Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/342

326 was all in the direction of commercialism and away from handicraft, and finally that the boy who braved social opinion and went in for hand work had to do it almost by stealth. The old institution of apprenticeship had died, and the present order of artisan had been so far tainted with the commercial spirit as to be jealous of his skill. He hoarded it like a miser, unwilling to pass it on from generation to generation. The ranks of skilled workmen in America were and are renewed from the more fertile soil of Europe. Furthermore, in 1876, education in America was even more a mechanical process than it is to-day. All these forces conspired to give manual training a distinctly industrial trend. And this trend was manifestly strengthened by the fact that manual training had been originally apprehended as a form of industrial education. It had indeed appeared in the literature under that name, and under that name was being advocated in Switzerland, in France, and in parts of Germany. I do not think that in 1876 manual training was anywhere being put forward as a culture branch. The movement in America began largely as an artisan movement. The schools that were started in the decade following the Centennial Exhibition were all conceived in this spirit. Some of them have experienced no change of heart since then, but others, I am happy to say, have been transformed and transfigured. Like Saul, the son of Kish, we unexpectedly found a kingdom. Later schools have had much the same history. In some the leaven of the new idea has worked; in others not.

But even within the bounds of the artisan spirit, a restraining grace came into play, which illustrates very well, I think, the tendency of education to continue its search for underlying principles, however unfavorable the conditions, and so to substitute the general for the specific. Manual training, even in the hands of these industrialists, never developed into the teaching of specific trades—the manual training schools were always distinct from the trade schools. Whether the industrialists were appalled by the diversity of trades to be taught, or were restrained by some vague notion that the state ought not to foster one craft rather than another, or were frightened by the prospective antagonism of the trades unions, I do not know, but certain it is that the movement gained educationally with each repetition of the assertion that no trades were taught, but only the principles underlying all trades. The growth of this universalizing spirit has made possible a far broader conception of the true function of manual training.

But meanwhile the manual training idea had been making its way into the curriculum from the other direction, from the lower schools, and from them it came purely as an educational idea. The educational conception has come from the kindergarten, from sloyd.