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;[E1] (1) because the idea, being the reflex perception or shadow of the object, is less clearly defined than the object itself, and (2) 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.
[E1] “And the attempt to convey scientific conceptions without the appeal to observation, which can alone give such conceptions firmness and reality, appears to me to be in direct antagonism to the fundamental principles of scientific education.”—“Physiography,” [Preface], p. vii. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1878.
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.
CHAPTER II.
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.