Professor of Philosophy and Education in Columbia University, New York

14

ART AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

BY

ISAAC EDWARDS CLARKE

Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.

THIS MONOGRAPH IS CONTRIBUTED TO THE UNITED STATES EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT BY THE

STATE OF NEW YORK

ART AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

I. INTRODUCTION

Since 1870 the rapidity of the development of art and industrial education in the United States has been so marked and so effective, the rapid increase in the number of special schools and museums of the fine arts so striking, as to make exceedingly difficult a satisfactory survey of this subject within the limits of a monograph.

The movement for the general introduction of drawing in the public schools, and of definite endeavors to promote art education, with a purpose to develop and improve the art industries of a people, seemed alike sudden in England and in the United States. In England it was apparently the definite result of the first world's fair-the exhibition of 1851. In the United States it had its origin in Boston, in 1870, where it was a direct outcome of the English movement.

The Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, where the work in drawing of the Massachusetts normal art school, and of the public schools in Boston, was shown, made possible the rapid and remarkable development throughout the United States of the two kindred elements in education, namely, industrial art drawing and manual training. This addition of these two new studies to the regular courses of the public schools has been, perhaps, the most notable characteristic educational feature of the past two decades.

As the English were long held to be a people hopelessly inartistic and devoid of art possibilities, their wonderful development since 1851, in so many lines of artistic manufactures, challenges investigation, especially by a people long similarly accused as being innately inartistic, and for a long period, it must be admitted, apparently deservedly so accused. The causes of this lack of art development as recited by

Haydon, were the same in both countries. That these causes were amply sufficient to account for this almost entire absence of any national evidence of art consciousness,— without compelling the admission of any inborn lack of mental capactity,- Haydon sought to demonstrate, by an appeal to the art development of England during the thirteenth century: "When England, in her knowledge of form, colour, light, shadow, and in fresco decoration, was in advance of Italy; and had her progress not been checked by the reformation, would have been at the head of Europe." "Show the people of England fine works," said Haydon; "give them the opportunity of study and the means of instruction; teach them the basis of beauty in art, and then give your opinion, if you like; but you have no right to condemn your fellow countrymen when you give them none of the advantages foreigners enjoy; when you have no schools for art instruction, no galleries open to public view, no national collections, no schools of design, and when you refuse to allow that art has a public function, and absolutely withhold from it all public support."

However true is his picture of the absence of any opportunities for the people to see works of art, or to enjoy any personal training in the elementary knowledge of art, in the England of his day, the lack of all such opportunities in the United States was tenfold greater. The Puritan immigrants of New England had all the abhorrence of art which marked the followers of the reformation, and for two centuries the bare whitewashed walls of their plain meeting houses were eloquent in protest against the art adornments of ancient church or chapel. Nor did the long hard struggle to wrest sustenance from stony soil and stormy sea afford any space of leisure for those artistic occupations which to the stern puritan were worse than folly.

Such was the situation, alike in England and the United States, during the first half of the nineteenth century. The exhibitions of 1851 and of 1876 seem in turn to have revealed to each people their own artistic deficiencies.

II. PROGRESS OF ART EDUCATION

In 1749, Benjamin Franklin published his proposed "Hints for an Academy," and enumerated as the most useful studies, arithmetic, writing, drawing and mechanics. In this connection drawing is seen to be reckoned with mechanics as a useful study. So, more than a hundred years before Boston had put drawing into its public schools, this Boston boy sought to have his fellow citizens of Philadelphia adopt it in their schools as a required study.

In a Lancastrian school presided over by Mr. Fowle in Boston in 1821, the method prevailed of having the younger pupils taught by those of their fellow pupils a little in advance of them. This method was, in its fundamental idea, successfully adopted by Walter Smith, in his first introduction of drawing as a required study in the public schools of Boston, and has since been followed in many of the public schools throughout the country. This arose from the fact that, as the teachers in the elementary schools were in addition to their duties in teaching other studies unexpectedly to be called on to teach drawing, of which they had before little or no knowledge, it was inevitable that they could then be but little in advance of their pupils in their knowledge of this new study; the teachers could only teach the lessons they had just previously been taught in the weekly lessons given to the public school teachers by the new director of drawing and his assistants.

In the case of the pupils of the normal art school, subsequently established under the director, Professor Walter Smith, and in those attending the various state normal schools, as well as in the fact that drawing has long been a regular study in the public schools, the teachers in the public schools of to-day may fairly be assumed to have as much practical knowledge of this study as of any of the others intrusted to their care.

The arguments for the teaching of drawing in the public schools are clearly and concisely stated by Mr. Fowle in his