John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics. Джон Дьюи
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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.
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