Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: The material for this lecture was collected for a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, at St Stephen's Hall, New York City, in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.]

We have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our education of the masses is a failure. Teaching people to read and write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge, overgrown Sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. Indeed we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. The learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper, the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. With some rather [{156}] disconnected information this is practically all that our ordinary education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums of money on it. We are just beginning to realize that other forms of education and not these superficial introductions to supposed scholarship, which can mean so little, constitute realities in education.

We have come to realize that Germany, where it is said that more than sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. By contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children have the opportunity for such training. We are very prone to think, however, that the technical school is a modern idea. We assume that it owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork and craftsmanship has at length arisen. Nothing could well be less true than this. It is true that the eighteenth century saw practically no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity for it. In the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded the masses of the people in all sorts of arts and [{157}] crafts and trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical schools. They did not call these teaching institutions technical schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from such schools.

This training the people of these times owed to the gilds. These were, of course, of many forms, the Arts Gilds, the Crafts Gilds, the Merchants Gilds, and then the various Trades Gilds. Boys were apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that his parents chose for him, and then began his training. It was conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. The master provided him with board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be. After his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his gild. If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was [{158}] considered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was derived.

This might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. The only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products turned out by these workmen. It was these graduates of the apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the English cathedrals, the English municipal buildings, the castles and the palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling, who produced the wonderful stained glass, the beautiful bells, the finished ironwork, the surpassing woodwork, the sculpture, the decoration,--in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture of the wonderful Gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--which we have learned to value so highly in recent years. If we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would have to import the workmen. These wonderful [{159}] products were made in cities so small that we would be apt to think them scarcely more than insignificant towns in our time. No town in England during the thirteenth century, with the possible exception of London, had more than 25,000, and most of the cathedral towns were under 15,000 in population and many of them had less than 10,000.

The extent to which this teaching went and how much it partook of the nature of real technical training can be very well appreciated from recent studies of these early times. There has probably never been more beautiful handicraftsmanship nor better products of what we now call the arts and crafts than during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when this system of educating the masses became thoroughly organized. Any one who knows the details of the decoration of the great Gothic cathedrals or of the monasteries and castles and municipal buildings of these centuries will be well acquainted with these marvels of accomplishment, scattered everywhere throughout England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in this period. Something of the story of it all I tried to tell, as far as the cathedrals are concerned, in my book, "The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries." Those who care to see another side of it will find it in Mr. A. Ralph Adams Cram's "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain." [Footnote 13] Mr. Cram, himself a [{160}] successful modern architect, does not hesitate to declare some of this work as among the most beautiful that ever was made, even including the ancient Greek and Roman productions. In his searches into the ruins of these old abbeys he has found mutilated fragments so consummate in their faultless art that they deserve a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age.

[Footnote 13: New York, The Churchman Company, 1905.]

It was not alone, however, in the arts of sculpture and decoration, that is in those finer accomplishments that would occupy only a few of the workmen, but in every detail of adornment that these artistic craftsmen excelled. The locks and bolts, the latches and hinges, the grilles, even the very fences and gates made in wrought iron, are beautiful in every line and in the artistic efficiency of their designs. The carved woodwork is in many places a marvel. When a gate has to be moved, or a hinge is no longer used, or a lock or even a key from these early times goes out of commission, we would consider it almost a sacrilege to throw it away; it is transported to the museum--not alone because of its value as an antique but, as a rule, also because of its charm as a work of art. When a bench-end is no longer needed it, too, finds its way into the museum. As Rev. Augustus Jessopp has shown very clearly in his studies of the old English parishes, these marvels of iron and woodwork were made, in most cases, respectively by the village blacksmith and the village carpenter. In the archives of [{161}] some of the parishes of the Middle Ages the accounts are found showing that these men were paid for them. When the village blacksmith and the village carpenter becomes the artist artisan capable of producing such good work, then indeed is there an ideal education at work and a technical training that may be boasted of.

The most important feature of this education remains to be spoken of, however. It consisted of the fine development and occupation of the mind that came from this system. Men found happiness in their work. In a population of less than 3,000,000 of people many thousands of workmen, engaged in building these magnificent monuments of that old time, reaped a blessed pleasure in the doing of beautiful things. They, too, had a share in the great monument of which their town was worthily proud and the opportunity to make something worth while for it. Instead of idly envying others they devoted themselves to making whatever their contribution might be as beautiful as possible. It might be only the hinges for the doors or the latch for the gates, it might be only the stonework for the bases of pillars, though it might be the beautiful decoration of their capitals; but everything was being done beautifully and an artist hand was required everywhere. Men must have tried over and over again to make such fine things. They were not done at haphazard nor at one trial. There must have been many a spoiled piece [{162}] rejected, not so much by the foreman as by the critical, educated taste of the workmen themselves who were able to make such beautiful things. Men who could make such artistic products must have labored much and begun over and over again. This must have made the finest occupation of mind that a great mass of people has ever had in all the world's history.