MANUAL-TRAINING HIGH SCHOOLS OR MANUAL TRAINING IN HIGH SCHOOLS

CHARLES B. GILBERT, NEW YORK CITY

Postulate: The segregation of manual training in separate high schools. means giving the fullest enjoyment of its advantages to the minority who elect to attend these schools, and entirely deprives all other secondary students of all manual-training instruction.

The proper answer to the question of the title, then, involves much more than appears upon the surface. At least three fundamental educational questions must be answered first. They are:

1. What is the purpose of manual training in secondary schools? Is it exclusively educational, exclusively occupational, or has it a dual purpose? 2. What is the function of the state with regard to industrial or occupational training?

3. What time, if any, should be set by school authorities when students. must select their future occupations, and thereafter receive definite training for them, or be deprived of certain important educational advantages?

Of course, I shall not attempt to answer these three great questions in full, but I hope to show their bearing upon the question at hand, and to show that our answer to that will depend upon the views we take of the other three questions; because, if the purpose of teaching manual training in secondary schools is purely educational, it stands to reason that it should be a co-ordinate part of the curriculum of all secondary schools where it appears at all. If it is purely occupational or industrial, then when the time has arrived in the course of education for the choice of an occupation and for directing all energies toward that, at that time manual training should cease to be a part of the general curriculum and should be given only to those who desire to make use of it for occupational ends.

If the time for this choice is the end of the elementary-school course and the beginning of the secondary course, the question is settled at once. Separate manual-training high schools should be maintained instead of manualtraining courses in other high schools; that is, whenever economic conditions render it possible.

If it has both an educational and an occupational purpose, then provision should be made for meeting both these ends.

Is it one of the offices of the state definitely to equip by technical training young people for their chosen callings? If not, and if the purpose of teaching manual training in secondary schools is not educational, but occupational, then there should be no manual training taught after the elementary school. If it is the function of the state, on the other hand, to teach trades, and if the time to begin is the end of the elementary course, and if the purpose of teaching manual training is to lead to these trades, then, of course,

there should be separate schools for the subject, and their courses should be sufficiently enlarged to include practically all remunerative trades.

Does this seem like an impossible discussion of the question? It is simply putting the case fairly, because the teaching of manual training is for educational or occupational ends, or both. If the first or the third, it stands to reason that it should not be segregated and placed so that the majority of students cannot take it. If the second, then it should be so segregated.

Now, to answer these questions, is the purpose of teaching manual training educational or occupational? In the elementary grades, educational without doubt. If it is educational up to the end of the grammar-school course, on what principle does it cease to be educational and become purely occupational at the beginning of the high school? Is it not, indeed, one of those very subjects which especially appeal to the adolescent, bringing into his horizon that sense of reality from the lack of which he is apt to suffer at that time in the ordinary school course? This is not saying it may not also be occupational.

Surely no one can reasonably claim that if it is a desirable subject for educational ends up to the age of fourteen, it ceases at that point to be a desirable subject. That being the case, why should the great majority of high-school pupils who have pursued it with interest up to that point then be deprived of it. For it follows necessarily that if it is segregated and taught only in a single school, even in a large city like New York, only a very small minority of the high-school students can have any of it, and whatever educational value there is in it is consequently lost to the majority.

Second, at what time does it become absolutely necessary for the youth to select his calling, under penalty of being deprived of valuable educational opportunities if he does not so choose? The answer is easy. There is no such time for all or a majority. It is purely an individual question. Some must leave to go to work at a calling chosen or thrust upon them as soon as compulsory-attendance laws allow, or sooner, if they can evade the officers. Others must go to work at something definite for a livelihood after leaving the grammar-school course. In fact, the vast majority of boys and girls leave before reaching the high school, as we all know. Some, a saving minority, are allowed by good fortune and their parents to pursue their education farther and go thru the high school, and a rapidly decreasing minority thru the college and university. And very many go even thru these last without having decided what definite line of work they will pursue in life. They are gathering knowledge to use and accumulating power.

Now, shall the state step in at any point and say to those fortunate youth: "You must give over some elements at least of the general culture which you are enjoying, unless you decide now what calling you want to pursue?" Clearly, it is not a function of the state to determine the age at which the youth shall either go to work for a living or decide what he will do for a living. If that is true, then on what ground can a subject which has proved to be of great educational value thru the elementary course be taken away from him at this point unless he chooses a calling?

Third, is it a proper function of the state to give exclusively occupational training at all? That is a question that I am not prepared to answer definitely pro or con. If I should say this is the function of the state, I should be accused at once of rank socialism; but if I were to call attention to the law schools, medical schools, dental schools, and agricultural schools, sustained in practically all of our western states at public expense, tho most of them of university grade, I should prove that I have good company at least in my socialism.

Indeed, if the function of education by the state is to make better citizens, and the ability to earn a good living and the wise choice of an occupation are fundamental to good citizenship, it is difficult to formulate a telling argument against occupational training at public expense. But suppose we make a concession in this direction-we surely do not place ourselves in the class of those who would give only occupational training and who would deprive those not choosing an occupation of some important element of culture.

Consequently, if manual training is an important element of culture-so important that it is worth the state's while to pay cost and to put it into all the elementary schools; and if it is also an especially valuable training for the students during the adolescent period, ought not the facilities for its pursuit to be placed within the reach of all secondary-school students, even if we also grant special facilities to those who choose some occupation to which manual training leads, and who want to continue in school, and if we regard it as the office of the state to furnish this occupational training?

Is not my point clear? It may be well to have special manual-training schools. It is certainly well to have thoro manual-training instruction thru the secondary school for all who wish to pursue this with a view to using it in the work of life, but the arrangements made to meet the needs of such should not ignore the larger class of those who would pursue the subject for its cultural value. While manual training should be offered to the fullest extent to those students who want to pursue it thoroly and broadly, should it not also be offered in more limited courses to those who want to give a shorter portion of time to it? Should not those boys and girls who have had an hour, or two hours, or three hours a week thruout the elementary school for this work be allowed to devote an hour, or two hours, or three hours a week during the secondary school to the same work?

One of the chief arguments in favor of the adoption of manual training in elementary schools is that it furnishes a new medium of expression, because it is so readily correlated with the other subjects, especially the mathematical and scientific. Does this cease to be true in the high school?

Another strong argument generally employed for manual training in the elementary schools is its democratic influence, its tendency to create sympathies between those who toil with their hands and those who do not; to dignify manual labor. Does this value cease when that most important of all developmental periods the adolescent-comes in? Can anyone advance any good proof that a single educational advantage which is admitted to belong to

this subject during the elementary-school period ceases to belong to it for the secondary period?

My position, then, is that the opportunity to pursue manual training as a cultural study should be offered to all secondary students; that a further opportunity to pursue it as an occupational subject should be offered to those who have determined at as early a time as that of entering the secondary school that they want to make this use of it.

It is evident that this can be better done in the ordinary high-school building than in a special school; and of this arrangement I will speak in a moment. There is one special objection to the separate manual-training school of which I will speak here, and whose force I recognize, altho I may advocate special schools in certain cases. That is, the tendency of all such institutions is to place the emphasis upon the mechanical, at the expense of the intellectual, features of the curriculum. It may be said that the special manual-training school. is not necessarily vocational, but the very fact that it is a special school almost of necessity makes it such. The specialists who are doing the teaching, from force of habit and from uncontrollable psychological causes will put the stress of their work upon those features which are specifically manual and will make it an occupational school. I state this practically a priori. An observation of schools generally also will confirm it.

The manual training school needs a corrective. It needs the contact with students and teachers who are more concerned with other phases of education than this in order to keep it sane and sound and wholesome, unless we want it to run into the trade school pure and simple; and surely no one here wants that.

There are economic conditions also that of necessity will affect the answer to this question in most cities. These conditions will vary according to circumstances, chiefly, perhaps, according to the size of the city. A manualtraining school run independently is, on the face of it, a very expensive school. A full corps of teachers for all the subjects-mathematics, languages, sciences, and the rest-must be maintained and a full corps of shop instructors; and unless the school is a large one so that the classes can be kept full, which is not the case in the smaller cities, the expense is very great. In very large cities, of which there are but a few, it may be that there will be students enough wanting to make manual training the major course of their secondary-school work to justify this expense.

New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and possibly Boston, St. Louis, and San Francisco, with perhaps two or three other cities in the country could maintain manual-training schools in which the cost per capita would not be very much greater than in the ordinary high school. The cities of a lower grade from 150,000 population, say, to 300,000-can do this with difficulty by shaving salaries and by paring down expenses; but even then the expense will be somewhat larger than for ordinary schools. But when a smaller class of cities is reached, especially those below 100,000, it will be found

that the per capita cost of students in special manual-training schools is so great as to be practically prohibitive of such schools.

But, to my mind, stronger than all economic arguments for manual training in the ordinary secondary school is the need of the ordinary secondaryschool student for some of it. There is no reason why a good high school, teaching all the subjects, should not have a complete manual-training equipment as a part of its plant. In my judgment, every good high school should have such an attachment, and should offer to students who want to pursue manual training fully just as complete courses in it as can be offered in the very best separate manual-training school; and also to those students who do not desire to make manual training the major subject, limited courses of one or two hours a week, continuing the interest started in the grammar school, amplifying and illustrating the other subjects of the curriculum, especially mathematics and the sciences, enlarging the views of life, and furnishing a certain amount of valuable manual dexterity without materially increasing the cost of their instruction or of the manual-training work. Moreover, the students who are taking the special manual-training courses can have the beneficial influence of the very best teachers in all the other subjects, and of contact in class with those students who are making specialties of Latin, Greek, modern languages, history, literature, mathematics, sciences, and what not.

This mingling of those who are taking different courses in one school is of advantage to both. There is a little danger of class feeling between manualtraining high schools and other high schools. The students in the classical high schools are apt to look down a little upon the students who are taking manual-training courses, and the students of the manual-training schools are apt to have a rather uncomfortable, antagonistic feeling toward the mere "book" students, as they deem the others.

It is sometimes said that teachers in the regular high schools are not in sympathy with manual training, and that it will not have a fair chance if made a part of the regular school. There is no stronger argument for such a union. If teachers are narrow enough to undervalue this great subject, they need the broadening influence which comes from contact with it. If it is all that we claim for it it will stand for itself, and if put into a good high school as a regular course, with a complete and extensive equipment, with a full corps of special teachers, and with large classes taking it with enthusiasm, no one need be found to stand as its defender.

Experience running over a good many years has shown me how popular such courses as may be allowed in manual-training schools can be made with those students who are not specialists. I think it is unfortunate to have the large number of students entering the high school specialize early. I confess to the old-fashioned belief in old-fashioned culture, enriched and enlarged by new-fashioned studies, among which stands manual training. If it is so good a thing, do not hedge it off by itself and limit it to the few; let all have it. Keep it where the many can see it, and come to value it, and can take advan