assumed, and this prepolytechnic work, wherever and in what- ever d^ree it is possible, is a better adjunct of secondary courses than manual training, the sad fact being that according to the best estimates only a fraction of one per cent of those who need this training in this country are now receiving it.
II. Manual training has many origins, but in its now most widely accepted form it came to us more than a generation ago from Moscow, and has its best representation here in our new and often magnificent manual-training high schools and in many courses in other public schools. This work meets the growing demand of the country for a more practical education, a demand which often greatly exceeds the accommodations. The philosophy, if such it may be called, that underlies the movement, is simple, forcible, and sound, and not unlike Pesta- lozzi's " keine Kentnisse okne Fertigkeiten/' in that it lessens the interval between thinking and doing; helps to give control, dexterity, and skill an industrial trend to taste; interests many GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION I75 not successful in ordinary school; tends to the better appre- ciation of good, honest work; imparts new zest for some studies; adds somewhat to the average length of the school period; gives a sense of capacity and effectiveness, and is a useful preparation for a number of vocations. These claims are all well founded and this work is a valuable addition to the pedagogic agencies of any country or state. As man excels the higher anthropoids perhaps almost as much in hand power as in mind, and since the manual areas of the brain are wide near the psychic zones, and the cortical centers are thus directly de- veloped, the hand is a potent instrument in opening the intel- lect as well as in training sense and will. It is no reproach to these schools that, full as they are, they provide for but an in- significant fraction of the circa sixteen millions or twenty per cent of the young people of the country between fifteen and twenty-four.
When we turn to the needs of these pupils, the errors and limitations of the method are painful to contemplate. The work is essentially manual and ofifers little for the legs, where most of the muscular tissues of the body lie, those which re- spond most to training and are now most in danger of degener- ation at this age; the back and trunk are also little trained. Consideration of proportion and bilateral asymmetry are prac- tically ignored. Almost in proportion as these schools have multiplied, the rage for uniformity, together with motives of economy and administrative eflficiency on account of overcrowd- ing, have made them rigid and inflexible on the principle that as the line lengthens the stake must be strengthened. This is a double misfortune, for the courses were not suf^ciently con- sidered at first and the plastic stage of adaptation was too short, while the methods of industry have undergone vast changes since they were given shape. There are now between three and four hundred occupations in the census, more than half of these involving manual work, so that never perhaps was there so great a pedagogic problem as to make these natural developments into conscious art, to extract what may be called basal types. This requires an effort not without analysis to Aristotle's attempt to extract from the topics of the market- place the underlying categories eternally conditioning all thought, or to construct a grammar of speech. Hardly an 176 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE attempt worthy the name, not even the very inadequate one of a committee, has been made in this field to study the conditions and to meet them. Like Froebel's gifts and occupations, deemed by their author the very roots of human occupations in infant form, the processes selected are underived and find their justification rather in their logical sequence and coherence than in being true norms of work. If these latter be attainable at all, it is not likely that they will fit so snugly in a brief curriculum, so that its simplicity is suspicious. The wards of the keys that lock the secrets of nature and human life are more intricate and mazy. As H. T. Bailey well puts it in substance, a master in any art-craft must have a four- fold equipment: i. Ability to grasp an idea and embody it. 2. Power to utilize all nerve, and a wide repertory of methods, devices, recipes, discoveries, machines, etc. 3. Knowledge of the history of the craft. 4. Skill in technical processes. American schools emphasize chiefly only the last.
The de facto result is thus a course rich in details represent- ing wood and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the course treating of the former, wooden in its teach- ings and distinctly tending to make joiners, carpenters and cabi- net-makers, that of the latter iron in its rigidity and an ex- cellent school for smiths, mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few trades. This tendency they even also fear less often because unfortunately trade-unions in this country some- times jealously suspect it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic methods and matter. In- dustry is everywhere and always for the sake of the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacri- fice of content to form, which in all history has been the chief GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 177 Stigma of degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal, but tools are always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their invention. Hence a course in tool ma- nipulation only, with persistent refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly, hollow, artificial in- stitutions. Instead of making in the lower grades certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific ap- paratus more generic than machines to open the great principles of the material universe, all is sacrificed to supernormalized method.
As in all hypermethodic schemes the thought side is feeble. There is no such control of the work of these schools by the higher technical institutions as the college exercises over the high school, so that few of them do work that fits for advanced training or is thought best by technical faculties. In most of its current narrow forms, manual training will prove to be his- torically as it is educationally extemporized and tentative, and will soon be superseded by broader methods and forgotten and obsolete, or cited only as a low point of departure from which future progress will loom up.
Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected it even with the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new edu- cational elements, and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their hygiene and fullest development, and next, the closest con- nection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each operation and each tool — the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe — will be studied with reference to their orthopedic value, bilateral asym- 13 1 7^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCJi metry, the muscles they develop, and the attitudes and motor habits they favor; and uniformity, which in France often re- quires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to indi- viduality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful, deft. The movement was organized in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was soon installed in an institution of its own for training teachers at Naas. It works in wood only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans, but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and self-respect- ing, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. It as- sumes that all and especially the motor-minded can really under- stand only what they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and to be so essentially edu- cational that, as a leading exponent says, its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor de- velopment of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models, the penates of the sloyd house- hold, the unique features of which persist like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.^ Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools, drawing, and models. Each must be pro- gressive, so that every new step in each series involves a new and next developmental step in all the others, and all together, it is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of each power appealed to in the child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological or psychological reason of a single step in any of these series, and the coordina- tion of the series even with each other, to say nothing of their adaptation to the stages of the child's development. This, if as ^ This I have elsewhere tried to show in detail. Criticisms of Manual Train, ing and Mechanic Arts in High Schools. Ped. Sem., June, 1902.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION I79 pat and complete as is urged, would indeed constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty, totality in vari- ety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But the " 45 tools, "j^ exercises, 3 1 models, 1 5 of which are joints," all learned by teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are overmethodic, and such correla- tion is impossible in so many series at once. Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough, since the fall lost us Eden, and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree of knowledge itself, is incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have caused its enthusiastic coryphei to magnify its scope and claims far beyond their modest bounds, and although its field covers the great transition from childhood to youth, one searches in vain both its literature and practise for the slightest recognition of the new motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in its partially acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost scholastic, and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor power- wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty current that sets toward motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse and less economic of pedagogic momen- tum than it is. It holds singularly aloof from other methods of efferent training and resists coordination with them, and its provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one of the last to accept its true but modest place as con- tributing certain few but precious elements in the greater syn- thesis that impends. Indian industries, basketry, pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is making lost arts by forcing the white man's industries upon red men at reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization that Swedish peasant work has re- ceived to develop even greater educational values, and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the old New England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only now, and perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few edu- cators.
This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating i8o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE with Carlyle's gospel of work and Ruskin's medievalism, de- veloped by William Morris and his disciples at the Red House, checked awhile by the ridicule of the comic opera Patience, and lately revived in some of its features by Cobden-Sander- son, and of late to some extent in various centers in this country. Its ideal was to restore the day of the seven ancient guilds and of Hans Sachs, the poet cobbler, when conscience and beauty inspired work and the hand did what machines only imitate and vulgarize. In the past, which this school of motor culture harks back to, work was indeed praise for which our degenerate age lacks even respect. Refined men and women have remembered these early days, when their race was in its prime, as a lost paradise which they would regain by designing and even weaving tapestries and muslins; ex- perimenting in vats with dyes to rival Tyrian purple; printing and binding by hand books that surpassed the best of the Aldines and Elzevirs; carving in old oak; hammering brass; forging locks, irons, and candlesticks; becoming artists in burned wood and leather; seeking old effects of simplicity and solidity in furniture and decoration, as well as in architecture, stained glass, and to some extent in dress and manners; and all this toil and moil was ad majorem gloriam hominis in a new socialistic state, where the artist and even the artisan who does take his rightful place above the man who merely knows. The day of the mere professor, who deals in knowledge, is gone, and the day of the doer, who creates, has come. The brain and hand, too long divorced and each weak and mean without the other, use and beauty, each alone vulgar, letters and labor, each soulless without the other, are henceforth to be one and inseparable, and this union will lift man to a higher level. The workman in his apron and paper hat, inspired by the new socialism and the old spirit of chivalry as revived by Scott, revering Wagner's revival of the old Deiitschenthiim that was to conquer Christenthum, or Tennyson's Arthurian cycle — this was its ideal; even as the Jews rekindled their loy- alty to the ancient traditions of their race and made their Bible under Ezra; as we begin to revere the day of the farmer-citizen, who made our institutions, or as some of us would revive his vanishing industrial life for the red man.
Although this movement was by older men and women and GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION l8l had in it something of the longing regret of senescence for days that are no more, it shows us the glory which invests racial adolescence when it is recalled in maturity, the time when the soul can best appreciate the value of its creations and its possi- bilities, and really lives again in its glamour and finds in it its greatest inspiration. Hence it has its lessons for us here. A touch, but not too much of it, should be felt in all manual educa- tion, which is just as capable of idealism as literary education. This gives soul, interest, content, beauty, taste. If not a poly- phrastic philosophy seeking to dignify the occupation of the workshop by a pretentious Volapiik of reasons and abstract the- ories, we have here the pregnant suggestion of a psychological quarry of motives and spirit opened and ready to be worked. Thus the best forces from the past should be turned on to shape and reenforce the best tendencies of the present. The writings of the above gospelers of work not only could, and should, but will be used to inspire manual-training high schools, sloyd and even some of the less scholastic industrial courses, but each is incomplete without the other. These books and those that breathe their spirit should be the mental workshop of all who do tool, lathe, and forge work, who design and draw patterns, carve or mold, or of those who study how to shape matter for human uses, and whose aim is to obtain diplomas or certificates of fitness to teach all such things. The muse of art and even of music will have some voice in the great synthesis which is to gather up the scattered, hence ineffective elements of secondary motor training, in forms which shall represent all the needs of adolescents in the order and proportion that nature and growth stages indicate, drawing with this end supreme, upon all the resources that history and reform offer to our selection. All this can never make work become play. Indeed it will and should make work harder and more unlike play and of another genus, because the former is thus given its own proper soul and leads its own distinct, but richer, and more abounding life.
I must not close this section without brief mention of two important studies that have supplied each a new and important determination concerning laws of work peculiar to adolescence.
The main telegraphic line requires a speed of over seventy letters per minute of all whom they will employ. As a sending rate this is not very difficult and is often attained after two THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE months' practise. This standard for receiving rate is harder and later, and inquiry at schools where it is taught shows that about seventy-five per cent of those who begin the study fail to reach this speed and so are not employed. Bryan and Harter ^ explained the rate of improvement in both sending and receiv- ing, with results represented for one typical subject in the fol- lowing curve.
From the first, sending improves most rapidly and crosses the dead-line a few months before the receiving rate, which may fall short; curves i and 2 represent the same student. I have added line 3 to illustrate the three-fourths who fail. Re- ceiving is far less pleasant than sending, and years of daily practise at ordinary rates will not bring a man to his maximum rate, but he remains on the low plateau with no progress be- yond a certain point. If forced by stress of work, danger of being dropped, or by will power to make a prolonged and in- tense effort, he breaks through his hidebound rate and perma- nently attains a faster pace. This is true at each step, and every advance seems to cost even more intensive effort than the former one. At length, for those who go on, the rate of re- ceiving, which is a more complex process, exceeds that of sending, and the curves of the above figure would cross if pro- duced. The expert receives so much faster than he sends that * Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language. Psychological Review, vol. iv, p. 27, and vol. vi, p. 345.
GROWTH OF MOTOR POWER AND FUNCTION 183 abbreviated codes are used, and he may take eighty to eighty- five words a minute on a typewriter in correct form. The motor curve seems to asymptotically approach a perhaps physiolog- ical limit, which the receiving curve does not suggest. This seems a special case of a general though not yet explained law. In learning a foreign language, speaking is first and easiest, and hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as an hierarchy of habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower order habits are approaching their maxi- mum but are not yet automatic enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting to- gether of units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack. In many, if not all skills, where expert- ness is sought, there is a long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if here too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and attains her ends by alter- nate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is trans- formed, converted, the hard becomes easy, the old life sinks to a lower stratum and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain level and functions are evolved. The practical implica- tion here of the necessity of hard concentrative effort as a con- dition of advancement is reenforced by a quotation from Sen- ator Stanford to the effect of early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, " It is the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is developed else- where, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned by spon- taneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary attention is motivated by the same nisus of develop- ment even in its most adult form, and that the products of science, invention, discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was originally determined in the form of consciousness,