Manual labor school

“ With a single further quotation from the prospectus of the second great manual training school in the United States, on the subject of labor, we close this too brief notice:
“One great object of the school is to foster a higher appreciation of the value and dignity of intelligent labor, and the worth and respectability of laboring men. A boy who sees nothing in manual labor but mere brute force despises both labor and the laborer. ”

“ Under the pretext of division of labor, we have sharply separated the brain worker from the manual worker. The masses of the workmen do not receive more scientific education than their grandfathers did; but they have been deprived of the education of even the small workshop, while their boys and girls are driven into a mine or a factory from the age of thirteen, and there they soon forget the little they may have learned at school. As to the men of science, they despise manual labor. ”

“ Modern educators, with their manual training want to use handwork to develop the brains of the child, while the manufacturers want to develop the hands only. The educators want to keep the unity of the system, understanding that where hand and brain are separated both degenerate. The business interests want schools in which their workers may be trained; they are willing to pay generously, in order to get cheap skilled labor which they may use in strike-breaking. They want two separate school systems, with separate boards, buildings, funds and corps of teachers. ”

“ But admit for a moment that manual labor schools are an utter failure as regards the pecuniary advantages which they afford. Admit, if you please, that the manual labor feature is an expensive part of education, and that to comply with it an education will cost more than on any other plan. The argument for their utility remains alike unanswered and unshaken. Is not the education thus obtained a more perfect one? ”

“ The truth on this subject, as could be satisfactorily shown is, that, as might naturally be expected, manual labor schools, being a novel experiment in this country, have had to struggle, as do all similar enterprises of benevolence at the outset, with formidable obstacles ”

“ It must not be assumed that the transition can be effected merely by the introduction of shop work, even if it were possible to provide the wide variety of manual training necessary to make up a fair representation of the principal occupations into which the boys will enter when they leave school. It is doubtful whether, so far as its vocational value is concerned, shop work isolated from other subjects of the curriculum is worth any more per unit of time devoted to it than several of the so-called academic subjects. ”

“ These consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking of the technical school and class and the factory. It is equally essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and not a dual system. Only thus can we insure that vocational education will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the factory system. ”

“ Besides this he usually works at his trade during the three summer months. As a rule, after a student has succeeded in going through the night-school test, he finds a way to finish the regular course in industrial and academic training. No student, no matter how much money he may be able to command, is permitted to go through school without doing manual labour. In fact, the industrial work is now as popular as the academic branches. Some of the most successful men and women who have graduated from the institution obtained their start in the night-school. ”

“ The organization of the manual work as a part of the regular curriculum prevents the narrow specialization of the trade school. It tends to turn the young worker out, not as a part of the industrial machine fitted to do only one thing, but equipped to meet a dynamic, rapidly changing industrial world which demands above all things versatility, and which scraps methods and machines as ruthlessly as it does men. Only the man of rounded training and resourcefulness who can turn his hand quickly to a variety of occupations has a chance to-day to rise above the mass. ”

“ When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for that older form of craft-training. ”

“ The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the schoolmasters, that the factory children, although receiving only one half the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and often more. “This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at school for one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work, half manual labour, and half school, renders each employment a rest and a relief to the other ”

“ Thus, when it was proposed to extend to the whole nation the system of compulsory education, introduced by the Factory Acts, political economy pointed out how production in this country, and how the wages of the labouring classes, would be affected, by compelling every child under thirteen years of age, who might be employed in any kind of labour, to attend school a fixed number of hours per week. ”

“ The higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by productive vocational training.
Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres. These lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually productive and not mere play.... In such a school the moral elements of labor should be primary, viz.: joy to the producer, through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material and character of workmanship; social coöperation, mutualism, and fellowship among the workers or students ”

“ In the second place, the plan solves most of the problems of vocational and industrial training which now confront the public school. It catches the child’s curiosity and skill on the upstroke. It makes no separation of manual from intellectual work, and avoids that sinister caste-feeling which seems to be creeping into the vocational movement. And from the point of [Pg 144] view of economy again, the scheme of devoting industrial work to actual care of the school-plant enables the school to provide a great variety of occupations almost without additional cost to the community. ”

“ Industrial work is an important adjunct to the college. It was started as a means of self-help, to enable students who could not pay their tuition or board to earn a part of it by manual labour, and American machinery and tools were introduced for cabinet work according to modern methods. This has proved so popular that it was necessary to make a rule that no boy should take the mechanical courses alone, without taking some of the regular courses in the college or the preparatory school. ”

“ The first condition for successful industrial training is the concentration of a large number of pupils old enough to benefit by such training in a single school plant. Only in this way is it possible to bring the cost of teaching, equipment, and material within reasonable limits and provide facilities for differentiating the work on the basis of the vocational needs of the pupils. The fact that this condition cannot be met in elementary schools is one of the strongest arguments in favor of conducting the seventh and eighth grade work under the junior high school form of organization. ”

“ As a rule, industrial training is not practicable in elementary schools, for the reason that the number of boys in the average elementary school who are likely to enter the skilled trades and who are also old enough to profit by industrial training is too small to permit the organization of classes. ”

“ No plan of vocational training is presented, because at present the mills recruit almost exclusively from foreign labor, and only a very small number of boys from the public schools are likely to seek employment in them. The technical content of the work which might conceivably be given in evening classes, except in the case of the few directive and supervisory positions, is so small that continuation instruction offers but meager hopes of success. ”

“ To-day, it is frequently necessary for practical teachers, who are urging measures of improvement, to point this out, and to say, just as Emerson said two generations ago, that any falseness in mechanical work immediately appears; that a teacher can judge of the moral quality of each boy in the class before him better and sooner from manual work than from book-work. Emerson taught that manual labor is the study of the external world; that the use of manual labor never grows obsolete, and is inapplicable to no person. ”

“ There can be no doubt that if, in 1870, a system, resembling that of Sloyd, had been generally introduced into English Elementary Schools, the joiners, metal-workers, and most other craftsmen of to-day, would possess more skill in their own work, and more interest in all kinds of manual work, than they do now possess, and that English workpeople, finding that their children received at school kinds of training obviously well fitted to increase wage-earning power, would less commonly than now be careless with regard to their children’s attendance at school. ”

“ We should never get any real success until we re-created the pride of skilled manual work. In another speech he said that the danger of the secondary school system was that, when we should be using these schools for training leaders for all the professions and industries and businesses, we are in fact using them to train the subordinates in a few “respectable” industries. ”

“ There is, however, a suspicion that some manufacturers, under the cloak of interest in technical education, are advocating the extension of manual training courses for their own selfish purposes, rather than for the general good; that they are seeking to increase the number of skilled workers among whom they may choose, and to make themselves independent of labor organizations. ”

“ Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.—Where young boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically, morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest of the work-day. ”

“ In fact, their existence offers a certain hindrance to the exploitation of the working powers of the young, and this is disagreeable, not only to factory owners and manual workers, but for the time being is distasteful to many proletarian parents. These schools turn out workers who can [215] compete successfully with the older generation of unskilled labourers. In spite of these objections, continuation schools become ever more important and more widely diffused, tending more and more to become an invariable supplement to the public elementary school. ”

“ The findings and recommendations as to training emphasize the fact that the vast majority of boys who become workers in the metal trades leave school by the time they are 15 with at most a common school education, so that any vocational training before they go to work must be given between the ages of 12 and 15 and before the end of the eighth grade. The report points out the impossibility of effective vocational instruction in elementary schools on account of the prohibitive cost per pupil for both equipment and teaching, and endorses the recently adopted junior high school plan. ”

“ It is the opinion of the Survey Staff that a separate school in which direct training for the industrial trades is emphasized would result in more profitable use of the pupils' time and probably induce many of them to remain in school up to the apprentice entering age. Such a school, with a curriculum embracing vocational training for all the principal trades, would easily command an enrollment sufficient to justify the installation of a good shop equipment and the employment of a corps of teachers qualified by special training and experience for this kind of work. ”

“ Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the institutions and movements of the world about them. ”

“ Down to 1897 the Central Authority had contemplated and recognised in its orders and circulars that the pauper children would spend only about half the school time in ordinary school subjects, the other half being devoted to what was euphemistically called "industrial training." [619] This meant, in practice, the employment of the children in domestic work, gardening, mending clothes or boots, and so on, the persons selected as "industrial trainers" not being required to have any pedagogic qualifications or power to teach, and being paid in fact only at workmen's rates. ”