Correlated courses in woodwork and mechanical drawing

by Ira Samuel Griffith

Like every extreme position each of these points of view has good in it, but there is sufficient error accompanying each to impair the validity of the conclusions and to make the resulting applications unhappy as related to ordinary public school conditions.

The whole subject of design as it relates to the manual training shop is one that has demanded thought on the part of the author. It is one of those places where teaching theory failed to bring efficiency either in the results obtained in design or in the reaction upon the boy. He has been forced to the opinion, from his own experience and from his observation of the efforts of others to teach design to grammar school pupils, that the cause for dissatisfaction and discouragement is due to our insistence upon one and only one method of presentation—the inductive or synthetic.

In judging results we must consider the results obtained from every member of a class and the good each boy has got out of his experience. This efficiency test most effectively excludes the exhibition of a few “accidentals” as evidence that our method is the correct one. There is no reason why design should seek justification on any ground other than that offered by other subjects.

Inductive or synthetic teaching of design has its place; so also has the deductive or analytic. Happily those educators who insist on the use of one method or the other only are becoming few. In other subjects we are finding that the teaching results which demand the respect and approval of educators of safe and sane judgment are obtained by the use of both methods interchangeably. There is no formal notice when one is to be used or the other—whichever method fits the occasion is used without apology. This is right; to do otherwise is to sacrifice the boy or girl for the sake of the method. We are all agreed that the child is the more important consideration. In fact, some psychologists tell us that induction and deduction are one and the same process, the difference being merely a matter of emphasis. It is this difference in placing the emphasis that we seek to discuss.

Our methods in the high school have made much of the inductive. This is right. Pupils of high school and college age are ready for this method, tho our high school pupils often would profit by having a little less of this with more of the deductive.

However, when it comes to grammar school teaching, the maximum of use has to be made of the deductive or analytic method. This is acknowledged in the academic subjects. Woodworking when taught so as to meet the efficiency test that is applied to academic teaching also makes use of this method mostly. Our design, however, has always been taught by the inductive or synthetic method, no one seeming to have the temerity to make use of any other. As a result we find the views of design in the grammar school as stated above. Those who advocate it urge the “accidentals” as sufficient justification. Those who reject it base their argument on the fact that results based on a few accidentals will not satisfy the same efficiency test that is applied to other subjects.

Experience has shown, at least to the author’s satisfaction, that the deductive or analytic method when given maximum emphasis with beginners in design is all that is needed to bring the results up to a standard equal to that of other subjects. It is the rational method of presenting any subject to beginners.

The terms deductive and inductive have such wide application that it may be well to specify more particularly just what we mean. A concrete illustration will suffice to show the distinction we seek to make between what we choose to designate the deductive or analytic and the inductive or synthetic methods.

Suppose we wish to have a class, with little or no information about the subject, design a booklet to meet certain specified conditions. Three distinct stages of progress manifest themselves in what we shall call the complete method. First, the pupils must be given information bearing upon the problem. Second, they must be given experience in handling problems of that type. Third, they will utilize this information and experience in designing the booklet to meet given conditions.

The first step will be the taking of a type form and analyzing it. Either the instructor will demonstrate or, better, each pupil may be given a booklet of type form and required to take it apart and put it together again. Any way to give the pupil the information in a form that will cause it “to stick.” In woodwork, it would be done by means of the traditional shop demonstration—a wise practice, since psychology teaches us that sight percepts are among the strongest.