Corsi di falegnameria e disegno meccanico

Le prime righe

CHAPTER I. FOREWORD—AIMS Foreword. It is assumed that woodworking and mechanical drawing have subject matter and that it is desirable to have an orderly arrangement. Such an assumption may seem unwarranted to some—to those who labor in private institutions where the instruction is individual or nearly so. It is believed, however, that to teachers of these subjects in the public schools, where for economic reasons, classes of considerable numbers must be cared for, the necessity for a careful selection and arrangement of subject matter is very evident. It has taken some years for the manual training movement to recover from the extremes into which the late psychology and child study movement had led it. The exaltation of the “individual” and the reign of the “self-expressionist,” it would seem, is about over. Not that this latter movement was an evil—far from it. Its influence was needed and came none too soon. Like other great movements, however, it led some teachers to extremes, causing them to overlook the good in the old with the result that the new alone has proven no more desirable than the old alone. The pendulum of opinion is returning and in not a few important places, is already swinging to the other extreme. It is for manual training teachers to try to determine by an exchange of ideas where the sanest position lies. In this discussion, we should ever keep in mind that the American public school system is maintained mainly to prepare boys and girls for good and useful citizenship; that this is a democracy in which neither individual nor class is to be exalted unduly and that our system of education must result neither in the chaos of anarchy nor in the dull formalism of a despotism. To the writer it appears that manual training as practiced before the