PART II CHAPTER II DEVELOPMENTS DIRECTLY AFFECTING THE SCHOOLS. Vocational Education. VOCATIONAL TRAINING AND CULTURE.-Doctor David Snedden, State Commissioner of Education for Massachusetts, has made, in the April issue of the Educational Review, a valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of the relation of vocational training to culture, or, as he puts it, the influence and place of The Practical Arts in Liberal Edu cation. As Doctor Snedden has had wide experience in the administration of both vocational and liberal education, what he has to say deserves the most careful consideration. Although conclusions in regard to matters pertaining to vocational training have not yet reached the point of assurance, the past 23 years have furnished us a great body of experience which should assist in our constructive thinking and at least enable us to draw conclusions of a negative nature. And by limiting his inquiries to the definite period between the ages of 12 and 14, or the last two grades of the elementary school, Doctor Snedden hopes, by raising certain questions, to assist in making clear what should or should not be the practice in connection with vocational education. This term, it should be remembered, Doctor Snedden uses to include all the manual activities which are used for the concrete and objective ends which are most clearly related to the occupations of mankind. He uses the term practical arts as a more comprehensive expression which will readily include all such branches, studies, or exercises as manual training, manual arts, cooking, sewing, agriculture, printing, etc., and it is these practical arts that he has in mind in considering the relation of vocational training to the more abstract and intellectually approached parts of the elementary school program. He presents a contrast between these two things by asking the following questions: 1. Are not the practical arts, as factors in the program of studies for the upper grades, suffering from a confusion of partially contradictory terms? In other words, to Doctor Snedden's mind vocational education has for its purpose to make of a person an efficient producer; liberal education, an effective consumer or user. Therefore, any liberal training resulting from vocational activities could only be incidental and merely in the direction of a broad social use of the vocational training. And the course of study best adapted to a liberal education may develop little vocational power. Hence, these two forms of training have little in common, although in the teaching of the practical arts to-day we are striving to follow the two paths simultaneously. If this is true, then he asks 2. Is it worth while to introduce the vocational aim in practical arts studies which are to form only a minor part of the program of general or liberal education? There is insufficient time in any good elementary program to realize genuine vocational power; hence, what is done in that direction is only sham and make-believe. Vocational ideals and capacity for vocational choice may come from such work; but it will accomplish little for direct vocational training. "Vocational education must be more serious, more effortful, closer to the realities of practical life in respect to the hours, discipline, surroundings, and strivings of productive labor " than can be expected in the elementary program. The question is then asked 3. Is it worth while in the practical arts branches to try to defend the kind of aims and methods that have been discarded in other departments of education? For example, in the minds of writers on manual training still persist such ideas as "logical" courses, "type" studies, the "artistic" and "workmanship." While the failure to recognize the genetic order in the development of the powers of the child is not restricted to such writers and teachers, it is peculiarly disastrous in the studies and exercises from which we have a right to expect so much in the way of socialized experience, a higher appreciation of the shop and the farm, and permanent interest in the finer things of life. The child is insatiable in his desire for constructive activity and for familiarizing himself with the concrete world, and his natural efforts will gradually evolve from purposeless activities, which serve for physical growth through ministering consciously to the play instinct, into those which foreshadow purposeful efforts toward utility. Is it not wiser then to have, as our chief purpose in the practical arts education, merely an enriched and varied experience along the lines suggested by youthful instincts and an environment sympathetically adapted to the child's stage of development? If such a course should be decided upon, then Doctor Snedden naturally questions the efforts at correlation by asking 4. Is it profitable to permit practical arts subjects to be deflected from their important purposes by considerations of correlation? This inquiry is less pertinent in its relation to upper-grade work than lower, but all over-insistence on correlation, in Doctor Sneddens' judgment, is confusing to the pupil. This, of course, does not preclude the idea that we may yet find large strands or units of common effort underlying both the practical arts and the purely intellectual studies. But there must be no artificial attempts at correlation; and the drawing, mathematics, language, etc., that have their application to practical arts teaching, must be correlated only in the natural way in which each contributes incidentally to the other. 5. Cannot a wide range of units or projects be selected from the principal fields of industry and each and all be adapted to the active interests and stages of development of these pupils? The various fields in which creative activity is applied to materials, and from which self-development and the consciousness of mastery of nature are secured by men and women, should yield selected units adapted to the powers of youth and calculated to call forth their ambitious efforts. Furthermore, a large number of these activities operate in the fields of personal need and social relation and, therefore, lend themselves to an interpretation of economic and social life. Hence, in these respects they may be made to contribute to a genuinely liberal education, especially with reference to broad social usefulness. 66 Suppose that the boy of twelve or fourteen choose his projects from the following: the growing of selected vegetables or other plants; the making of pieces of playground apparatus or articles of furniture for the home; the varnishing of a school desk; the cleaning and repairing of a bicycle, faucet, lock, or sewing-machine; the sharpening of a collection of cutlery used at home; the half-soling of a pair of shoes; the construction of some steps of concrete; the binding of some sets of magazines; the mounting of photographs or framing of pictures; the preparing of articles of food used in camp; the printing of a pamphlet; and the executing of hundreds of other undertakings which educational ingenuity can discover. If, within the capacity of the school and the directive power of the teacher, he makes choices, and carries his projects to a successful outcome; if, in doing so, he reads, designs, compares, and is led to comprehend such scientific and artistic principles as are not too deeply involved in his work, will he not have obtained a substantial addition to liberal education? Is it of fundamental importance that he shall have completed all the steps in some abstract series of exercises? Suppose he has not reached the degree of thoroughness, precision, artistic or scientific appreciation commonly exacted by craftsman's standards, can we not apply here the same tests of childish growth and unfoldment that we avail ourselves of in other departments of the program of studies?" 6. In the seventh and eighth grades, must not these practical arts be taught by a departmental or special teacher? This, Doctor Snedden regards as the only practicable way. He also feels that such teachers should be "handy" men, resourceful, ingenious, and sympathetic with childish crudities, rather than journeymen with skill in only a few lines of work. "It is improbable that any woman can carry out the program described for boys; and, equally, only a woman should give the work for girls. The importance of holding to the amateur's standards and spirit rather than those of the journeyman must be insisted on." In closing, Doctor Snedden refers to the analogy exist- · ing between the teaching of these practical arts and the teaching of other subjects of the elementary curriculum, and says that, in the early stages of all these subjects, modern pedagogy insists on the utilization of units touch ing dominant interests, and not remote from the spontaneous learning powers of children." The place for drill, systematic approach, and the approximation of journeyman's standards is in the vocational school and not in these elementary grades. AN EXTREME VIEW.-H. E. Miles, chairman of the Committee on Industrial Education of the National Association of Manufacturers, recently expressed a desire which is in the minds of many who are interested in education from the industrial side alone. He declared that the ordinary trade schools are not sufficient for the needs of the people, and that boys and girls should be provided training in the trades they intend to pursue in the ordinary elementary school. In every public school-house he would make provision for teaching carpentry, bricklaying, painting, and every other ordinary trade. The instruction in the elementary academic subjects he would have bear directly upon the pupil's industrial efficiency, and would follow such subjects only to the extent to which they would add to this proficiency in production. It is with these and similar ideas in mind that charges are often made against existing school instruction as based on "excessive regard for tradition" and "as being blinded with the worship of time-worn educational ideals." It is also from the viewpoint of adult business or industrial efficiency that many of the statements about " inability to write good business letters," "poor spelling" and worse accounting, and "a lack of thoroughness" arise. No one questions the importance of thoroughness nor of the kind of training that is essential to success in life. But it is a grave question whether there is not danger of our becoming so imbued with the idea of industrial efficiency that we forget that there are other exceedingly important things which go to the forming of the truly efficient citizen. Industrial efficiency is a very desirable thing, both for the individual and the State,, because it means self-support and economic gain; but neither the individual nor the State find their greatest happiness or truest success in these things. Health, recreations, morality, human brotherhood, how leisure hours are employed, and the worthiness of the ideals that are developed and fostered are all more important questions than these. And whether |