Margaret McMillan

“ The existence of the elementary school has made it almost necessary to carry on the study of early childhood and to get to know something about the child. But the existence of adult schools, evening classes and technical schools, does not seem to have made it so clear that there is something to learn about youth as well as about childhood. Most people who consider evening schools or training colleges even, do so from the point of view of critics, not students, and so it happens that few are on really safe ground when they are dealing with the hobbledehoy of either sex. ”

“ As children grow older they put away childish things, but their impulsion is still reliable. They cease to want to become a humble order of artisan. Most of the boys want to be engineers!
And meantime thousands of mere machine-minders are being turned away. And there is a greater demand for skilled and inventive workers in the real workshops of the future!
It is not for the school doctor—camping hastily as it were on the outskirts of school life—to enter yet on a full explanation and justification of this new impulse of youth. ”

“ Hence we find that muscles are generally arranged in pairs, each muscle of a pair being antagonistic in its action to the other. Rouleaux, the great authority on mechanics, says that the present day ideal of the great mechanic is to advance from force-closure to pair-closure. In force-closure, as we have seen, the forces of nature are used to stop some movement of a machine, but in pair-closure the machine itself can stop itself—like a moral person! The ideal of the mechanic, as well as of the saint, is self-control. ”

“ A great many things still hamper them, but there is one above all others that hugs more closely at their straining arms than any other, and that is the fact that our educational system is far in the rear of the Spirit of the New Age. It is timid. It is timid as the ancient Greeks who hugged the coast in stormy times. It is afraid to let youth project freely. ”

“ The technical school at Chicago which took Dellavos' school avowedly as its model was started through the generosity of a few rich men in the seventies, and Charles Ham, in his book Manual Training, gives a full account of its work.
There is nothing strange or novel about it—and yet it is bold. At every stage the pupil resumes all he has learned from the first lesson, and then goes forward unflinchingly—recapitulating the industrial life of the world. Drawing is the basis of the work at every stage, so the pupils spend a great deal of time over this subject. ”

“ That is why he is awkward, embarrassed by the sudden growth, for example of the lower limbs, which made people invent for him the name of hobbledehoy. The effects of this sudden impulse of growth are not only interesting, but very various. It may break up old barriers like a storm, so that a boy or girl who appeared in childhood very defective may come suddenly into a new heritage, and appear henceforth as normal or almost normal. The affections as well as the intellect usually suddenly expand and deepen in a very remarkable way, that seems to transform the character. ”

“ A popular orator or public person holds the imagination of many young people in secret for years, while the ideal of the parent, which may be a higher one in a sense, does not probably in the least attract them. The parent's ideal as a rule is rational, beyond the point where it remains lovely in the eyes of youth. As a rule, indeed, it is only the noblest elements in it that even feebly attract youth. ”

“ At every step the work grows more grave, more absorbing. It is, as we said, not the teacher who grows stern, but the work. We are told that the pupil gains as much power in a day in the school forge as he would gain in a year in an ordinary smith's shop. ”

“ No doubt some great hand workers suffered through neglect, and wished for recognition. What is more remarkable, however, is that they seem to have suffered infinitely less through such causes than did other orders of great men. Our great inventors, too, so little talked about even to-day, suffer less; and this detachedness appears even in the fully-trained pupils of the new technical college. "It may be," said Ham, "that there are vain statesmen, kings, priests, but we should as little expect to find a vain mechanic as a vain scientist." ”

“ It is quite clear, then, that youth has a great deal to lose as well as to gain, and it is a consciousness of this that inspired such phrases as "Whom the gods love die young" and "Be true to the dreams of thy youth." ”

“ But for the new technical training we may claim that it favours a movement that is not degenerative in any sense, but progressive. All through the rationalizing process goes on and is not checked. It consists, not in the discovery of the perversions of human beings, but in the discovery of the nature of materials and the forces of nature and of what is possible in dealing with them. ”

“ So we have now to consider a kind of projection that has gone on for ages, and then after ages halted, and finally in modern days appeared to find a soul and to develop in a way that must either lift us up into a higher kind of life or destroy us for ever.
Every school boy knows that there are three kinds of levers in the body. ”

“ It cannot be active and controlling many things at once. And so the power of man, though very beautiful in work, was also very restricted. It was also very uncertain. This did not matter so much when one was dealing with inert things, with wood that lay still on the bench, and metals that were under the power of the moulder every moment. But when motor power itself was projected, it was a very different matter. To give oneself up to the mercy of steam is not a thing that even the most confiding would care to do. ”

“ So the discovery of the new order of schools is at the mercy of every wind that blows. It is no more ours than is the bird who alights on the window-sill, and who then, startled by her own arrival, flies away before we welcome her. ”

“ Thus the early education (with its care of the body) generates power, but power can continue to be generated only through the exercise of what has already come into existence. The pupil passes from the metal work to the forging room. ”

“ They are all going to make improvements and inventions, and they know of a score that require to be made, and that they may very well take a part in. As a matter of fact the young mechanic's ambitions are quite reasonable. There is no other field of invention where so many may make useful contributions; and the pupils know this.
Each knows that by working hard he may do some very important thing—that he may improve a machine, discover an improved way of dyeing, forging, tempering, a new way of applying what he has learned. ”

“ The incentives to vanity are not quickened in dealing, as the artisan deals, with the forces of nature—they are quelled rather. They are quelled even in handwork. The finest mechanics of the past got little credit for their work. ”

“ It is to have a perfect power of stopping or controlling the movement. That is true in all work—and in conduct. It is true in mechanics and in morals. In work it was for ages the hand that was the great controlling agent—and almost the only one. ”

“ Just as the youth at Oxford tests himself by speaking and writing in public, the youth of the Moscow school went through a much more searching kind of test—a test that surely will appeal to all truly manly youths and practical men. ”

“ Watt, the instrument maker, Stephenson the brakesman, Telford the mason, Rennie the wheelwright, Dudley the artisan, Brindley, and Cartwright, and a host of other practical men, made the great projections, which were, among other things, an enfranchisement (in some small degree at least) of the human will. Their work well begun, the whole problem of human existence presented itself in a new light. ”

“ Then they go into the wood-turner's shop, and there they are introduced to steam-driven machinery of whose power they are warned: "Death lurks in the shafts and pulleys." Work is certainly not play here. The pupils manage edged tools driven by machinery. Ernst is das Leben—revolutions are not made with rose water. Neither are men made by handling toys and making verses. The new education is much more tender than the old— but it is also a great deal more stern and grave. ”

“ It is exercised in new ways, and embraces realities more completely and truly. He is not held in a slavish, half-hypnotic trance. Obscurely perhaps, but more and more strongly, he feels the rallying and renewal of life within him, advancing without pause or arrest towards some new goal. ”

“ The pupils go into the machine tool laboratory. They are now from 17 to 20 years old. They have to resume all they have learned in science, in art, in ethics: working as modern, up-to-date artisans. The graduating test is significant. They do not sit down to examination papers or answer surprising questions. They make "a project." Language has grown frank at last—gone back to origins. Each pupil makes his own project, a complete engine, a steam pump, an electric machine. ”

“ That is to say, the mechanic is, morally, in some respects at least, the higher order of person.
But this elevation of one kind of worker is not due certainly to any innate superiority; it is more probably the result of the training given in his work. This integral kind of technical training extends beyond childhood into youth; and it seems to favour in these stormy years the harmonious working of many awakening brain centres.
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One cannot here attempt the task of showing what youth is. This is no place for it. The psychology of youth is in its infancy. ”

“ Many reforms have been carried already, and lost for lack of it. Some reforms are, indeed, always in jeopardy till science has put their value beyond dispute. People will find substitutes for them—or what they regard as substitutes. ”

“ The adolescent, or girl or boy between thirteen and twenty-one is living through a period of rapid growth and great physical development. How great and rapid this change is we may judge from the great increase in the weight of the various organs, but more especially of the heart. ”

“ But those who have come into existence all give the same kind of testimony. They testify that of all the non-selected pupils received, none have turned out badly. And it is shown on the other hand that among the wrecks of society there are hardly any who have had even the beginnings of this kind of education. ”

“ Deeds of heroism are common in adolescence, and one has not to read history in order to see how often youths and maidens have led or served forlorn causes. The philosopher is nearly always old: the hero is nearly always young. ”

“ Rather it strengthens faith, not in self or in some showy public character, or even in one great inventor, but in a great army of nameless inventors and workers—in humanity. And the worker's imagination is not weakened. ”

“ The new technical schools already show that this education saves—they show, at least, pupils who, at first feeble and unstable of character, after a certain time become strong, and self-controlled, and are saved from shipwreck. But the schools where such training is given are in peril all the time. ”

“ The men who did all this were not learned men. They were not the heads of colleges, nor did they hold degrees. One cannot say that they were more than vigorous workmen, whose vigour and eager life, stimulated by labour, demanded new tools. ”

“ Youths and girls hide verses they have written away, distrusting quite rightly the instinct of the older person on finding them. [1] And as even the most original imagination requires at first a guide or master, so every adolescent is at first a disciple. ”

“ Criminologists testify that the great majority of people become criminals between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. In adolescence a great proportion of all suicides take place; the hold on life is less tenacious than it will be later, when, perhaps, life will have lost its charms. ”