When the socially bad effects of the decay of the apprentice system
were recognized, and the need for some new forms of distinction
between the skilled and the unskilled in labor was understood, there
was a movement to introduce into the school system a substitute for
that older form of craft-training. The first Manual Training High
School marked that movement. The starting of Trade Schools in
connection with certain large industrial plants or groups of plants
signally demonstrated an effort to reinstate skill as a distinction of
those who had acquired it. The pioneer work of such educators as Dr.
Felix Adler in the Ethical Culture School of New York, at first called
the Workingman's School, to introduce manual training and some
definite use of handicraft processes for educational purposes in the
grade schools, and thus make a logical connection with the
Kindergarten, was a striking example of the new sense of need for a
new education to fit the new industrial situation. The Kindergarten
itself, with its response to the natural desire of childhood to make
things and to do things and to act together in the play rehearsal of
activities of later life, was a testimony that the school was to be
called upon from henceforth to do what in the older time was done
within the home and to do it better than the home had succeeded in
doing.
The connection between these movements in education and the family
well-being must be clear to all. Anything that lessens the dignity and
power of the worker lessens the ability of the average man to be a
competent and successful father; just as anything that lessens the
dignity and power of the worker or makes him seem but a machine for
others to use in building up industrial organization lessens his
influence in the political order. The importance to the family and to
the state of the elements of education which are aimed at reinstating
standards of skill and recognition of superior ability in the
industrial field, by the school, can not, therefore, be overestimated.
=Education a Social Process.=--These elements are attempts to
socialize education. We say that education is a process in the
development of human personality. So it is, but it is also a process
by which individuals are fitted for serviceableness to the group life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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