Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885
Various
Science -- Periodicals
What mean those buildings which you have seen spring up within a few
years past in all the college greens of New England? They are libraries
and laboratories. They show that rede-craft and hand-craft are alike
held in honor, and that a liberal education means skill in getting and
skill in using knowledge; that knowledge comes from searching books and
searching nature; that the brain and the hand are in close league. So
too, in the lowest school, as far as possible from the university, the
kindergarten has won its place and the blocks, and straws, and bands,
the chalk, the clay, the scissors, are in use to make young fingers
deft. Between the highest and the lowest schools there is a like call
for hand-craft. Seeing this need, the authorities in our public schools
have begun to project special schools for such training, and are looking
for guidance far and near. At this intermediate stage, for boy and girls
who are between the age of the kindergarten and the age of the college
or the shop, for youth between eight and sixteen, there is much to be
done; people are hardly aware how much is needed to secure fit training
for the rising generation.
It seems sometimes as if one of the most needed forms of hand-craft
would become a lost art, even good handwriting. We cannot give much
credit to schools if they send out many who are skilled in algebra, or
in Latin, but who cannot write a page of English so that it can be read
without effort.
Drawing is another kind of hand-craft, quite too much neglected. I think
it should be laid down as a law of the road to knowledge, that everybody
must learn to draw as well as to write. The pencil maybe mastered just
as readily as the pen. It is a simpler tool. The child draws before
he writes, and savages begin their language with pictures; but, we
wiseacres of this age of books let our young folks drop their slate
pencils and their Fabers, and practice with their Gillotts and their
Esterbrooks. Let us say, in every school and in every house, the child
must not only learn to read and write, he must learn to draw. We cannot
afford to let our young folks grow up without this power. A new French
book is just now much talked about, with this droll title, "The Life
of a Wise Man, by an Ignoramus." It is the story of the great Pasteur,
whose discoveries in respect to life have made him world renowned. I
turned to the book, eager to find out the key to such success, and
I found the old story--"the child was father of the man." This
philosopher, whose eye is so skilled in observing nature, and whose hand
is so apt in experiments, is the boy grown up whose pictures were so
good that the villagers thought him at thirteen an artist of rank.
Girls should learn the first lesson of hand-craft with the needle; boys
may (and they will always prize the knowledge), but girls must. It is
wise that our schools are going back to old fashioned ways, and saying
that girls must be taught to sew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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