Our Schools in War Time—and AfterDean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
History
Our Schools in War Time—and After
Dean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
Education -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Schools
Next, in the laboratory of the school an analysis of the workman's
movements is made in relation to their regularity, direction, speed,
and according to the force they expend. The measure of the man's
physical incapacity is deduced from impressions gathered in this
analysis, and from it the method of training must be devised. Furnished
with his card of qualifications, the man passes from the hospital
laboratory to the workshop, where experts instruct him in theory and
practice. The first thing to determine is whether a man cannot perform
the operations of his former trade. In many cases a man imagines that
the disability caused by amputation of fingers, hand, or arm makes him
unfit for the work he did previous to the war. But where the school
is attached to a hospital and the man's disability can be accurately
known, the union of medical skill and technical instruction makes it
possible to restore him to usefulness with the minimum of effort and
waste.
Dr. Amar recommends for special relief work for the 15 per cent who
are not capable of any great degree of reëducation, shops which will
execute orders for easily manufactured articles, involving such
processes as light cooperage, stamping, plaiting, toymaking,--work such
as is offered at the shop in Rue de la Durance, Paris.
Another institution whose methods are similar to those employed at St.
Maurice and by Dr. Amar is the Anglo-Belgian Military Institute, at
Port Villez, Vernon, under the technical director Major Haccourt. It
accommodates over 800 men, and is self-supporting, the land where it is
situated having been originally covered with forests, the sale of which
financed the undertaking at first. Forty-three trades are taught here,
and a large farm is maintained on which horses wounded in war are cared
for and made useful. The workshops provide for commercial courses,
telegraphy, wall-paper designing, the manufacture of motor vehicles
and electrical machinery of all kinds, plumbing and tinsmithing,
rabbit and poultry farming, fur curing and dyeing, etc. The shops
make fuse boxes for munitions, and various army supplies. At Vernon
the men pupils are regarded as still in the Belgian army, receiving
military pay; they have no option as to entrance, since they are under
military discipline, but enter as soon as they are discharged from
the Anglo-Belgian hospital at Rouen. In this school the services of
the best professors in different trades are obtained without trouble,
for the director can requisition any man in the Belgian army for any
required purpose. Before the war Belgium had a large proportion of
highly trained workmen; and with compulsory reëducation and military
discipline the operation of this institution is much simplified.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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