Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/340

324 for the sake of a handle, name the two views the educational and the artisan view.

Manual training as a scheme of education occupies a curious middle ground. It has not been evolved in the schools themselves. Like most of our educational innovations, it has been forced upon the schools from without. But the lack of harmony in our conception of manual training does not grow out of this circumstance. Indeed, were it a brand-new thought, offered us from any one of the world's intellectual or industrial camps, we might expect it to present a unit conception, to be accepted, or declined, as the case might be. But such has not been the genesis of the manual training idea. It has not been introduced into education as the embodiment of the educational creed of any one party. It has come into the schools from two different directions, and in its outer form is the incarnation of two distinct and radically different modes of thought. You can hardly understand manual training as a system of education unless you understand its history; and you will readily see that the methods used by the teachers of manual training, while conforming in a general way to one pattern, depend for their essential spirit upon the path by which these teachers have approached the subject. While manual training in some form is a part of all education and appears in all grades, it began its career as a distinct scheme of education in schools of high-school grade. All the early manual training schools were high schools. Even now, when manual training has grown and spread beyond our most sanguine expectations, the typical manual training school is still a high school. Now, the high school occupies a middle ground. It has, on the one side, the elementary school and kindergarten, and, on the other, the college and technical institute. The curriculum of the high school is consequently a composite, and contains elements borrowed from the lower schools and from the universities, or thrust upon it from one of these sources. But as a rule each element in this composite has come into it from one direction, either up or down, and has not assailed it from both sides. Manual training occupies the exceptional position of having come from both directions, from above, from the technical schools, and from below, from the kindergarten and from sloyd, and to have brought from both of these sources fundamental ideas much at variance with each other. In the technical schools manual training is pursued purely as an end in itself and absolutely without thought of its culture value. It is wanted simply as a help to engineering studies. The formal manual training had such an origin. It sprang up in Russia in the technical schools of Moscow, and first attracted any general attention in America at the time of the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. The thought back of it was purely utilitarian. It