involves a new and next developmental step in all the others, and all together, it
is claimed, fit the order and degree of development of each power appealed to in
the child. Yet there has been hardly an attempt to justify either the physiological
or the psychological reason of a single step in any of these series, and the
coördination of the series even with each other, to say nothing of their adaptation
to the stages of the child's development. This, if as pat and complete as is urged,
would indeed constitute on the whole a paragon of all the harmony, beauty,
totality in variety, etc., which make it so magnificent in the admirer's eyes. But
the "45 tools, 72 exercises, 31 models, 15 of which are joints," all learned by
teachers in one school year of daily work and by pupils in four years, are
overmethodic; and such correlation is impossible in so many series at once.
Every dual order, even of work and unfoldment of powers, is hard enough, since
the fall lost us Eden; and woodwork, could it be upon that of the tree of
knowledge itself, incompatible with enjoying its fruit. Although a philosopher
may see the whole universe in its smallest part, all his theory can not reproduce
educational wholes from fragments of it. The real merits of sloyd have caused its
enthusiastic leaders to magnify its scope and claims far beyond their modest
bounds; and although its field covers the great transition from childhood to
youth, one searches in vain both its literature and practise for the slightest
recognition of the new motives and methods that puberty suggests. Especially in
its partially acclimatized forms to American conditions, it is all adult and almost
scholastic; and as the most elaborate machinery may sometimes be run by a poor
power-wheel, if the stream be swift and copious enough, so the mighty rent that
sets toward motor education would give it some degree of success were it worse
and less economic of pedagogic momentum than it is. It holds singularly aloof
from other methods of efferent training and resists coördination with them, and
its provisions for other than hand development are slight. It will be one of the
last to accept its true but modest place as contributing certain few but precious
elements in the greater synthesis that impends. Indian industries, basketry,
pottery, bead, leather, bows and arrows, bark, etc., which our civilization is
making lost arts by forcing the white man's industries upon red men at
reservation schools and elsewhere, need only a small part of the systemization
that Swedish peasant work has received to develop even greater educational
values; and the same is true of the indigenous household work of the old New
England farm, the real worth and possibilities of which are only now, and
perhaps too late, beginning to be seen by a few educators.
This brings us to the arts and crafts movement, originating with Carlyle's gospel
of work and Ruskin's medievalism, developed by William Morris and his