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 them even with
the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life of our day is being
slowly explored in the quest of new educational 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 connection 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 its orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it
develops, and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in
France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all
together, upon count and command, will give place to individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful, deft. The
movement was organised 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 installed in an institution of its own for training
teachers at Nääs. 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-respecting, and to revere
exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and especially the motor-
minded can really understand 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 educational 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
development 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 household, the unique features of which persist
like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[1]
Sloyd at its best tries to correlate several series, viz., exercises, tools, drawing,
and models. Each must be progressive, so that every new step in each series