Special Trades are Not Taught.

All the shop-work is disciplinary; special trades are not taught, nor are articles manufactured for sale.

The scope of a single trade is too narrow for educational purposes. Manual education should be as broad and liberal as intellectual. A shop which manufactures for the market, and expects a revenue from the sale of its products, is necessarily confined to salable work, and a systematic and progressive series of lessons is impossible, except at great cost. If the object of the shop is education, a student should be allowed to discontinue any task or process the moment he has learned to do it well. If the shop were intended to make money, the students would be kept at work on what they could do best, at the expense of breadth and versatility.

In manual education, the desired end is the acquirement of skill in the use of tools and materials, and not the production of specific articles; hence we abstract all the mechanical processes and manual arts and typical tools of the trades and occupations of men, arrange a systematic course of instruction in the same, and then incorporate it in our system of education. Thus, without teaching any one trade, we teach the essential mechanical principles of all.

Accordingly, the shop-training is gained by regular and carefully graded lessons designed to cover as much ground as possible, and to teach thoroughly the uses of page 24 ordinary tools. This does not imply the attainment of sufficient skill to produce either the fine work or the rapidity of a skilled mechanic. But a knowledge of how a tool or machine should be used is easily and thoroughly taught. The mechanical products or results of such lessons have little or no value when completed, and they are generally used as new material for more exercises.

Frequent requests have been made for detailed descriptions or drawings of the models actually made in the several shops. Such requests have generally been refused for several good reasons. In the first place, the main object of one or more exercises is to gain control and mastery of the tool in hand, and not the production of a particular model. The use of the tool may be well taught by a large variety of exercises, just as knowledge of bank discount may be gained from the use of several different examples. No special merit can be claimed for a particular example; neither can a particular model or series of models have any great value. No good teacher is likely to use precisely the same set twice. Secondly. The method of doing a piece of work; and not the finished piece, is generally the object of a lesson. Again, the exercises by which certain methods of using tools are to be taught, often depend upon varying circumstances,—such as the quality of the material, the age of pupils, and their knowledge of working drawings.

Instead of giving particular descriptions of exercises, we prefer to state the general methods by which the use of the various tools is taught.