SLOYD.
By Evangeline Stirling.
Sloyd, as taught at Nääs in Sweden, its headquarters, is the most perfect educational system of handwork in wood which has yet been produced. It is suitable for girls as well as boys of the ages of ten and eleven and upwards.
Each child is required to make a series of useful articles called models, in which round work and the square work of the carpenter are duly alternated; and each model introduces, with the nicest regard to the graduation of difficulties, some new tool or fresh exercise with a tool. It is used as a means of developing physical power and of forming character and habit, rather than of attaining utilitarian ends. The tools are mostly those ordinarily used by a carpenter, with three or four extra ones, viz., the knife, the axe, the draw-knife and the spoon-iron. Specially shaped carpenters’ benches, adapted to the size of work done, are also used.
CONCLUSION.
RELATION OF SCHOOL TO HOME.
By Dorothea Beale.
So far we have spoken of the life of the child in the school. I now enter on another branch of the subject no less important, which in a book intended for teachers I shall treat from a teacher’s point of view.
I have spoken of the great change which has taken place during the last fifty years. In the days of Locke, of Rousseau, of Sandford and Merton, and of the Edgeworths, it was only possible to educate a boy by a private tutor at home. Now the sons of the nobility are no longer educated in their own homes, nor sent, as in earlier days, to other families. A similar change has taken place in the education of girls; every year more of those who would formerly have received their education entirely from governesses and masters at home, or at most gone to a very small boarding school, are studying as day-pupils at large schools and colleges, or living in boarding-houses. The question arises then, since the time is in the case of day-girls divided between the school and the home, how shall the relations between the two be adjusted? In the case of the day-girl, about eleven-twelfths of her time are spent at home; in the case of the boarder, nearly a third of the year. Everything must depend upon the harmonious working of the home and the school, if the education is to be profitable, and the problem requires the most careful attention. Teachers full of zeal and devotion are eagerly seeking to deepen their knowledge, to widen their experience, and when they have come to the conclusion that a well-proportioned curriculum is necessary for mental development, that early specialisation is harmful, that daily distractions are wasting the nervous energy of the growing girl, they are aggravated by hearing, “Mother thinks geometry is no good for a girl”; “Please, I am to drop my English lessons, and give nearly all my time to music”; or, “I could not do my lessons because I was at a bazaar”; or, “Friends invited me”; or, “Mother does not approve of my working in the holidays”.
And then they are tempted to do what specialists in all ages have tried to do—to set up a beneficent despotism, to say, “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!” I once heard the Head of a College address a body of teachers, advising them what to say to an opposing mother: “My dear madam, I know what is best for your child”. There are doctors who assume a dictatorial attitude, but what should we say, if a mother let the child go on taking his medicine without expostulation, when it seemed to be injuring the child; or, on the other hand, refused to give the child medicine which was beneficial, because the child did not like it? As the doctor needs to listen to the experience of the mother, and the mother to carry out the advice of the doctor, so do parents need to trust the children’s teacher in matters of which an educational expert can form the best judgment, and teachers, like doctors, need to profit by the experience of the parent, and should be willing to give reasons for their advice, knowing that the more their patient understands, the more intelligently will he carry out the directions given.
But how shall this be? Well, as a quickened sense of the supreme importance of education has been awakened in teachers, so has it in parents. But mothers cannot in these days lead quiet lives, and devote themselves to the home as they once could. The multiform external activity, which we have noticed among women workers, has its good side even as regards family life, for the family that lives for itself alone can no more lead a healthy life than the individual, but it has its dangers too. We all know how great are the claims of society, of culture, of philanthropy, right in themselves, yet sometimes displacing a higher claim. All of us, specially mothers and teachers, want to know how to conciliate the rival duties, lest the words should be said to us, “Thine own vineyard hast thou not kept”.