinkers and philanthropists, and shaken to its foundations by the social upheaval that accompanied the French Revolution. In our own day its overthrow has been completed by the irresistible advance of the industrial movement.
Of these thinkers the first, and not the least remarkable, was the Moravian Bishop John Amos Komensky (1592-1670), better known as Comenius, a man of the most ardent and encyclopædic intellect. To him the ultimate aim was "eternal happiness with God", for which knowledge of the Divine nature was essential, to be attained mainly through the study of the Universe He had created. This study was the business of education. A true education, therefore, should provide the groundwork of every branch of knowledge. Such a programme could only be realised by an entirely new method of instruction. The barbarous traditional discipline which made school a torture chamber and learning hateful must be banished, and the intellectual curiosity natural to every child stimulated and guided. Though there is nothing to show that Comenius ever grasped the idea of applying Handwork to the school curriculum, nevertheless in laying down the principle that instruction should be through things and not through words, he unconsciously went halfway towards it, and in any case prepared men's minds for fundamental changes. His labours, however, bore little fruit in his own day. The Thirty Years' War overwhelmed in ruin and exile the Moravian Brethren, the peaceful community which might otherwise have furnished a sheltering environment for the practical development of his ideas. The writings of John Locke (1632-1704) are of importance in this connection in two ways. On the one hand his scheme for the education of a gentleman (1693) embraced the learning of at least one trade (preferably Carpentry), of two or three, if possible. His object, however, was not educational development so much as physical training and recreation. On the other, he lent his powerful advocacy (1697) on social grounds to the movement for the establishment of industrial schools for the children of the poor, which marked the close of the 17th century.
It is very different when we come to Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the herald of the French Revolution. "Emile", the pupil of his educational treatise, also learns a trade, but he does so not for the sake of exercise or recreation (these were otherwise abundantly provided for), but partly with the object of securing economic independence, and still more of enabling him to understand and sympathise with the artisan and to realise the true dignity of manual labour. The profound influence
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which these views of the Genevan reformer exercised is seen in the conception of civic education expressed in the Registration Law which was adopted in the year 3 (1792) by the French Revolutionary Government. "Young people may not be enrolled on the civic register unless they shew that they can read and write and practice [sic] a mechanical occupation."
Rousseau was an educationist because he was a social reformer. In revolt against the injustice and artificiality of the society of his day, he aimed at giving the young an education which would lead them to burst the fetters and so transform society. His ideal has been happily termed a "Robinson Crusoe kind of education". The child was to go straight to nature, ignoring the traditional experience of the community and the books in which it was enshrined. The test of his training, as reflected in "Sandford and Merton", the work of Rousseau's British disciple Day, was the pupil's ability to shift for himself if shipwrecked on a desert island. Such a plan obviously assumes throughout the basal principle of constructive Handwork "Learn by Doing".
The first attempt to give practical effect to Rousseau's ideas was made by the German Basedow, who in 1774 established at Dessan an institution with the grandiloquent title of Philanthropinum, intended probably to indicate that kindness rather than severity was to be the disciplinary motive. The Philanthropinum is important as the first school to embody a branch of constructive Handwork in its curriculum on definitely educational grounds. It had a brief but brilliant existence and exercised considerable influence on German educational thought.
The Philanthropinum was, however, a Secondary School for the well-to-do. The application of Rousseau's ideas to the primary school was reserved for another Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi (1746-1826). He began in 1775 with an industrial village school for the poor, based on farm life and its operations, including spinning, weaving, etc. Writing and Arithmetic were carried on concurrently but independently. This school failed for lack of financial support. His effective educational activity, however, dates from 1799, when he started a school for the training of teachers at Burgdorff, continued some years later on French soil at Yverdun. Through all these experiments manual work played a prominent part.
Pestalozzi's genius was essentially practical, and his work did much to convince philanthropists and politicians that the new conception of education was no mere dream of the revolutionary doctrinaire.
The series of great educationists closes in the person of the German idealist philosopher Fröbel (1782-1852), who formulated a philosophic basis for the whole range of education, though he had only time to work it out in practice for the lowest stage of all, that of the Infant School or, as he called it, the Kindergarten. With him self-development is the aim and self-activity the method of education. The child's first natural activities are manual. Education must therefore begin with the hands. Rousseau had recognised Handwork on social and economic grounds. Pestalozzi as a means of acquiring knowledge. But to Fröbel it was the instrument of self-development, knowledge and dexterity being, so to speak, mere by-products in the manufacture of the self. Thus in Fröbel we reach the climax. "On distinctively educational grounds Fröbel gave to all manual and industrial training and to all forms of constructive work the place which they are coming to occupy in modern schooling." It is significant that the United States, the country in which manual training has up to the present time won the widest acceptance in all stages of education, is in a special degree the home of the Kindergarten
Scandinavia. For the first national development of Manual Training on strictly educational lines we must go to the Scandinavian countries, among which for this purpose must be included Finland, a Swedish colony and still largely Swedish in social life and language, though under Russian government. The movement began and reached its most complete form in Finland. It originated with a Finnish Lutheran pastor, Uno Cygnæus, who after ministerial work in the Russian colony of Alaska
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(1839-1846), returned to take up a pastorate in St. Petersburg. Residence in a primitive community naturally turns the attention of a thoughtful man to popular education, and Cygnæus returned to Europe with a mind preoccupied with this problem. During the 12 years of his residence in St. Petersburg it continued to engage his thoughts, and he now became acquainted with the writings of Pestalozzi and Fröbel, of whose ideas he soon showed himself an ardent disciple. He gradually thought out a scheme of popular education, which chance was to give him the opportunity to translate into fact. In 1856 Alexander II, who had just ascended the Russian throne, visited his Grand Duchy of Finland full of ideas of social reform. In particular he directed the Senate to prepare a scheme of national elementary education. The Senate invited public discussion, and Cygnæus' proposals showed such mastery of the subject that in 1858 he was appointed to carry out the educational reorganisation. He began by making a tour, memorable to the annals of education, through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, and on his return formulated a definite scheme. An essential part of this scheme was the extension of Fröbel's great principle "Learn by Doing" from the Kindergarten into the Primary School. This was embodied in the Primary Education Law of 1866, which was carried into effect under his own supervision. Under this law the Elementary School period was to cover six years, two in the lower, four in the higher school. Manual Training might be given in the lower school, but was compulsory throughout the higher school. It consisted of Wood-work of the type generally known as Sloyd for the boys and Needlework for the girls, the time given to the subject being from four to six hours a week. The influence of this movement soon made itself felt in Sweden, and led to the establishment by Otto Salomon in 1872 of the famous Sloyd Training School for Teachers at Nääs in Gothenburg, which has so profoundly affected educational thought in this country and in the United States. Unlike the Finnish system, this was, till the death of its founder, a private enterprise. Sloyd was at first barely tolerated by the Swedish Ministry of Education, was subsequently recognised and encouraged by a small grant, and still remains an optional subject of the curriculum. It is now, however, taken by some three-fourths of the Swedish Primary Schools.
It appears at first sight singular that, though Cygnæus derived his inspiration from Fröbel, he made no attempt to provide suitable work for the lower classes of the Elementary School which follow immediately on the Kindergarten. This is, no doubt, to be explained by the local circumstances. In a country of lakes and forests like Finland (or Sweden), where the rural population is thinly scattered, every farmhouse has to depend on its own work for most of the ordinary household utensils and ornaments, and wood is the universal material. Thus working in wood was an essential part of farm life, and this cottage industry (Slöjd, to use its Swedish name), a mixture of Carpentry and Carving, furnished ready to hand the obvious instrument of the new educational method. But Wood-work in any serious form makes demands on physical strength which render it impracticable for the lower classes in Elementary Schools. Again, the introduction into the school of a definite industry with traditions, methods, and rules of its own made correlation with the ordinary subjects of the curriculum exceedingly difficult. Sloyd has thus existed rather as a separate subject in a compartment by itself than as a method of instruction permeating and vitalising the whole curriculum. On the other hand the cottage industry it represents has always contained a strong artistic element, and in this respect Sloyd has had a cultural effect which has been lacking in the more purely mechanical forms of Wood-work adopted by schools in industrial countries. For the same reason no doubt the educational aim has been from the first the predominant one in Sloyd, and in the hands of its Swedish protagonist, Otto Salomon, it has been the instrument of a powerful educational propaganda. The fact that though based on a peasant industry it has made its way into a few of the Secondary Schools for Girls points in the same direction. Such is the Sloyd system in its strength and weakness. In the rural districts of
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Finland and Sweden it still remains the sole form of School Handwork. In the cities, where life approximates more to ordinary industrial conditions, there has been a tendency to develop the lighter forms of Handwork for junior classes and to supplement Wood-work by Metal-work at the top of the school.
England. Towards the end of the 17th century the growth of industrial competition led to the development of child labour, and philanthropic effort began to take the form of training children for work. In 1675 Firmin established his Spinning School in Little Britain, a combination of a factory and a school. Children were admitted at three years old, from the age of three to four were taught reading and from the age of four onwards spinning, etc. Firmin showed the way. The Charity Schools followed with the same object, the production of apprentices, but with less insistence on manual work. They grew until the middle of the third decade of the 18th century and then declined. In 1723 an Act was passed for the formation of Unions of parishes to which we owe our Workhouses. The Workhouse, originally an industrial school for children, was virtually the Firmin School adopted and administered by an ad hoc public authority. The Industrial School movement failed mainly owing to ignorant methods of teaching. It seems to have been assumed that to give practical instruction nothing more was required than the practical skill of the ordinary craftsman. Its failure threw back the cause of Educational Handwork for a century. Handwork in schools came to be looked on as a badge of pauperism and a device for preventing the poor boy from rising out of his own class; and for the greater part of the last century [i.e. the 19th] Reading and Writing were regarded as the be-all and the end-all of popular education. But the older tradition did not entirely die out. It dragged on a kind of subterranean existence in a few Industrial Schools and Reformatories, till near the last quarter of the century, when the decay of apprenticeship training and the growth of laboratory work in connection with Science classes began once more to force to the front the idea of manual work as a legitimate part of school training.
The subject of School Handwork was broached at the Social Science Congress in Nottingham in 1883, when Sylvanus Thompson and other men of science strongly urged its introduction. Two years later Dr. Gladstone, with the co-operation of the Headmaster of the Beethoven Street Elementary School, who had been struck by the way in which his boys were crowding into clerkships and avoiding manual occupations, succeeded in getting a school workshop built, and the work was carried on with such success that in 1887 the London School Board appointed a special committee to consider the whole question. The report of this committee was conceived in the broadest spirit. It recommended that in order to make school training a better preparation for the work of life:
(1) The Kindergarten method should be extended right up throughout the Primary Schools;
(2) Manual Instruction should be correlated with Elementary Science and Drawing; and
(3) Should be given by qualified teachers;
(4) The necessary time should be found by reducing the number of hours assigned to book subjects.
The importance of this report can hardly be exaggerated. It was the first reasoned pronouncement made by any local authority in favour of Educational Handwork, and it proceeded from the authority which represented by far the largest, wealthiest, and most influential community in the United Kingdom. The development of the work was greatly encouraged at the outset by the assistance of the City and Guilds of London Institute, which had already in operation a system of Manual Training for apprentices in various industries.
Meanwhile a similar development had been proceeding independently under the Birmingham School Board, and it was not long before the vigorous action and representations of these two important bodies affected
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the policy of the central authority. In 1889 the Technical Instruction Act authorised local authorities to supply or aid Manual Instruction except in Elementary Schools. In the following year the Board of Education included it amongst the subjects which might be taught in Elementary Schools; and a few years later it was made obligatory upon students in Training Colleges who were not working for a University degree. Furthermore, for some years past the Board of Education, in approving plans of buildings for recognised Secondary Schools, has required that they should contain provision for a manual work-room.
Both in London and Birmingham the movement seems to have originated in the vocational idea, and the work was at first limited to the higher classes and took the form of carpentry. As it grew, however, the idea of educational development made itself more and more felt. Year by year a stream of English teachers had been making their way to the Sloyd Seminarium at Nääs in the south of Sweden, and coming under the personal influence of its Director, Otto Salomon. Few went through this experience without having their educational outlook profoundly modified, and many returned ardent propagandists. The Sloyd Association and the Educational Handwork Union (subsequently amalgamated under the title of the Educational Handwork Association) and the Scottish Sloyd Association preached the new educational doctrine chiefly north of the Humber. For a time there was considerable rivalry, even hostility, between the advocates of the English and the Swedish ideas respectively, but they have gradually drawn closer to each other. The Nääs student has learnt that it is educationally unsound to transplant a foreign system in all its details, and the English Manual Trainer has largely assimilated the educational principles which are the secret of the strength of Sloyd. This process has been powerfully aided by the influence of the Kindergarten. There has in consequence been a steady tendency to fill up the gap between the manual occupations of the Kindergarten and the Wood-work of the sixth and seventh standards with lighter forms of Hand-work, and also for the Wood-work itself to take a more educational form. Thus, in 1893, a system of Hand and Eye Training was established in London, Birmingham, and elsewhere for the lower standards (Paper-folding and Cutting, Cardboard-modelling, etc.). The scope of the subject has also been further extended by the introduction of Metal-work in Higher Grade and Continuation Schools for those who had completed the Wood-work course. At the same time class-teaching has more and more given way to individual teaching, and the practice of exercises to the making of complete articles.
America. Manual Training in the United States derives its strength from two independent. motives, the educational motive working up from the Kindergarten through the Elementary School, and the vocational motive working down through the Secondary School from the Technical College. The forms of work and methods of instruction in the Elementary Schools do not differ materially from those which prevail in this country. The light work carried on in the four lower grades (between the ages of 6 and 10) is a development of Kindergarten work and is succeeded by Wood-work, which in the main is either Swedish Sloyd or based on the same general principles. In the Secondary School sphere, however, the Manual Training High School is a distinctive and characteristic American product. In 1876 there was a display at the Philadelphia Exhibition of Russian Trade School work. This made a deep impression on Doctor Woodward, the Headmaster of a Secondary School, who conceived the idea of utilising work of this kind for the curriculum of the American High School. It soon became clear that the school he had organised on these lines at St. Louis met a real want, and the number of Manual Training High Schools has ever since been steadily increasing. The American High School covers the four years from 14 to 18. The Manual Work is technological in character, and embraces in the first year carpentry, and in the remaining three years heavy Metal-work, usually in the order: second year, forging; third and fourth year, mechanical drawing and machine fitting; though the type and
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order are occasionally varied. The amount of time devoted to the manual side varies considerably. In some schools it occupies one-fifth of the time-table; in one or two the proportion rises as high as one-half. One-third seems the most common proportion and that which the best American educational opinion is disposed to regard as the maximum permissible, but, owing to the absorbing nature of the work and the pressure of industrial interests from outside, there is a constant tendency for it to rise.
The Manual Training High School is essentially a city school, and usually for boys alone. In the few cases where girls are also admitted, their manual work takes the form of Millinery, Cookery, and Domestic Economy. The aim is partly educational and partly vocational, though the vocational element tends to predominate. A school of this kind enables the lad who is going into commercial or industrial life to prolong his schooling until 18, and at the same time turns out a regular supply of educated lads qualified for industrial posts for which reason it is much favoured by the great industrial firms. It is undoubtedly the form of American High School which has most life and vigour, and seems likely in course of time to extinguish, so far at least as schools maintained by public authorities are concerned, the more literary type of High School. The same development is beginning to make itself felt in the private schools in which the sons of the well-to-do are prepared for the older Universities. At the same time the Manual Training High School has a literary side on which great stress is laid. In this, English studies play the chief part. German and, in many cases, Latin also enter into the curriculum, but rather as a mental gymnastic.
America has also another type of Manual Training School not found elsewhere, of which the original is the remarkable Institute for coloured people at Hampton in Virginia, officered mainly by white teachers. There is a hardly less famous daughter institution further south at Tuskegee, founded and conducted on the same lines and with a coloured staff by Booker Washington, an old graduate of Hampton. These are rather industrial communities with a strong educational side than regular schools. Their object is to train and equip the coloured population for the varied occupations of rural life as farmers, masons, harness-makers, wheelwrights, etc. Hampton Institute was established immediately after the close of the great Civil War by the Federal General Armstrong, a man who in spirituality, breadth of view, and power of understanding inferior races and commanding their devotion offers a singularly close parallel to our own General Gordon. Placed in charge, during the last phase of the war, of thousands of run-away slaves who had taken refuge within the Northern lines, he found himself face to face with the problem how these were to be fitted for the new existence as free citizens that lay before them. To this work he devoted the remainder of his life, raising by his own personal efforts the necessary funds, and gradually building up the great Institute which embodies his ideas and still breathes his spirit. The fundamental principle of the Institution is the union of religious life and industrial training. Book studies come in only in dependence on and illustration of the industrial work. From the first the student receives wages for his labour, and out of them pays for his schooling. The feeling that he is paying his way acts as a powerful moral tonic, and supplies a back-bone of self-respect and independence. The success of the system has been extraordinary. It is hardly too much to say that it has largely solved the problem of training inferior races for the privileges and responsibilities of ordered life in a free political community. This moral effect of industrial training rightly organised is fully borne out by the experience of Reformatory Schools in our own country.
The Manual Training High School has direct connection, not only with the industries, but also with the great Technical Colleges and with the Applied Science Faculties in which the American Universities are peculiarly rich. Thus the University plays an important part in the promotion of Manual Education. Its Engineering Graduate has necessarily been
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through a programme of work which would qualify him to conduct the Manual Training Class of the High School. Nor is the more strictly educational Handwork of the Elementary School neglected; though here it is naturally the Faculty of Education that steps in. Thus the Teachers' Training College of Columbia University, New York, has organised courses of light Handwork which form part of a qualifying scheme of study for an initial degree in the Faculty. Such an arrangement is no doubt the exception, but is indicative of a general attitude. It is indeed just where educational investigation is most scientific and profound e.g. in the Education Faculties of Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago, that belief in the value of Handwork as an educational instrument, is most unqualified. The deliberate judgment of William James, the great psychologist may here be quoted. "The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in Secondary Education lies in the introduction of the Manual Training Schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre."
France. During the half century which followed the Revolution of 1830, when France began to recover from the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars, several experimental attempts were made to utilise the schools for industrial training, but these were local, disconnected, and usually confined to single industries. It was not until the great reconstruction effected by the Education Law of 1882 that Manual Training became part of the national system.
This law established the Infants' School with its manual occupations and universal Primary Schools with manual work as an essential part of the curriculum. These were supplemented by the growth under municipal management of Higher Primary Schools, which, at first unsystematised and sporadic, were organised by the further Education Laws of 1886 and 1893, and now form an important part of the French School system. They are intended for the most promising of the children from the Primary Schools who are looking forward to industrial employment. Beginning as a mere extension of the general Primary curriculum, they have moved more and more in the trade direction. The school period is four years. During the first year all the pupils pursue the same general course; the three remaining years are devoted to specialised courses in Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture respectively, between which the pupil has to make his choice. Manual work fills a considerable part of the time-table. This Higher Primary School is essentially a native French development. It has some analogy with the American Manual Training High School on one side and the English Higher Grade School and Higher Standard School on the other. It differs from the former in being definitely primary, from the latter in the greater length and thoroughness of its programme and in its closer relation to particular industries. The Act of 1889, which controls Technical instruction in English schools, limits it to "instruction in the principles of Science and Art applicable to industries", but expressly declares that it "shall not include teaching the practice of any trade or industry or employment". Manual work is thus viewed in France mainly from the vocational standpoint, and does not enter into the curriculum of the Secondary Schools.
Germany and Austria. Towards the close of the 18th century a movement in the direction of technical education began in North Germany and Bohemia and schools of industry were established which provided for Manual Work. But these were too much on trade lines, and the growth of Pestalozzi's ideas soon discredited and ultimately extinguished them. At the same time the impetus given by Pestalozzi to the rural school began to influence the German Governments. This led, during the first half of the 19th century, to the establishment of school gardens for the practical instruction of children, particularly in fruit growing, with the definite object of improving the conditions of rural life. Beginning in 1814 in Schleswig Holstein it, spread to Nassau and Prussia and subsequently to Mecklenburg
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Schwerin, Bavaria, the upper Palatinate, and Saxony. It has attained its fullest development in Austria. At first confined to the Elementary Schools, it has in Prussia and Saxony invaded the Secondary Schools and Training Colleges, and has even got foothold in one or two of the Universities.
But the motive of this governmental policy was purely social and economic. It was not until the last two decades of the century that the growth of Fröbelian ideas began to revive belief in Manual Training as an educational force. School workshops were established, the number of which increased from 164 in 1884 to 650 in 1898, of which over 400 were in Prussia. In 1886 was founded the Association for Educational Handwork for Boys. In 1889 the Leipzic [Leipzig] Training College was founded under Doctor W. Götze, and since 1895 a Theory Course has been conducted at the University of Jena. The subjects taught correspond on the whole with those pursued in English Schools.
Age 8-9. Preliminary courses of light Handwork, Paper-cutting, clay, etc.
10-12. Cardboard-modelling.
12 and onwards. Wood and Metal-work of various kinds and Glass work.
The Handwork Association and its Seminar at Leipzic have had considerable success in do far as they have endeavoured to reach boys out of school. The new Manual occupations tend to fill the place taken in English Schools by organised games, enlisting the interest of the pupil by the scope they offer for physical exercise and dexterity and proving a valuable ally to the teacher. For a long time all attempts to introduce them as regular subjects were frustrated by the emphatic opposition of the Elementary School Teachers. The Annual Conference of the Union of Teachers' Associations held at Cologne at Whitsuntide in 1900 accepted by a very large majority a resolution deprecating in the strongest terms the introduction of manual work for boys into the Elementary Schools. By that curious irony of fate which so often allows a winning cause to appear hopelessly defeated, the same year witnessed the establishment of manual instruction in the curriculum of the 8th year of the Elementary Schools of Münich. This action was taken on the recommendation of Dr. Kerschensteiner, whose writings have also done much to influence public opinion in Germany. His belief in the efficiency of the new development was fully and immediately justified. For whereas the attendance at the eighth year course, being voluntary, had hitherto been inconsiderable, with the introduction of this new subject it at once rose, without impairing that of other institutions receiving boys of a similar age. The past decade has produced the most marked change in the attitude of the Elementary School teacher. Instruction through action is a principle now so universally accepted that the Arbeitschule or the Tatschule is the educational fashion of the day, and has already produced a literature of no inconsiderable extent. It is desirable, however, to add that though the opinions of the teachers have changed, no extensive alterations have as yet been made in the official programmes of instruction.
A similar movement of a more industrial type has also been recently making remarkable progress under Dr. Kerschensteiner in Münich, chiefly in Continuation Schools and in branches of work directly bearing on the actual occupations of the pupils. This appears to owe its marked vitality less to the obvious utility of the work than to the reality and freshness it derives from its close connection with the everyday life of the pupil and the inspiring personality of the teacher.
In Austria a system of State Manual Training Schools (Handwerkerschulen) has also been established with apparently satisfactory results. These schools replace the last two years (12-14) of the Primary School and are intended to give direct preparation for a manual calling. During the first of these years the course consists of Wood-work and Metal-work, and is the same for all; during the second the pupils specialise in one or the other.
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Summaries of Evidence (image-only pdf file)
[pages 389-411]
Index (image-only pdf file)