Correlated courses in woodwork and mechanical drawing

by Ira Samuel Griffith

Second, the pupils must acquire experience. Let them make a booklet according to definite specifications provided them by the instructor.

The process thus far is mainly deductive or analytic. So far there has been no invention or design, but the pupils are now prepared for it. Using the information and experience now available, let them design a booklet to meet certain conditions. This latter part we would call the inductive or synthetic process.

We should have two aims in our teaching of design: (1) Appreciation, (2) Development of the creative faculty. Since all must be able to appreciate good line and good form when they get out into life while only a few will ever become designers in a creative sense, it is essential, as it is also rational, that attention should be paid first to appreciation. Past efforts show how hopeless is the problem when we strive to give to the pupils appreciation of and feeling for line and form by demanding original forms in the very beginning. The beginner’s efforts at creation are abortive and the appreciation that he derives is nil. By our insistence on this method we have given to our pupils the idea that design means making something out of nothing. He is not far wrong if we demand of him original designs before we have given him anything tangible upon which to work. We say tangible as distinguished from academic principles or rules of design. If nothing tangible is given the pupil he must get it outside of his school experience. This explains the superabundance of “wienerwurst” forms, bouquets tied with ribbons, circles, etc., etc.

It is possible to create unknown out of what is seemingly unknown. When we stop to analyze the process, however, we find that we have made use of information, appreciation, and feeling that are known. Sometimes we make ourselves believe that our pupils are creating unknown out of unknown without these requisites. Analysis will show that our continued suggestions to him, drawn from our own fund of known are the causes, and not the pupil’s faculty. This method of teaching is the kind we have been used to in design. It works pretty well with small classes and individual instruction. Try it on large classes of beginners and it is not possible to bring results that stand for class efficiency.

And why should this particular method be insisted upon exclusively with beginners? Why should not design, like mechanical drawing and woodwork and other subjects be developed upon a substructure consisting of information and appreciation secured by allowing or even insisting that the boy handle good design until he becomes saturated with a feeling for good line and good form? Of course, if any pupil comes to a beginning class with this information and feeling, due allowance should and can readily be made. It is highly probable that there would be less inclination on the part of our pupils to insist that designers are born not made were more use made of the deductive method. When the boys no longer see their efforts result in crudities and are enabled to acquire the necessary feeling and information as their work proceeds, then you find a happy and interested class that as a whole takes design as a matter of course and not as something intended only for the few.

Whatever the method of teaching design in the regular classroom, lack of time demands the most direct treatment of shop design. A grammar school boy is not inclined to listen very patiently to anything that smacks of the academic. (1) Give the boy something definite with which to work and (2) keep him working, or “playing,” as one has fittingly designated it, until he has made a conscientious effort to “make it a part of himself,” that is, until he succeeds in changing the form until it no longer resembles the original but still possesses the pleasing appearance of the original.

If he succeeds in doing this, he is well on the way to creative effort. Not all boys are of equal ability in other lines of endeavor, neither are they in this. By this method of attack, however, even the stupidest—usually stupid only in the matter of design—is not without compensation for his effort. He has learned somewhat of the principles that govern good design by hearing them explained and seeing them illustrated in a piece of good design. He will have developed some feeling for line and form thru having played with good line and form. He can at the very least fit the form given him to an outline made by himself after suggestions of good line placed upon the board. To this extent, at least, you have benefited him, whereas, by the usual method he—and there are many like him—would have simply sat idle in discouragement—if he were not more mischievously occupied.

If our old art schools were to be criticised because they made too much use of the imitative method when they strove to give to their students information and appreciation and feeling for form and line thru copying historic ornament, it would seem, from results obtained, both tangible and in the effect upon the pupils, that our modern schools are open to criticism when they seek to force originality upon immature minds before they have given these minds any information or feeling.

Of course grammar school boys are not interested in historic ornament, at least not in America. This is the weakness of the imitative method and helped to bring in the movement which now seems to have swung to the opposite extreme—it lacks vitality for young pupils. Instead of giving the boy historic fragments, give him a form that is vitally interesting to him because he sees its immediate application in the thing that is to be made in wood. Let him play with this form combining imitation and modification and creation just as far as he is able.

Make the problem concrete, stating the principles you have to state in a language the boy can understand. There will not be time to bring out every principle that might be involved in design. There must be time to bring out those involved in the particular problem under discussion. Balance and symmetry, for illustration, are pretty well understood by the boy in the simple form in which he will have occasion to use them.