Fourth Series, No. 7 December 7, 1912 Suilrtttt Schools of the Art Industries A Plea for a New Type of School in the Public School System By FREDERICK H. SYKES, PH.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND DIRECTOR OF PRACTICAL ARTS, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Technical Education Bulletin, No. 16 PRICE, 5 CENTS Published by Geacbcrs College, Columbia "{University 515 WEST i loth STREET NEW YORK CITY lulklitt Published fortnightly from September to May inclusive. Entered as second class matter January 15, 1910, at the New York, N. Y., Post Office, under act of July 16, 1894. These Bulletins include the Dean's Report, the Announcements of De- partments, the Alumni Bulletins (4 issues per year), Syllabi of courses of study, Announcements of the School of Education and the School of Practical Arts, and the Technical Education Series. There are included in the Teachers College Bulletin series, the following catalogue numbers, which will be sent free, on request to the Secretary: Announcement of the School of Practical Arts. Announcement of the School of Education. Announcement of the Department of Nursing and Health. ofcrfjtttrai Efcuratton IBultefttta (Sent post free on receipt of price named. Address, Publication Bureau, Teachers College.) No. x. Economic Function of Woman. Edward T. Devine, Ph.D., Profes- sor of Social Economy, Columbia University. 16 pages, 10 cents. No. 2. Annotated List of Books Relating to Household Arts. 42 pages, 15 cents. No. 3. The Feeding of Young Children. Mary Swartz Rose, Ph.D., Assist- ant Professor, School of Practical Arts. 10 pages, 10 cents. No. 4. Hints on Clothing. Professor Mary Schenck Woolman. 8 pages, 10 cents. No. 5. Quantitative Aspects of Nutrition. Henry C. Sherman, Ph.D., Head of Department of Nutrition and Food Economics, School of Practical Arts. 15 pages, 10 cents. No. 6. An Annotated Bibliography of Industrial Arts and Industrial Ed- ucation. 50 pages, 15 cents. No. 7. Determination of Linen and Cotton. Dr. Herzog. Translated by Ellen A. Beers, B. S. 24 illustrations, 2 color prints, 25 cents. No. 8. Syllabus on Household Management. Mary Louise Furst, A. B., Lecturer in Household Management, Teachers College. 10 cents. No. 9. The Girl of To-morrow What the School Will Do For Her. Benjamin R. Andrews, Ph.D. 8 pages, 10 cents. No. 10. Fundamental Values in Industrial Education. Frederick G. Bon- ser, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Industrial Education, Teachers College. 30 cents. No. XL Annotated List of Text and Reference Books for Training Schools for Nurses. 64 pages, 25 cents. No. 12. Address List for Illustrative Materials and Laboratory Supplies for Instruction in Household Arts. 12 pages, 10 cents. No. 13. A Dietary Study in a Children's Hospital. Mary Swartz Rose, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, and Harriet C. Jacobson, Department of Nutrition, School of Practical Arts, Teachers College. 16 pages, 10 cents. No. 14. A Year's Work in the Industrial Arts in the Fifth Grade, Speyer School. Clara B. Stilnrar, M. A. 36 pages, 15 cents. No. 15. Industrial Education and the Labor Unions. Frank Duffy. 14 pages, 10 cents. No. 16. Schools of the Art Industries A New Type of School in the Public School Systems. Frederick H. Sykes, Ph.D., Director of Practical Arts, Teachers College. 12 pages, 5 cents. No. 17. Constructive Art-Teaching. Arthur W. Dow, Professor of Fine Arts, Teachers College. 12 pages, 5 cents. Correlation of Industrial Work in the Elementary School Speyer School Chart 20 cents. SCHOOLS OF THE ART INDUSTRIES A PLEA FOR A NEW TYPE OF SCHOOL IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM* FREDERICK H. SYKES, Ph.D. Go through the main street of an average American town and you have the measure of the average taste. The tawdriness of the signs, the disorder of the shop display, the pretentious and perverse decorations of the saloons, the discords of muddy paints, the dirt and refuse of the street, show us that some vital element is lacking in our civilization. Go through the living quarters of the average commercial city, the streets of dismal monotony, or enter its dwellings; consider the furniture, wall-paper, carpets, cushions, crayon portraits, and ask if there is a glimmer of the beauty of workmanship left for the atrophied soul of the average man or woman. "We have," said William Morris, ' 'practically killed the beautiful in the nineteenth century. Railroads are ugly. Streets are ugly. Clothes are ugly. Houses are ugly. Capitalism has plunged us into a mass of ugliness out of which there seems no escape." If this were external merely we might stand it, but it strikes in, and inner ugliness, unrest and doubt, numb and sadden and brutalize the average world about us. Something vital is lack- ing to our life. Contrast with this the following picture of life in the Italian Renaissance. "Nothing notable," says Symonds, "was produced in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the stamp and character of fine art. . . . On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for beds and lids for linen-chests, a wealth of artistic invention was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less skilled in technical details than distinguished by real taste. . . . The entire nation seems to have been endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for pro- ducing it in every conceivable form." Look on this picture and on that. Under the present indus- trial system we have changed Hyperion to a satyr. *Reprinted from the Proceedings of, the Eastern Art and Manual Training Association, Baltimore, 1912. 360875 4 TECHNICAL EDUCATION BULLETIN What is the matter with our state? In the end of the eighteenth century industry engendered the crude powerful monster known as the factory. The factory sub- stituted for poor human and animal sinews the irresistible power of steam ; it forged the crude movements of human fingers in iron and steel, and set up, in countless thousands, mechanical workers driven at terrific speed. The monster had an appetite and a pro- ductive power that left the old-time hand-worker isolated and starving. Tie the steam engine to boat and cart and carriage for modern transportation, segregate the factories in strategic centres, and you have the modern industrial system, which has worked wonders beyond the dreams of Prometheus and Vulcan, of Ariel or Prospero. The Industrial Revolution came, and it is here to stay. Now the industrial revolution has forged ahead far ahead of our organized social life and our organized education. We have not yet adjusted life to the new era. We suffer from mal- formation, malnutrition of vital organs needed for full living. What are we going to do about it ? Are we going to sit still and enjoy Perry prints of the Renaissance? This is the attitude of the dilettante and the decadent. Or are we going to face our problem ? Face the crude monster of industry and tame and civil- ize Caliban to finer works of service? Can we bring a fresh ad- justment of life to the new industrial conditions? As art workers there is for you, I believe, here and now, a mission and a pro- gramme that call for all you have of courage and conviction to bring back beauty "the religion of joy," as Keats called it, to the worker and to daily life. Europe succumbed to the industrial revolution in spite of the tremendous defence of traditions of art and art objects everywhere. But Europe reacted quickly. Within fifty years from the setting up of the first factory in England Ruskin appeared as the disciple of reaction. Ruskin called out William Morris, and Morris be- came the source and fount of the Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain, Germany and America. The Crystal Palace Exhi- bition of 1851 marked the completion of the Industrial Revolution, and it marked, as we see now, the change in the epoch, the begin- ning of the amelioration of conditions. In 1852 the South Ken- sington Museum was established, and the Museum School for Art SCHOOLS OF THE ART INDUSTRIES 5 Training. Then the way was broken, the path pointed for all we have done since. iThe way of salvation lies through the schools. It does not lie in the trades. The traditions of art used to be preserved in the old industrial system ; they were handed down from master to appren- tice and journeyman, as the faith delivered to the apostles. A "masterpiece" once meant, you remember, the piece that made a journeyman a master, the lovely lantern or scroll in iron, the cab- inet or chest in wood, the blazoned shield in stone that was his examination paper and thesis. That indeed is the only kind of ex- amination paper you should ever accept in the subjects you profess. But the hand industries were engulfed by the machine mon- ster, and the old system as a teaching system, with slight excep- tions, has disappeared, lingering on only in callings that could not be mechanized. The hand industries of the home with their tra- ditions became likewise extinct. The objects of daily use, factory- made, lost the touch and line and color of art. And where once art gave charm and joy, you find now only the products of our pro- lific and industrious friend Caliban. Europe reacted quickly. It turned for salvation, not to the trades, but to the schools. This was evolution. In the complex development of a modern nation, specialization is inevitable and necessary. We see now clearly that it is the business of trade to produce, not to educate ; it is the business of the school to educate, not to produce. The example of Great Britain begun in South Kensington was followed by other countries. In Germany, chiefly since 1871, the development of the School of the Art Industries, the Kunstgewerbeschule, has been immense, significant and result- ful. In Italy the new education is turning the abandoned fort- resses and vacant palaces of the past into art-industrial schools and museums. The profession of these European schools, whatever their type, whether monotechnical or polytechnical, whether open by day or night or Sunday, is to train technical artists ; to preserve the art handicrafts where still "the touch of the hand is everything," but also to master the machine and make it serve the spirit of life and joy. To-day, we may say, Europe, through its art-industrial schools, furnishes its most important branches of industry with the technically trained artists needed. Putting it differently, the public O TECHNICAL EDUCATION BULLETIN systems of education of Europe train students to be practical craft- masters in the art industries : in the textile industries as designers, lacemakers, costume delineators ; in the graphic arts as designers, decorators, painters, illustrators, engravers, lithographers, etchers, color printers, photographers, bookbinders ; in the plastic arts as designers, moulders, sculptors, stone-carvers, decorative tile- makers ; in the wood industries as designers, cabinet-makers, wood- carvers ; in the earth product industries as designers, potters, work- ers in stained glass and enamel ; in the metal industries as craft- workers in hammered and forged metal, silversmiths; in the building and furnishing arts as interior designers and decorators. Infinite variety of callings, infinite variety of schools and courses springs of vast fresh streams of vivifying power entering into industry and into life, making manifest that "religion of joy" of which you art teachers and craft teachers are ministers ! Europe has all types and methods and specializations of the art-industrial schools for all ages and classes of workers. Italy, for example, has over two hundred art-industrial schools, of which seven in the large cities are higher schools. In Rome you may see the institutional type; the old foundation known as the Istituto de San Michele, with its 150 old men, 150 old women, 150 boys, 150 girls. For the young it is a school in which various master workmen are given space for their shops, on condition of taking in children as pupils. Men are doing there as good wood-carving as is done in Rome ; there they are doing wonderful fresh experimen- tal work in printing and photo-engraving ; there they designed and cast the gigantic statue of Victor Emmanuel II recently unveiled in the proudest place in the city of Rome. Go to the Museo Artistico Industriale and you have another type not a museum merely, though they have splendid rooms for textile and clay exhibits, na- tional and royal gifts, and 20,000 photographs ; it is a night school only three hours a night, six nights a week, free to all, in three- year courses. In Milan they have turned the Castello of the Sforzas into a Museum and Art Industrial School. It is free for all, men and women, on proof of ability ; it works nights and Sundays on mod- ern lines of teaching. If it is plastic art, the whole project is done in a small sketch in clay, a detail is done in natural size, the work being marvellously strong and professional. Five hundred stu- SCHOOLS OF THE ART INDUSTRIES 7 dents, busy in the day in this Manchester of Italy, attend this school at free hours workers in cabinet making, in bronze, silver, en- gravers, decorators, stucco and marble workers, designers of pot- tery and textiles. Go to Switzerland and visit the Landesmuseum and the Kunstgewerbeschule, in Zurich, superb in architecture massive, distinctive and national. One entrance takes you into the Museum and you wander through rooms that reproduce or preserve the best art of the past ; so arranged that each room represents a period of a national style. Another door takes you into the School of the Art Industries, where with the best equipment and the best art in- struction, they teach printing and photography, glass staining and enamel, wood-working and the plastic arts. Germany still sets the example and standard in art-industrial education. In Berlin they put up in 1905 an art-industrial school that is a White Palace spacious halls, corridors, workshops. This school, like St. Michael's Institute of Rome, is characterized by its master workshops. The master craftsman is a salaried officer of the school, and has two or three rooms for his business; he pro- vides at his own expense helpers and materials, but he must take five or six pupils from the school and teach them his craft. The sculptor in that school is one of the foremost of German artists ; the woodcarver, when I saw him, was carrying out a royal order for the interior woodwork and furniture for a new palace of the Kaiser. Thus there was a sense of reality, of scope, of standard. There is no conflict with the unions, since all work is done from original designs; the school trains technical artists, not artisans. Built in 1905, the school is already too small for its function and service, and is being enlarged. The School of Graphic Arts and the Book Trade is the achievement of Leipsic, the chief centre of the book trade of the world. Every art and every science that make for the production of printed paper find a place in this specialized college or, as they call it, Royal Academy. They disdain no style of work from the picture postcard or the decorative lining of a cigar-box to the finest poster or the most difficult color print ; they neglect no type of work plain book printing, decorative design for letters and bor- ders, illustration whether by linoleum, or wood or stone or etching or photo-processes, die-cutting and embossing and bookbinding. 8 TECHNICAL EDUCATION BULLETIN Compared with their equipment and scope and efficiency, our work in America in similar lines is only a kindergarten. The teaching in photography in the city of Munich has devel- oped since 1898 through the efforts of the South German Photog- raphers Union, till in 1911 they founded a state school in special and spacious quarters with 90 rooms studios, laboratories, lecture rooms where the entire art and science of photography and its applications to industries are taught and experimentally in- vestigated. In 1902, the last year for which I have full data, there were 25 art-industrial schools of the first rank in Germany, one for every leading city, maintained at public expense, having in day and even- ing classes 14,430 pupils. They have not merely the schools, they have the necessary correlative of the schools, the Museums of the Art Industries. The art spirit at present in America is like Arnold's angel, "beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." We offer in no city that I know of in the United States such art-industrial educa- tion as is given in every city of the first class in Europe. We have been contented with our subsidiary art work in the regular school curriculum or we have left the whole matter to private initiative. Under private initiative good institutions are growing up, but the fees they must charge are a heavy tax upon the student when he is least able to pay and has most ability to learn. We must open up a new era an era of public provision in the public educa- tional system for the School of the Art Industries. We need in every city an art-industrial school providing six years' instruc- tion beyond the elementary school a two years' preparatory school and a two to four years' professional training beyond that. Such schools will specialize naturally in the industries of the communi- ties that erect them. They will have equipment at least as good as the technical high schools now being erected in all cities education- ally classed as progressive. They will be open both day and night. The social contribution of such schools will be a great gift of life. They will enable the young workman gifted with artistic power to realize himself and follow his talent to his vocation. At present we waste and squander the wealth of artistic taste inherent in our people and instinctive in many of our immigrants. In our present system one generation suffices to destroy the foreign-born craftsman who comes among us ; his children revert to barbarians SCHOOLS OF THE ART INDUSTRIES Q in the environment of the East Side. He is driven by his talent perhaps to carve the door post of his flat and make it beautiful, but the landlord sues him for damages ; his son wins the praise of the elementary teacher in the handwork classes for his hammered brass tray, but next year the boy is found driving a delivery cart. There is a sociological gain when we can differentiate indus- tries so that our native-born art workers can find training and a place. Mr. Frank Duffy, Secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpen- ters and Joiners, in a recent address, l put our situation forcibly when he said : "Within the last two years a new city hall was built in Indian- apolis. American mechanics were employed until it came time to do the fine work, the terrazza and mosaic work, the carving and sculpture work, the fine painting and the like. Then mechanics were brought from Italy and Germany and elsewhere to do this work, under the pretense that the American workmen were not qualified to do the work. These men were paid from $12 to $15 per day for the work done, while the American mechanic walked around idle. But just the same, our mechanics could do the work. I claim that we have a better race of people than any nation of the earth. The intermingling and intermarrying of the different na- tionalities comprising the American public brings forth the best specimens of the human race. If our men lead in athletics, sports and games of all kinds, I cannot understand why they are not the best mechanics and the best professional men on the face of God's earth. It is said opportunity has been denied them. We are fight- ing for opportunity. It is coming ; shall we grasp it ?" There could be, as you see by this, an enormous economic gain from art-industrial schools. We export raw cotton at 14 cents a pound ; we import fine Swiss muslins at $14 a pound. 2 They pay for our raw material and our crude labor ; we pay for their taste and their trained intelligence. A London Times correspondent 3 reported an interesting bit 1 Teachers College, Technical Education Bulletin, No. 15. 2 "We export cotton at 14 cents a pound with scarcely any labor in it; we buy it back from the thrifty Swiss, in fine handkerchiefs, at $40 a pound, all labor. We have gone about as far as we can in exporting crude materials to be made into finished products by the better edu- cated laborers of competing countries. Impending changes will lower our tariff wall and, in this respect also, bring us nearer the level of international conditions." Report of the Committee on Industrial Education, National Association of Manufacturers, 1911. 3 Quoted in Howard, Industrial Progress of Germany, p. 67. 10 TECHNICAL EDUCATION BULLETIN of evidence on the matter of the economic value of art industries and education : "A German manufacturer was showing me one day in Elber- feld (where they have, by the way, a good art-industrial school) a length of dress material. ' That is going to England and is made of English material. I get the materials from England, manufacture them, and send them back. I pay carriage both ways, and yet I can sell this in the English market.' "'How?' " ' Well, you see, this is a nice design. There is brains in it.' " You teachers of art have done something to build up the stair- case of art interests through the elementary schools. But the stair- case must not stop at the eighth grade. It must not land the apt child facing the (for him) blank wall of the strictly academic high school or the abyss of the trades. We must build the structure on and up. And that means the Art-Industrial School. You teachers of the crafts have done something to get manual training accepted as an element in education; you have carried your cause even so far as to have manual training high schools. But you know and I know that the school world looks on your work only as an appendage, an interesting variation in educational experiment and practice, but not the trunk and stem of any special- ized form of education. And for a good percentage of our boys and girls the work that centres in art and the art crafts ought to be the trunk and stem of their education, not merely for the sake of their development but for their ultimate vocation. Aren't you a little tired of being the hangers-on of the aca- demic world ? You are doing, I grant it fully, a useful and valu- able work in your participation in the regular work of the high schools. You are doing a valuable work in the contributing to the regular work of the elementary school. Through these schools you are getting a measure of art interest and art faculty back to the people. But are you satisfied with this subsidiary work? Do you not desire a form of school where what you stand for shall be supreme? The academic people have their schools, the technical people are getting theirs. You must have yours. You must get free into the freer world of art. For artistic effort really to live and be fruitful, it must have its own soil, its own environment, its own traditions. That means the Art-Industrial School in the edu- cational system of this country on a par with the academic high school and the technical high school. Effect this, and we may hope SCHOOLS OF THE ART INDUSTRIES II to produce freely, everywhere, in this generous, fruitful America, the finest flower of life, "the thing of beauty" that is "a joy for- ever." The recent reorganization of Teachers College recognizes a new and liberal attitude toward the arts and crafts. We have seg- regated our education courses as a School of Education ; we have segregated our art and technical courses in a School of Practical Arts. In various lines of fine and applied art, the boy or girl com- ing to us from the high school can follow at his choice a major study ; in fine arts, or applied design, or house decoration, or cos- tume design, or wood, or metal; he can enrich his program of studies with the best that is worth while to him in English, history, modern languages, economics and sociology; he will receive his Bachelor's degree in as good standing as any other Bachelor of the University, and, what is more important, he can work throughout his four years' course on subjects that are vital to his talent and directly helpful to his vocation as a specialized and technically trained artist or a specialized teacher of arts and crafts. We have put this thing into organized being, we want your interest and your support, so that an institution so conceived and organized shall not perish. 1 1 Since the above address was given the School has entered on its first year of work with a Freshman class of 150 the maximum number for whom provision was made. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, BERKELEY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW Books not returned on time are subject to a fine of 50c per volume after the third day overdue, increasing to $1.00 per volume after the sixth day. Books not in demand may be renewed if application is made before expiration of loan period. 10m-12,'23 Gayloref Make Syracuse MT. AN. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY