To-day, largely as a result of the spreading of the kindergarten spirit, the world is coming to recognize play and games at something like their real social, moral, and educational values, wholly aside from their benefits as concern physical welfare, and in many places directed play is being scheduled as a regular subject in school programs. Music, too, has attained new emphasis since the coming of the kindergarten, and methods of teaching music more in harmony with kindergarten ideas have been introduced into the schools.
INSTRUCTION IN THE MANUAL ACTIVITIES. Froebel not only introduced constructive work—paper-folding, weaving, needlework, and work with sand and clay and color—into the kindergarten, but he also proposed to extend and develop such work for the upper years of schooling in a school for hand training which he outlined, but did not establish. His proposed plan included the elements of the so-called manual-training idea, developed later, and he justified such instruction on the same educational grounds that we advance to-day. It was not to teach a boy a trade, as Rousseau had advocated, or to train children in sense-perception, as Pestalozzi had employed all his manual activities, but as a form of educational expression, and for the purpose of developing creative power within the child. The idea was advocated by a number of thinkers, about 1850 to 1860, but the movement took its rise in Finland, Sweden, and Russia.
The first country to organize such work as a part of its school instruction was Finland, where, as early as 1858, Uno Cygnaeus (1810-1888) outlined a course for manual training involving bench and metal work, wood-carving, and basket-weaving. In 1866 Finland made some form of manual work compulsory for boys in all its rural schools, and in its training- colleges for male teachers. In 1872 the government of Sweden decided to introduce sloyd work into its schools, partly to counteract the bad physical and moral effects of city congestion, and partly to revivify the declining home industries of the people. A sloyd school was established at Naas, in 1872, to train teachers, and in 1875 a second school, known as a "Sloyd Seminarium," was begun. The summer courses of these two schools were soon training teachers from many nations. In 1877 sloyd work was added to the Folk School instruction of Sweden. At first the old native sloyd occupations were followed, such as carpentering, turning, wood- carving, brush-making, book-binding, and work in copper and iron, but later the industrial element gave way to a well-organized course in educational tool work for boys from twelve to fifteen years of age, after the Finnish plan.
SPREAD OF THE MANUAL-TRAINING IDEA. France was the first of the larger European nations to adopt this new addition to elementary-school instruction, a training-school being organized at Paris in 1873, and, in 1882, the instruction in manual activities was ordered introduced into all the primary schools of France. It has required time, though, to provide work rooms and to realize this idea, and it is still lacking in complete accomplishment. In England the work was first introduced in London, about 1887. The government at once accepted the idea, encouraged its spread, and began to aid in the training of teachers. By 1900 the work was found in all the larger cities, and included cooking and sewing for girls, as well as manual work for boys. The training for girls goes back still farther, and was an outgrowth of the earlier "schools of industry" established to train girls for domestic service (R. 241). By 1846 instruction in needlework had been begun in earnest in England. In German lands needlework was also an early school subject, while some domestic training for girls had been provided in most of the cities, before 1914. Manual training for boys, though, despite much propaganda work, had made but little headway up to that time. As in the case of the kindergarten, the initiative and self-expression aspects of the manual-training movement made no appeal to those responsible for the work of the people's schools, and, in consequence, the manual activities have in German lands been reserved largely for the continuation and vocational schools for older pupils.
In the United States the manual-training and household-arts ideas have found a very ready welcome. Curious as it may seem, the first introduction to the United States of this new form of instruction came through the exhibit made by the Russian government at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, showing the work in wood and iron made by the pupils at the Imperial Technical Institute at Moscow. This, however, was not the Swedish sloyd, but a type of work especially adapted to secondary-school instruction. In consequence the movement for instruction in the manual activities in the United States, unlike in other nations, began as a highly organized technical type of high-school instruction, [22] while the elementary- school sloyd and the household arts for girls came in later. This type of technical high school has since developed rapidly in this country, has rendered an important educational service, and is a peculiarly American creation. In Europe the manual-training idea has been confined to the elementary school, and no institution exists there which parallels these costly and well-equipped American technical secondary schools.
The introduction of manual work into the elementary schools came a little later, and a little more slowly. As early as 1880 the Workingmen's School, founded by the Ethical Culture Society of New York, had provided a kindergarten and had extended the kindergarten constructive-work idea upward, in the form of simple woodworking, into its elementary school. In the public schools, experimental classes in elementary-school woodworking were tried in one school in Boston, as early as 1882, the expense being borne privately. In 1888 the city took over these classes. In 1886 a teacher was brought to Boston from Sweden to introduce Swedish sloyd, and a teacher-training school which has been very influential was established there, in 1889. In 1876 Massachusetts permitted cities to provide instruction in sewing, and Springfield introduced such instruction in 1884, and elementary-school instruction in knifework in 1886.
From these beginnings the movement spread, [23] though at first rather slowly. By 1900 approximately forty cities, nearly all of them in the North Atlantic group of States, had introduced work in manual training and the household arts into their elementary schools, but since that time the work has been extended to practically all cities, and to many towns and rural communities as well.
[Illustration: FIG. 228. REDIRECTED MANUAL TRAINING
A boy mending his shoe instead of making a mortice-joint ]
CONTRIBUTION OF THE MANUAL-ACTIVITIES IDEA. These new forms of school work were at first advocated on the grounds of formal discipline—that they trained the reasoning, exercised the powers of observation, and strengthened the will. The "exercises," true to such a conception, were quite formal and uniform for all. With the breakdown of the "faculty psychology," and the abandonment in large part of the doctrine of formal discipline in the training of the mind, the whole manual-training and household-arts work has had to be reshaped. As the writings of Pestalozzi, Herbart, and Froebel were studied more closely, and with the new light on child development gained from child-study and the newer psychology, these new subjects came to be conceived of in their proper light as means of individual expression, and to be extended to new forms, materials, colors, and new practical and artistic ends. To-day the instruction in manual work and the household arts in all their forms has been further changed to make of them educational instruments for interpreting the fields of art and industry and home-life in terms of their social significance and usefulness. Through these two new forms of education, also, the pupils in the elementary schools have been given training in expression and an insight into the practical work of life impossible in the old textbook type of elementary school. In the kindergarten, manual work, and the household arts, Froebel's principle of education through directed self- activity and self-expression has borne abundant fruit.
In the hands of French, English, and American educators the original manual-arts idea has been greatly expanded. In France some form of expression has been worked out for all grades of the primary school, and the work has been closely connected with art and industry on the one hand and with the home-life of the people on the other. In England the project system as applied to industry, and the household arts with reference to home-life, have been emphasized. In the United States the work has been individualized perhaps more than anywhere else, applied in many new directions—clay, leather, cement, metal—and used as a very important instrument for self-expression and the development of individual thinking.