Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. ARTISTIC HANDWORK IN EDUCATION. MANY influences combine at the present moment in favour of educational reform in a certain definite direction—the direction of what is sometimes called manual instruction. First among these influences we might reckon the " Kindergarten" movement, tracing its descent from Frobel, and through him, perhaps, from Rousseau, Schiller, and Goethe. The principle of this movement is, in Frobel's own words, to impart "a human education by the appropriate training of the productive or active impulses." A fine and complete school on this principle—not a mere kindergarten—is Dr. Adler's school in New York, which our technical commissioners refer to as based on a method of " creative " education. The idea of calling into play the productive impulse was not in itself new—the teaching of Latin versifying might be defended on this ground—but in its application to manual work, and to the early training of children, it was practically a new departure. The kindergarten employments, especially Frobel's highest employment, clay-modelling, are closely akin to, and an excellent basis for, the kind of teaching which I am to discuss to-day. An address delivered before the Self-Help Society, at Oxford, on behalf of the Home Arts and Industries Association. This Association has no connection with any other Society for which I have lectured. Another influence at work in a similar direction is that of the demand for natural-science teaching. The direct contact with objects—letting the boy feel, as Professor Huxley has said, the pull of the magnet for himself—the work of the microscopical or of the physical laboratory, and the elementary handwork required of the student in such laboratories, all tend to confer an instinctive grasp of principle, and a habitual ...