Schools of to-morrow · John Dewey
EDUCATION THROUGH INDUSTRY
Gary has fortunately been able to begin with such an all-around system of education, putting it into operation in all her schools in a nearly complete form, because the town was made, as it were, at a stroke and has grown rapidly from a waste stretch of sand dunes to a prosperous town. But many other cities are realizing more and more strongly the necessity of linking their curriculum more closely to the lives of their pupils, by furnishing the children with a general training and outlook on life which will fit them for their place in the world as adults. Recently the Chicago public schools have been introducing vocational work in some of the school buildings, while technical high schools give courses that are vocational, besides work in trade-training. Of course such elaborate equipment as that in Gary is impractical in a building where the shops are not used by the high school as well as the grades. Twenty or more of the regular school buildings in the city have been fitted up with carpenter shops and cooking and sewing rooms as well as laboratories for work in science. Each one of these schools has a garden where the pupils learn how to do practical city gardening. From one-fourth to even a half of the children’s time is spent on manual training instead of one-eighth as in the other schools of the city, and in other respects the regular curriculum is being followed. The teachers in the schools who were there before the change of program feel convinced that the pupils not only get through with as much book work as they did when practically all their time was given to it, but that they actually do their work better because of the motive furnished by the hand work.
The courses given by the schools are not uniform, but most of the schools include courses in mechanical drawing, pattern making, metal work, woodwork, and printing for the boys, and for the girls, work in sewing, weaving, cooking, millinery, laundry, and general home-making. Both boys and girls have work in designing, pottery, bookbinding, and gardening. The program differs somewhat in different schools to meet the needs of the neighborhood or because of the resources of the building; but all the pupils of one school take the same work, so that when a pupil graduates from the eighth grade in one of these schools he has acquired a good beginner’s knowledge of the principles and processes underlying two or three trades. This special work is supplemented by the regular work in music and art and this, with work in the elementary processes of sewing and weaving and pottery, constitutes the work for the younger grades. The object of this training is to enable the child to pick up the thread of life in his own community, by giving him an understanding of the elements of the occupations that supply man’s daily needs; it is not to confine him to the industries of his neighborhood by teaching him some one skilled trade.
The laboratories for the study of the elements of science play a most important part in this work. In them the child learns to understand the foundations of modern industry, and so comes to his environment as a whole. Without this comprehensive vision no true vocational training can be successful, for it is only as he sees the place of different kinds of work and their relation to each other that the youth can truly choose what his own vocation is to be. Elementary courses in physics, chemistry, and botany are given pupils, and the bearing of the work on what they are doing in the shops is made clear. The botany is taught in connection with the gardening classes, chemistry for the girls is given in the form of the elements of food chemistry. One school gives a laboratory class in electricity, where the pupils make the industrial application of the laws they are studying, learning how to wire when they are learning about currents, and how to make a dynamo when they are working on magnets, etc. All the pupils take a course in the elements of science, so that they may get a true basis for their ideas about the way things work. There is no doubt that even in this rather tentative form the vocational schools have proved themselves a decided success, enabling pupils to do their book work better than before. Linking it with the things of everyday life gives it meaning and zest, and at the same time furnishes a mental and muscular control over the sort of thing they are going to need as adults while earning a living.
There are five technical high schools in Chicago, four for boys and one for girls. In all of these and in three other schools there are given what is known as “prevocational” courses. These are for pupils who have reached the legal age for leaving school, but who are so backward in their work that they ought not to be allowed to do so, while at the same time this backwardness makes them wish not to stay. These classes have proved again the great value of training for the practical things of everyday life to the city child. The boys and girls who are put into these classes are by no means deficient: they are simply children who for one reason or another have not been able to get along in the ordinary grade school as well as they ought; often the reason has been poor health, or because the child has had to move from one school to another, or simply because the usual curriculum made so little appeal that they were not able to hold themselves to the work. The prevocational classes include the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and give the greater part of the time to training the child through developing skill with his hands. Book work is not neglected, however, and the pupils are held up to the same standards that they would have to reach in an ordinary school, though they do not cover quite so much ground. The work can be made more varied than in the vocational grammar school because the equipment of the high school is available. Moreover, their ambition is so stimulated that very large numbers of them do additional work and transfer to the regular technical high school work, where in spite of their prior backwardness they do as well as the regular students. Ordinarily not a single one of them would ever have entered a high school.
The girls’ technical high school does about what the vocational grammar schools are doing excepting that the work is more thorough, so that the graduate is more nearly prepared to take up work in some one industry. The cooking includes work in the school lunch room, and training in marketing, kitchen gardening and general housekeeping. The vocational classes proper take up large-quantity cooking, household administration, and restaurant management. In sewing the girls learn how to make their own clothes, but they learn as the work would have to be learned in a good dressmaking establishment; there is a course in machine operating for the girls who wish it. More advanced work teaches such principles of pattern making and designing as would be needed by a shop manager. But the most important difference is found in the emphasis that is put on the artistic side of women’s traditional occupations. Drawing is taught while the girls are learning to design dresses, and color in the same way; how to make the home pleasing to the eye is made a vital problem in the housekeeping department, and the art department has decorated the model rooms. The pattern and coloring for any piece of work, whether it is a centerpiece to be embroidered, a dress, a piece of pottery, or weaving, has been carefully worked out in the art department by the worker herself before she begins upon it in the shop. The girls are not simply learning how to do the drudgery of housework more efficiently; they are learning how to lift it above drudgery by making it into a profession.
The vocational courses in the boys’ technical high schools continue the pupils’ study in the regular academic subjects, and give them work in excellently equipped shops. There is work in printing, carpentry, forging, metal work, mechanical drawing, and in the machine shop, well supplemented by the art department. The pupil does not specialize in one kind of work, but secures general training. The object of all the vocational courses in the grammar schools is to prepare the pupils for any branch of work that they may want to take up by giving them an outlook over all the branches of work carried on around them. The work is cultural in much the same way that it is cultural in Gary. The success of these courses in bringing boys back to school, in enabling others to catch up with their grade, and in keeping others in school, points strongly to the fact that for a great many pupils at least some work which will link their school course to the activities of everyday life is necessary.
The technical high schools give two-year courses for the pupils who can not afford to stay in school for four years. They are designed to give a boy training for a definite vocation, and are at the same time broad enough to count for the first two years of high school work if the boy should be able to go on later. At the Lane School two-year courses are given in patternmaking, machine shop work, carpentry, electricity, printing and mechanical drawing; all of these courses include work in English, shop arithmetic, drawing, and physiology. The four-year pupils take one of three courses, according to what they expect to do. The technical course prepares students for college, the architectural course prepares for work in an architect’s office, and the general trade course prepares for immediate entry into industry. During the first two years of work the student devotes his time to the study of general subjects, and during the last two the major part of his time is put in on work that leads directly to the vocation that he has chosen. The two-year course has not cut down the total attendance at the school by offering a short cut to pupils who would otherwise stay four years. On the contrary, it has drawn a different class of boys to school, those who had expected to go directly to work, but who were glad to make a sacrifice to stay on in school two years longer when an opportunity appeared to put those two years to definite account in training for the chosen occupation. All these technical high schools have shown conclusively that boys and girls like to go to school and like to learn, when they can see whither their lessons are leading. Giving the young work they want to do is a more effective method of keeping them in school than are truant officers or laws.
In the Lane School the work of the different departments is closely connected so that the pupil sees the relations of any one kind of work to everything he is doing. A problem being set to a group of students, such as the making of a gasoline engine or a vacuum cleaner, the different elements in its solution are worked out in the different classrooms. For the vacuum cleaner, for instance, the pupils must have reached a certain point in physics and electrical work before they are capable of trying to make the machine, since each pupil becomes in a sense the inventor, working out everything except the idea of the machine. When they are familiar with the principles which govern the cleaner they make rough sketches, which are discussed in the machine shop and altered until the sketch holds the promise of a practical result. In mechanical drawing, accurate drawings are made for the whole thing and for each part, from which patterns are made in the pattern shop. The pupils make their own molds and castings and when they have all the parts they construct the vacuum cleaner in the machine and electrical shops. The problem of the gasoline engine is worked out in a like way; and since all the work that is given the pupils has been chosen for its utility as well as its educational value, the pupil does everything connected with its production himself, from working out the theory in the laboratory or classroom to screwing the last bolt. The connection of theory and practice not only makes the former concrete and understandable, but it prevents the manual work from being routine and narrow. When a pupil has completed a problem of this sort he has increased knowledge and power. He has tested the facts he learned and knows what they stand for in terms of the use the world makes of them; and he has made a useful thing in a way which develops his own sense of independent intelligent power.
The attempts of the Cincinnati school board to give the school children of that city a better education, by giving them a better preparation for the future, have been made from a somewhat different point of view. Three-fourths of the school children of Cincinnati, as of so many other cities, leave school when they are fourteen years old; most of them do not go beyond the fifth grade. They do this because they feel they must go to work in order to give help at home. Of course a fifth-grade pupil of fourteen is fitted to do only the easiest and most mechanical work and so receives very low pay. Once at work in factory or shop on this routine kind of work, the chances for the worker to advance, or to become master of any trade, or branch of his trade, are slight. His schooling has given him only an elementary control of the three R’s, and usually no knowledge of the theory or practice of the business he is engaged in. He soon finds himself in a position where he is not learning any more. It is only the very exceptional person who will go on educating himself and push ahead to a position of independence or responsibility under such conditions. The person who becomes economically swamped in the cheapest grades of work is not going to show much energy or intelligence in his life as citizen. The experiments of the Cincinnati schools in introducing manual and industrial training have been directed to remedying this evil by making the school work such that the pupil will desire to stay in school if this is in any way possible; and if it is not, by giving him opportunities to go on with his education while working.
The Ohio law requires children to stay in school until they are sixteen unless they must go to work, when they are given a certificate permitting them to work for the employer with whom they have found their first position. This permission must be renewed with each change of position. Consequently the pupil is kept in school until he has found work, and if for any reason he stops working, the school keeps in touch with him and can see that he goes back to school. The city also conducts continuation schools, where most of the pupils who leave between the ages of fourteen and sixteen have to return to school for a few hours a week, receiving theoretical instruction in the work they are doing. The cash girl has lessons in business English, arithmetic of the sort she has to use, and lessons in salesmanship, and receives a certain amount of general instruction about her special branch of trade. There are voluntary continuation classes for workers above sixteen years of age, by means of which any shop or store is able to use the facilities of the public schools to make their workers more efficient by giving them more knowledge of the theory of the trade.
These continuation classes are undoubtedly of the greatest value to the employee who can not go back to school, but they do not give him that grasp of present problems and conditions which would enable him intelligently to choose the work for which he is best suited. They improve him in a particular calling, but the calling may have been selected by accident. Their function is to make up to the child somewhat for what he has lost by having to become a wage earner so young. The coöperative plan which is being thoroughly tried out in Cincinnati is less of a makeshift and more of a distinct contribution to education, and has so far proved so successful as to be of great suggestive value. More than any other vocational plan it takes advantage of the educational value of the industries that are most important in the community. The factory shops of the city become the school shops for the pupils. Many of the big factories of the city have shown themselves willing to coöperate with the city for the first year of the experiment. This has proved so successful that many more factories are anxious to get their beginning workers in this way. In a sense it is a return to the old-fashioned apprenticeship method that prevailed when manufacturing was done by hand; for the pupils get their manual skill and the necessary practice in processes and shop conditions by working for wages in the city factories.
When the plan is further along the factories and stores will not be the only community institutions that will furnish laboratories for the school children of the city. The city college will begin its plan of having the domestic science pupils get their practice by working as nurses, cooks, housekeepers, or bookkeepers in the city hospital, and the engineering and architectural students will get theirs by working in the machine shops and draught-room of the city. As far as possible the departments of the city government will be used for the pupils’ workshops; where they can not furnish opportunities for the kind of work the pupil needs, he will go into an office, store, or factory where conditions reach the standard set by the board of education. So far this plan has been tested only with the boys and girls who are taking the technical course in the city high schools. The pupils who have finished the first two years of work, which corresponds to the work of any good technical high school, begin working alternate weeks in shop and school. The pupil chooses a kind of work in which he wishes to specialize, and is then given a position in one of the factories or shops which are coöperating with the schools.
He receives pay for his work as any beginner would, and does the regular work of the place, under the direction of, and responsible to, the shop superintendent. One week he works here under trade conditions, meeting the requirements of the place, the next week he returns to school, and his place in the factory is taken by another pupil who has chosen the same line of work. The week in school is devoted entirely to theoretical work. The pupil continues his work in English, history, mathematics, drawing, and science, and enriches his trade experience by a thorough study of the industry, all its processes and the science they involve, the use, history, and distribution of the goods, and the history of the industry. This alternation between factory and shop is kept up for the last two years of the course, and also during the pupil’s college course, provided he goes on to a technical course in the city university.
From the standpoint of vocational guidance, this method has certain distinct advantages over having the pupil remain in the classroom until he goes into a shop permanently. His practical work in the factory is in the nature of an experiment. If his first choice proves a failure, the pupil does not get the moral setback that comes from a failure to the self-supporting person. The school takes the attitude that the pupil did not make the right choice; by coöperating with him, the effort is made to have his second factory experience correspond more nearly to his abilities and interest. A careful record of the pupil’s work in the factory is kept as well as of his classroom work, and these two records are studied, not as separate items, but as interacting and inseparable. If his class work is good and his factory record poor, it is evident that he is in the wrong factory; and the nature of the class work will often give a hint of the sort of work to which the pupil ought to change. If all the work is mediocre, a change to another kind of practical work will often result in a marked improvement in the theoretical work if the change has been the right one. The pupil has an opportunity to test his own interests and abilities, to find if his judgment of them is correct; if it is not, he has a scientific basis on which to form a more correct judgment.
The work is not approached from the trade point of view; that is, the schools do not aim to turn out workers who have finished a two years’ apprenticeship in a trade and are to that extent qualified as skilled workmen for that particular thing. The aim is to give the pupil some knowledge of the actual conditions in trade and industry so that he will have standards from which to make a final intelligent choice. The school work forms a necessary part of the training for this choice, for it is just as much a guide to the interests and bent of the boy as would be his success in any one shop. And it lifts his judgments from the plane of mere likes and dislikes to that of knowledge based on theory as well as practice. For the exceptional pupil who really knows what he wants, and is eager to go ahead with it, this plan offers distinct advantages. The boy’s desire to get to work is satisfied by his weeks in the shop, and in his classroom he is learning enough of the larger aspects and possibilities of the trade to make him realize the value of additional theoretical training for the satisfaction of his own practical purposes.
As a result of the first year of working on this plan a large number of factories, at first indifferent to the plan, have asked to receive apprentices in this way, and a number of pupils have decided to go to college who, when they were spending all their time in school, had no such intention. The technical course for girls includes only those occupations that are traditionally supposed to belong to women because they are connected with home-making. They may continue for the four years working in school, which is made practical by having the pupils trim hats to wear, make their own clothes, do some commercial cooking, with the buying, selling, and bookkeeping connected with it; or they may specialize during the last two years as the boys do, by working alternate weeks in shop and school. So far girls have gone only into millinery or sewing establishments, where they work just as do the boys under actual trade conditions. The aim of the work for the girl, just as it is for the boy, is to help her find her life work, to fit herself for it mentally and morally, and to give her an intelligent attitude toward her profession and her community, using the shop experience not as an end in itself but a means to these larger ends.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.