Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub

ject is taught as other subjects are taught, while the students have an hour's practice a day in the model kitchen; next, domestic dairying, especially buttermaking. Later, after elementary physiology, is a special course of hygiene, also regarding household comforts. That kind of training, intended to assist the woman in making a living, is given. A printing office is attached to the school. One of a former class is now conducting a paper in California. A telegraph-office permits the learning of telegraphy. Several are now successful operators. A type-writer gives opportunity for learning stenography and kindred arts. And so it would seem that there is abundant room for the extension of opportunities for the technical education of women.

Mr. ORDWAY- Harvard college allows women to attend lectures and prosecute their studies under its auspices, but wrongfully withholds from them a degree.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON TECH

NOLOGICAL EDUCATION.

PEDAGOGICAL VALUE OF THE SCHOOL WORKSHOP.

1. By a school workshop is understood a department of a school which, for example, may be a regularly organized and graded public school, conducted in the usual methods for instruction in its primary or secondary stages; that this department, or shop, is to be furnished with materials and tools, especially with rightly trained teachers, and with whatever facilities may be needed to teach all the pupils of the school, or, at least, all who wish such instruction, the uses of some varieties of tools, and the methods of producing some varieties of manufactured articles. The materials usually considered useful for this purpose are wood or metal, and of the latter chiefly iron. The tools are those used by the carpenter, joiner, or cabinet maker, or by the smith, foundryman, or machinist; but there appears to be no principle of natural or ideal selection which should choose these. For the purposes of this inquiry, a shop where attendants upon regular school discipline are taught systematically the processes of shoe or harness-making, or printing, or pottery, etc., would be properly included under the term "school workshop."

We are to consider this shop as designed for instruction, and not for profitable construction or manufacture. The product is to be not work, but workers; the work itself being only a by-product, whose utility is to be measured merely in proportion to the service it has rendered in imparting instruction. The question of money.profit is not to be raised.

2. In considering the pedagogic value, we are to estimate the results not as the production of workmen, that is, persons skilled in the arts and methods of any specific trade; but as the production of workers, that is, persons whose capacity for work is general, and whose ability to adapt themselves to any specific work which they may choose, shall have been developed as part of the general training, discipline, and culture, which are to be the outcome of their pupilage. More than

that we may be required to say what, if any, have been the kind and degree of spiritual excellence, mental or moral, which in the make-up of large scholarly character may be attributable particularly to workshop training, and which might have been, perhaps would have been, deficient or entirely wanting but for the workshop discipline.

3. The work done in the shop will be of two kinds; first, outward, visible, upon material substance, as upon the wood or metal manipulated; second, inward, psychological, upon the spiritual nature of the manipulator.

In the first, the pupil is required to take a mass of rude, and relatively shapeless material, and to produce from it, by a series of processes more or less complex, another form, more refined, more exact, which, it may be, will satisfy certain conditions of adaptability to other forms, for purposes of construction; or it may be, at least in the more elementary stages of instruction, that, so far as the thing made is concerned, the satisfaction of the conditions is itself the purpose and the end of effort. This development of the newer and more refined form is done by the removal of the needless and extraneous matter that envelops and masks the finer outlines within the grosser and shapeless mass; or it may require the change or flux of material from one position or form to another but in either case the transformation is effected by the use of certain implements which are called tools.

In the ordinary or commercial shop the value of the product is determined by the subsequent utilities for which the pieces wrought are found to be adapted. In the school workshop the value of the product is chiefly dependent upon the service it has already rendered during the steps of its construction, in the improvement in some way of the pupil worker himself.

4. Here appears, in some measure, the discrimination between the economic and the pedagogic value of the work, which values, indeed, are not easily distinguished in all respects. The workman repeats his work with great care and circumspection, that he may make his work better, and that he may produce it more abundantly. If he seeks to make it better, that, being better adapted to some purpose, it may find quicker or more profitable sale; and if he seeks to make it more quickly, that his time may yield more abundant profits, each of these is a way to increase the economic value of his efforts. If his purpose to make himself a better, that is, a more skilful, workman, because such workmen command better wages or accomplish more salable products, even then, although his motives have become a step or two more

remote, they are still economic. But, if his labor and his care for exacter workmanship, and for more excellent results, tend, purposely or incidentally, to make the workman a larger and stronger and perfecter man, then they are pedagogic.

5. We turn, then, to consider that other work of the shop, the inward, psychological, may we say, subjective, influence upon the workman himself.

First, because it stands first usually in the thoughts of those who speak of this subject, we note the skill or workmanship of the workman, or that indefinite and mystical something, which is too often only a resounding phrase the use of tools. This knowledge or skill may or may not have pedagogic value; it may be referable wholly to the other or economic side, according to the purpose of him who acquires it or the use which he may make of it.

6. If, however, it should be objected, that this statement is too restrictive and that anything which makes the workman a better workman, has its pedagogic as well as its economic value, then another discrimination must be made.

.

Workmanship, or skill, is of two kinds. The first is intelligent; the second is mechanical. The first is directive; the second is executive. The first constantly observes the changing conditions as they present themselves, and as constantly adopts or creates new means to meet the new requirements. It is continually discerning how the thing in hand may be done to better purpose. It is in some degree intuitive and innate, yet is capable of large development by proper cultivation and use.

The second form of skill is that power of manipulation which is acquired by multitudinous repetition until the process, or the movement, usually in a large degree muscular, becomes mechanical and habitual. The workman comes to do the thing, to make the movement, simply as part of a machine, and in many cases the more implicitly the man gives himself to the habit after it is once formed, the more perfect is the work that is done. The formation of the habit requires long, patient, persistent effort.

These two elements, the intelligent direction and the habitual or mechanical performance, enter as co-ordinate factors into every constructive act, but their relative importance varies in every possible ratio. Mathematically expressed, the results might be indicated as the product of A, the intelligent direction, into B, the mechanical performance; the result being expressed by AXB; in which expression we

shall find as limits Ox B or AX 0; in each case the value reduces to 0.

An illustration in which the first, or intellectual, factor predominnates, will be found in that part of the machinist's work in which he arranges his work in the lathe, sets his cutting tool at the proper angle, determines the speed of his cut, etc. An illustration in which the mechanical factor predominates will be found in another part of the machinist's work in which he is using the file or the cold chisel. Only correctly formed mechanical habit will give good results. The smooth knitter is one who holds the yarn habitually and unconsciously, at a proper tension; the moment that the attention is called to this element of the work, the strain becomes varied, and the work is proportionally bad. The rapid type-setter does not look at the faces of his type; by an unconscious habit his fingers find the nicks in the sides of the bits of metal, and they seem to drop automatically into their proper attitudes.

7. Hence comes the well known fact that the simpler tools are those which are the most difficult for masterful use. A man can learn to manage a planing machine or a jig-saw in a small part of the time it will take him to learn to hew with the broad axe, cutting confidently to the center of the line, and leaving always a smooth, unscarred, and vertical plane surface. The intellectual effort in this work of the broad axe, is relatively small. The body must become a machine; legs, trunk, and arms must come into exact mechanical relations, the blade of the axe being the salient or working part. When this human machine works with mechanical precision, the man becomes a good axeman and not sooner. Even then a well controlled circular saw will do better work. As the intellectual activity of the axe-man's work is small, the intellectual development is proportionally feeble. 8. And this leads us to note, in passing, a common and not very unnatural error concerning the use of tools, namely, that skill with one tool begets skill with another. If the skill is intellectual, the statement is true; if the skill lies in the habit which results from long practice, the statement is not true. One habit always stands in the way of another, which lies, so to say, in the same horizon. Men have been heard to say that they did not know now to drive a nail. The driving of a nail into wood has two elements: first, to choose the right place, set the nail in the right position as to the direction it shall take and the proper facing of the wedge that the wood may not split; second, to strike it properly. The first part is intellectual, and any man of

« PředchozíPokračovat »