Read Ebook: Ted Strong in Montana Or With Lariat and Spur by Taylor Edward C

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1566 lines and 87418 words, and 32 pages

Educational Revolution in 1883-4. -- Urgent Demand for Reform. -- Existing Schools denounced as Superficial, their Methods as Automatic, their System as a Mixture of Cram and Smatter. -- The Controversy between the School-master of the Old R?gime and the Reformer. -- The Leaders of the Movement, Col. Parker, Dr. MacAlister, and others -- followers of Rousseau, Bacon, and Spencer. -- "The End of Man is an Action, not a Thought." -- The Conservative Teachers fall into Line. -- The New Education becomes an Aggressive Force pushing on to Victory. -- The Physical Progress of Manual Training -- its Quality not equal to its Extent. -- The New System of Training confided to Teachers of the Old R?gime. -- Ideal Teachers hard to find. -- Teachers willing to Learn should be Encouraged. -- The effects of Manual Training long antedate its Introduction to the Schools. -- Bacon's Definition of Education. -- Stephenson and the Value of Hand-work. -- Manual Training is the union of Thought and Action. -- It is the antithesis of the Greek methods, which exalted Abstractions and debased Things. -- The Rule of Comenius and the Injunction of Rousseau -- few Teachers comprehend them. -- The Employment of the Hands in the Arts is more highly Educative than the acquisition of the rules of Reading and Arithmetic. -- What the Locomotive has accomplished for Man. -- Education must be equal, and Social and Political Equality will follow. -- The foundation of the New Education is the Baconian Philosophy as stated by Macaulay. -- Use and Service are the Twin-ministers of Human Progress. -- Definitions of Genius. -- Attention. -- Sir Henry Maine. -- Manual Training relates to all the Arts of Life. -- Mind and Hand. -- Newton and the Apple. -- The Sense of Touch resides in the Hand. -- Robert Seidel on Familiarity with Objects. -- Material Progress the basis of Spiritual Growth. -- Plato and the Divine Dialogues. -- Poverty, Society, and the Useful Arts. -- Selfishness must give way to Altruism. -- The Struggle of Life. -- The Progress of the Arts and the final Regeneration of the Race. -- The Arts that make Life sweet and beautiful. -- The final Fundamental Educational Ideal is Universality. -- Comenius's definition of Schools -- the Workshops of Humanity. -- That one Man should die ignorant, who had capacity for Knowledge, is a Tragedy. -- Mental and Manual Exercises to be rendered homogeneous in the School of the Future. -- The hero of the Ideal School. 370

INDEX 427

PAGE

THE LABORATORY OF CARPENTRY 23

COURSE IN THE LABORATORY OF CARPENTRY 27

THE WOOD-TURNING LABORATORY 31

COURSE IN THE WOOD-TURNING AND PATTERN LABORATORY 41

THE FOUNDING LABORATORY 49

COURSE IN THE FOUNDING LABORATORY 53

THE FORGING LABORATORY 59

COURSE IN THE FORGING LABORATORY 67

THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY 79

THE CHIPPING, FILING, AND FITTING LABORATORY 89

COURSE IN THE MACHINE-TOOL LABORATORY 95

THE STUDENTS WITH THEIR BOOKS 107

M. VICTOR DELLA-VOS, THE FOUNDER OF MANUAL TRAINING IN RUSSIA 329

DR. JOHN D. RUNKLE, THE FOUNDER OF MANUAL TRAINING IN THE UNITED STATES 335

POWER.

--EMERSON.

MIND AND HAND:

MANUAL TRAINING THE CHIEF FACTOR IN EDUCATION.

THE IDEAL SCHOOL.

Its Situation. -- Its Tall Chimney. -- The Whir of Machinery and Sound of the Sledge-hammer. -- The School that is to dignify Labor. -- The Realization of the Dream of Bacon, Rousseau, Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel. -- The School that fitly represents the Age of Steel.

The Ideal School is an institution which develops and trains to usefulness the moral, physical, and intellectual powers of man. It is what Comenius called Humanity's workshop, and in America it is becoming the natural center of the Public School system. The building, well-designed for its occupancy, is large, airy, open to the light on every side, amply provided with all appliances requisite for instruction in the arts and sciences, and finished interiorly and exteriorly in the highest style of useful and beautiful architectural effects. The distinguishing characteristic of the Ideal School building is its chimney, which rises far above the roof, from whose tall stack a column of smoke issues, and the hum and whir of machinery is heard, and the heavy thud of the sledge-hammer resounding on the anvil, smites the ear.

It is, then, a factory rather than a school?

No. It is a school; the school of the future; the school that is to dignify labor; the school that is to generate power; the school where every sound contributes to the harmony of development, where the brain informs the muscle, where thought directs every blow, where the mind, the eye, and the hand constitute an invincible triple alliance. This is the school that Locke dreamed of, that Bacon wished for, that Rousseau described, and that Comenius, Pestalozzi, and Froebel struggled in vain to establish.

It is, then, science and the arts in apotheosis. For if it be, as claimed, the Ideal school, it is destined to lift the veil from the face of Nature, to reveal her most precious secrets, and to divert to man's use all her treasures.

Yes; it is to other schools what the diamond is to other precious stones--the last analysis of educational thought. It is the philosopher's stone in education; the incarnated dream of the alchemist, which dissolved earth, air, and water into their original elements, and recombined them to compass man's immortality. Through it that which has hitherto been impossible is to become a potential reality.

In this building which resembles a factory or machine-shop an educational revolution is to be wrought. Education is to be rescued from the domination of mediaeval ideas, relieved of the enervating influence of Grecian aestheticism, and confided to the scientific direction of the followers of Bacon, whose philosophy is common sense and its law, progress. The philosophy of Plato left in its wake a long line of abstract propositions, decayed civilizations, and ruined cities, while the philosophy of Bacon, in the language of Macaulay, "has lengthened life; mitigated pain; extinguished diseases; increased the fertility of the soil; given new securities to the mariner; spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; extended the range of the human vision; multiplied the power of the human muscles; accelerated motion; annihilated distance; facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind."

It is this beneficent work of Bacon that the Ideal school is to continue--the work of demonstrating to the world that the most useful thing is the most beautiful thing--discarding Plato, the apostle of idle speculation, and exalting Bacon, the minister of use.

In laying the foundations of education in labor it is dignified and education is ennobled. In such a union there is honor and strength, and long life to our institutions. For the permanence of the civil compact in this country, as in other countries, depends less upon a wide diffusion of unassimilated and undigested intelligence than upon such a thorough, practical education of the masses in the arts and sciences as shall enable them to secure, and qualify them to store up, a fair share of the aggregate produce of labor.

If this school shall appear like a hive of industry, let the reader not be deceived. Its main purpose, intellectual development, is never lost sight of fora moment. It is founded on labor, which, being the most sacred of human functions, is the most useful of educational methods. It is a system of object-teaching--teaching through things instead of through signs of things. It is the embodiment of Bacon's aphorism--"Education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity betwixt the mind and things." The students draw pictures of things, and then fashion them into things at the forge, the bench, and the turning-lathe; not mainly that they may enter machine-shops, and with greater facility make similar things, but that they may become stronger intellectually and morally; that they may attain a wider range of mental vision, a more varied power of expression, and so be better able to solve the problems of life when they shall enter upon the stage of practical activity.

It is a theory of this school that in the processes of education the idea should never be isolated from the object it represents; because the idea, being the reflex perception or shadow of the object, is less clearly defined than the object itself, and because joining the object and the idea intensifies the impression. Separated from its object the idea is unreal, a phantasm. The object is the flesh, blood, bones, and nerves of the idea. Without its body the idea is as impotent as the jet of steam that rises from the surface of boiling water and loses itself in the air. But unite it to its object and it becomes the vital spark, the animating force, the Promethean fire. Thus steam converts the Corliss engine--a huge mass of lifeless iron--into a thing of grace, of beauty, and of resistless power. Suppose the teacher, for example, desires to convey to the mind of a child having no knowledge of form an impression of the shape of the earth; he says, "It is globular." The child's face expresses nothing because there is in its mind no conception of the object represented by the word globular. The teacher says, "It is a sphere," with no better success. He adds, "A sphere is a body bounded by a surface, every point of which is equally distant from a point within called the centre." The child's face is still expressionless. The teacher takes a handful of moist clay and moulds it into the form of a sphere, and exhibiting it, says, "The earth is like this." The child claps its hands, utters a cry of delight, and exclaims, "It is round like a ball!"

This is an illustration of the triumph of object-teaching, the method alike of the kindergarten and the manual training school. As the child is father of the man, so the kindergarten is father of the manual training school. The kindergarten comes first in the order of development, and leads logically to the manual training school. The same principle underlies both. In both it is sought to generate power by dealing with things in connection with ideas. Both have common methods of instruction, and they should be adapted to the whole period of school life, and applied to all schools.

The Ideal school, most precisely representative of the present age--the age of science--is dedicated to a homogeneous system of mental and manual training, to the generation of power, to the development of true manhood. And above all, this school is destined to unite in indissoluble bonds science and art, and so to confer upon labor the highest and justest dignity--that of doing and responsibility. The reason of the degradation of labor was admirably stated by America's most distinguished educational reformer, the late Mr. Horace Mann, who said, "The labor of the world has been performed by ignorant men, by classes doomed to ignorance from sire to son; by the bondmen and bondwomen of the Jews, by the helots of Sparta, by the captives who passed under the Roman yoke, and by the villeins and serfs and slaves of more modern times."

When it shall have been demonstrated that the highest degree of education results from combining manual with intellectual training, the laborer will feel the pride of a genuine triumph; for the consciousness that every thought-impelled blow educates him, and so raises him in the scale of manhood, will nerve his arm, and fire his brain with hope and courage.

This theory is the antithesis of that of Plato, namely; "that the simplest and purest way of examining things, is to pursue every particular by thought alone, without offering to support our meditation by seeing or backing our reasonings by any other corporal sense."--Plato's "Divine Dialogues," p. 180. London: S. Cornish & Co., 1839.

THE MAJESTY OF TOOLS.

Tools the Highest Text-books. -- How to Use them the Test of Scholarship. -- They are the Gauge of Civilization. -- Carlyle's Apostrophe to them. -- The Typical Hand-tools. -- The Automata of the Machine-shop. -- Through Tools Science and Art are United. -- The Power of Tools. -- Their Educational Value. -- Without Tools Man is Nothing; with Tools he is All. -- It is through the Arts alone that Education touches Human Life.

Sacred to the majesty of tools might be appropriately inscribed over the entrance to this Ideal school; for its highest text-books are tools, and how to use them most intelligently is the test of scholarship. To realize the potency of tools it is only necessary to contrast the two states of man--the one without tools, the other with tools. See him in the first state, naked, shivering with cold, now hiding away from the beasts in caves, and now, famished and despairing, gaunt and hollow-eyed, creeping stealthily like a panther upon his prey. Then see him in the poetic, graphic apostrophe of Carlyle:--"Man is a tool-using animal. He can use tools, can devise tools; with these the granite mountains melt into light dust before him; he kneads iron as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth highway, winds and fire his unwearying steeds. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all!"

What a picture of the influence of tools upon civilization! It is through the use of tools that man has reached the place of absolute supremacy among animals. As he increases his stock of tools he recedes from the state of savagery. The great gulf between the aboriginal savage and the civilized man is spanned by the seven hand-tools--the axe, the saw, the plane, the hammer, the square, the chisel, and the file. These are the universal tools of the arts, and the modern machine-shop is an aggregation of them rendered automatic and driven by steam.

The ancients constructed automata which were exceedingly ingenious. In the statues that could walk and talk, the Chinese puppets and the marionettes of the Greeks there was a hint of the modern automatic tools, which, driven by steam, fashion with equal accuracy the delicate parts of the watch and the huge segments of the marine engine. The ancients knew more of science than of art. They were familiar with the power of steam, but knew not how to apply it to the wants of man. They knew that steam would turn a spit, but they had not a sufficient knowledge of art to convert the power they had discovered into a monster of force, and train it to bear the burdens of commerce. They never thought to apply the jet of steam used to turn a spit to great automatic machines, and to fit into them saws and files, and needles and drills, and gimlets and planes, and compel them to do the work of thousands of men. But this is precisely what the modern mechanic has accomplished. In making a slave of steam, science and art have combined to free mankind.

We marvel at the dulness of the ancients as shown in their failure to utilize in the useful arts the discoveries of science. That they should have studied the stars over their heads to the neglect of the earth under their feet is incomprehensible to the modern mind. But will not future generations marvel at us? Is it not an astounding fact that, with a knowledge of the tremendous influence of tools upon the destiny of the human race so graphically depicted by Carlyle, the nations have been so slow in incorporating tool-practice into educational methods? The distinguishing features of modern civilization sprang as definitively from cunningly devised and skilfully handled tools as any effect from its cause. And yet the world's statesmen have failed to discover the value of tool-practice as an educational agency. The face of the globe has been transformed by the union of art and science, but the world's statesmen have not discerned the importance of uniting them in the curriculum of the schools. If the ancients could see us as we see them, they would doubtless laugh at us as we laugh at them.

We might take a lesson from the savage. He is taught to fight, to hunt, and to fish, and in these arts the brain, the hand, and the eye are trained simultaneously. He is first given object-lessons, as the pupil of the kindergarten is taught. Then the tomahawk, the spear, and the bow and arrow are placed in his hands, and he fights for his life, or fishes or hunts for his dinner. The young Indian is taught all that it is necessary for him to know, and he is educated, practically, in the savage's three workshops--the battle-field, the forest and plain, the sea and lake. Thus the young savage enters upon the duties of his life with an exact practical knowledge of them. He has not been taught a theory of fighting, he has used the weapons of warfare; he has not studied the arts of fishing and hunting, he has handled the spear and the bow and arrow, and their use is as familiar to him as the multiplication table is to the boy in the public school.

We have more and better tools than the savage possesses. With the aid of science and art we harness steam to our chariot and compel it to draw us whither we will. We steal fire from the clouds and make it serve us as a messenger. We imprison the air, and with it stop the flying railway train; with the aid of science and art we reduce the most subtile forces of nature to servitude. But we neither teach our youth how to master their elements nor how to use them.

Tools represent the steps of human progress--in architecture, from the mud hut to the modern mansion; in agriculture, from the pointed stick used to tear the turf to a thousand and one ingenious instruments of husbandry; in ship-building, from the rudderless, sailless boat to the ocean steamer; in fabrics, from the matted fleece of the shepherd to the varied products of countless looms; in pottery, from the first rude Egyptian cup to the exquisite vase of the Sevres factory. And so of every art that contributes to the comfort and pleasure of man; the development of each has been accomplished by tools in the hands of the laborer.

Since, then, man owes so much to labor, he has doubtless educated the laborer and showered honors upon him . On the contrary, the labor of the world has been performed by the most ignorant classes, by bondmen, by helots and captives, by serfs and slaves. The laborer has been held in such contempt, and been so debased by ignorance, that he has often violently protested against improvements in the tools of the trades, and with vandal hands destroyed the mill, the factory, and the forge erected to ameliorate his condition. At the top of the social scale the sage has studied the stars and invented systems of abstract philosophy; at the bottom ignorance has deified itself and starved. This divorce of science from art has resulted in such incongruities as the Pyramids of Egypt and periodical famines; as the hanging gardens of Babylon and the horrors of Jewish captivity; as the Greek Parthenon and dwellings without chimneys; as the statues of Phidias and Praxiteles, and royal banquets without knives, forks, or spoons; as the Roman Forum and the Roman populace crying for bread and circuses; as Socrates, Plato, Seneca and Aurelius, and Caligula, Claudius, Nero and Domitian.

On the other hand the union of science with art tunnels the mountain, bridges the river, dams the torrent, and converts the wilderness into a fruitful field.

Science discovers and art appropriates and utilizes; and as science is helpless without the aid of art, so art is dead without the help of tools. Tools then constitute the great civilizing agency of the world; for civilization is the art of rendering life agreeable. The savage may own a continent, but if he possesses only the savage's tools--the spear and the bow and arrow--he will be ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, and poorly protected both against cold and heat. He might be familiar with all the known sciences, but if he were ignorant of the arts his state, instead of being improved, would be rendered more deplorable; for with the thoughts, emotions, sensibilities, and aspirations of a sage he would still be powerless to steal from heaven a single spark of fire with which to warm his miserable hut.

In the light of this analysis Carlyle's rhapsody on tools becomes a prosaic fact, and his conclusion--that man without tools is nothing, with tools all--points the way to the discovery of the philosopher's stone in education. For if man without tools is nothing, to be unable to use tools is to be destitute of power; and if with tools he is all, to be able to use tools is to be all-powerful. And this power in the concrete, the power to do some useful thing for man--this is the last analysis of educational truth.

There is no better definition of education than that of Pestalozzi--"the generation of power." But what kind of power? Not merely power to think abstractly, to speculate, to moralize, to philosophize, but power to act intelligently. And the power to act intelligently involves the exertion, in greater or less degree, of all the powers, both mental and physical. Education, then, is the development of all the powers of man to the culminating point of action. What kind of action? Action in art. What is art? "The power of doing something not taught by nature or instinct; power or skill in the use of knowledge; the practical application of the rules or principles of science." Again we have the last analysis of education--"skill in the use of knowledge; the application of the rules or principles of science." And this is tool practice.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet