The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
Manufacturers and business men do not take kindly to the idea that
they should be made responsible for the mental, moral and aesthetic
development of their employes and under these circumstances industrial
education would soon degenerate into a feudal appendage of our
industrial system. Manufacturers, corporations and business men are
certainly entitled to a share in the management of our educational
system and industrial schools and it is highly desirable that they
should claim their share.
But they can accomplish all they need either as members of school
boards, or as advisory committees on industrial education.
As to the danger of vocational schools being emasculated there is
no such danger. No one who understands anything about the matter
expects to have vocational or industrial schools articulated with the
elementary or high schools in the manner manual training has been and
is articulated, but have these lower schools separate in just the same
manner as manual training high schools or technical high schools are
separate from the academic schools, yet are under the same organization
and management without any detriment to their usefulness.
It is true that, if specific industrial education is yoked together
with academic education in the high school, industrial education will
be emasculated. But then it is due to a managerial blunder of trying to
straddle two horses and there is no excuse to make such a managerial
mistake the pretext for the creation of an expensive separate system of
education. Manual training, as we understand it, was never emasculated
because neither by the originators, and the writer is one of them,
nor subsequently, was manual training in the elementary and high
school considered anything else but an adjunct to academic schools
for cultural purposes and down to the N. E. A. meeting at Boston
in 1903, Professor Woodward, the father of the American system of
manual training, disclaimed any other but cultural purpose for manual
training, without any distinct vocational aim.
At the above meeting Dean Woodward, in referring to the manual training
work done at St. Louis said: “The secondary school should enable a
boy to discover the world and find himself. I use the word ‘discover’
in the sense of uncover--that is lay bare--the problems, the demands,
the opportunities, the possibilities of the eternal world. A boy finds
himself when he has taken a correct inventory of his inherited and
acquired tastes and capacities”. While many friends of manual training
were disappointed in finding it did not revolutionize trade education,
it never intended to do that and therefore was not emasculated.
PAUL KREUZPOINTNER.
[Chairman Committee on Industrial Education, American
Foundryman’s Association.]
Altoona, Pa.
=THE I. W. W.: AN OUTLAW ORGANIZATION=
TO THE EDITOR:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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