Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
The Manual Training School has been in operation since 1880. It may be
called the most fully developed pioneer institution of the sort. I spent
some time in its workshops and schools, thinking of the very interesting
question at the bottom of the experiment, namely, the mental development
involved in the training of the hand and the eye, and the reflex help to
manual skill in the purely intellectual training of study. It is, it may
be said again, not the purpose of the modern manual training to teach
a trade, but to teach the use of tools as an aid in the symmetrical
development of the human being. The students here certainly do beautiful
work in wood-turning and simple carving, in ironwork and forging. They
enjoy the work; they are alert and interested in it. I am certain that
they are the more interested in it in seeing how they can work out and
apply what they have learned in books, and I doubt not they take hold of
literary study more freshly for this manual training in exactness. The
school exacts close and thoughtful study with tools as well as in books,
and I can believe that it gives dignity in the opinion of the working
student to hand labor. The school is large, its graduates have been
generally successful in practical pursuits and in teaching, and it lias
demonstrated in itself the correctness of the theory of its authors,
that intellectual drill and manual training are mutually advantageous
together. Whether manual training shall be a part of all district school
education is a question involving many considerations that do not enter
into the practicability of this school, but I have no doubt that manual
training schools of this sort would be immensely useful in every city.
There are many boys in every community who cannot in any other wayr be
awakened to any real study. This training school deserves a chapter
by itself, and as I have no space for details, I take the liberty of
referring those interested to a volume on its aims and methods by Dr. C.
M. Woodward, its director.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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