The purpose of this book is to provide a series of projects in woodworking, blacksmithing, cement and concrete work, and harness mending. These exercises will not only furnish valuable training in the practical arts, but will also result in the making of many things that are of great use on the farm.

In case the time devoted to industrial work is too short for the class to do all the regular exercises provided in this book, the teacher should select those that involve the uses of the most common tools and the description of the most important processes. If more time is allotted to industrial work than is necessary for the regular exercises, the supplementary projects may be undertaken. The making of furniture should not be commenced until the pupil has mastered the woodworking tools.

The pupil should be required to make in pencil a complete working drawing with full-size details of the project he is about to make. Plans for farm buildings should be required as supplementary work in drawing. The teacher should standardize his work by requiring a definite procedure to be followed in tool operations. After a standard of manipulation has been adopted, the work of the class should be held to that standard.

This book is written primarily for pupils taking agriculture in elementary and secondary schools, and for pupils in the practical arts work of schools in rural communities; but it also has suggestions of great merit for farmers and others who have to deal in any way with the varied repair and construction problems of farm and village life.

Not until the rural schools realize that their manual training and shop work must be entirely different from that of the city schools will they serve properly the vocational needs of the children who are to spend their lives on the farm or in the village.

The aim of the practical arts courses in agricultural communities should be to give the boy at least an elementary experience in every form of manual work required to make an independent and successful farmer on his home acres. Such training will make the farm more attractive. It will also equip the farmer for more successful work in agriculture, both because he is prepared to meet the everyday demands of his calling and because he is saved the time and expense of relying on the village mechanic for much that the school should prepare him to do.

In most of our thinking to-day on the subject of manual training or practical arts in the rural schools, we have stopped with the idea of woodwork. Too often this woodwork is taught with little reference to its connection with the home life and agricultural career of the boy. The courses and methods have been borrowed all too frequently from the work of the city schools.

The farm boy and man must work in wood: in the making of fences, in the repair of tools and machinery, and in the repair and construction of farm implements, conveniences, and buildings. It is far more important that he should know how to deal with wood in these things than that he should be highly skilled in the making of mission furniture. It is training in the work of the ordinary rough carpenter rather than in that of the finished furniture maker that will be most beneficial to the farmer. He needs to know how to handle all the ordinary tools of the carpenter and how to put wood together. His practice should be on farm things and should result in a usable output of farm things.

An outfit of ordinary farm implements of the simplest kind can be constructed for the use of the school. Pupils should be encouraged to bring from home articles that need to be repaired. They should also be encouraged to set up a workshop on the farm and to do more extensive and ambitious repair and construction jobs, as supplementary to the school instruction. It goes without saying that successful results can only be secured when the teacher in charge of this training is not only able to sense the demands of the farm home by having actually experienced them, but is also able intelligently to direct the efforts of the boy.

The farmer must know how to shape iron for uses in all sorts of things. The school should be equipped with a small forge, and the boy be trained in the forging and tempering of iron, the cutting and soldering of sheet metal. He should be trained to think his problem through by making at least rough diagrams of his plans in dealing with material of all kinds.

He should be able to meet successfully emergency repairs on harness and belting. This means that the school should give him an elementary experience in the cutting, shaping, fitting, and sewing of leather, which can only result from training in actual repair problems.

The use of cement on the farm is increasing enormously. The ordinary farmer can now with some instruction use it successfully for most of the purposes for which it is employed in the country home. Hence it follows that the school should give the boy instruction in such things as the making of molds for cement work, the laying of foundations and the construction of posts, floors, and walks.

One of the most difficult questions confronting the work in industrial education to-day is the kind of industrial training which should be offered in villages and small towns. The diversified character of its industrial life, sometimes the entire absence of manufacturing, together with the certainty that only a small number of persons would care to be, or should be, trained for any one occupation, make it impossible for these small communities to undertake any program of industrial education which aims to give specific preparation for any one industry or trade. This has, in many cases, prevented such places from under, taking any work whatever of this character.

The solution of the problem in my opinion lies in a course in the practical arts in the upper grades and in the high school, which will serve a double aim. It will give the village boy an experience in manual work from which he will derive all the customary values, and which will fit him to be a "jack of all trades," if he so elects. At the same time it will give the boy from the farm a training in a range of activities which will fit him to meet, as a "jack of all trades," the ordinary everyday demands of farm life.

This book has been written from such points of view as the foregoing, and will find its largest field of useful- ness as a text or reference book in the hands of pupils of rural elementary and secondary schools. It offers a course of instruction in farm shop work which includes working the four fundamental materials used on the farm - wood, metal, leather, and cement. All the jobs undertaken by the pupil deal in a very practical way with the repair or construction of things which are used in the actual work of the farm.

The treatment of each task which the pupil is to undertake is excellent from the standpoint of good teaching. Throughout the language is simple and the explanations and directions clear. Each new article to be made is described and its use explained at the outset. Numerous illustrations illuminate the text.

From the outset, the pupil is engaged in the making of usable things. The assignment of work is by separate jobs or projects to individual pupils. The aim is to lead him to an understanding through practice rather than through either theory alone or through unapplied exercises. The realness and usefulness of the work performed will undoubtedly appeal to the interest of both the boy and his parent. The pupil is led gradually to rely more and more upon the text and less upon the teacher, which promotes self-help, an indispensable asset to the worker on the farm and in the farm shop. The book offers on every page excellent suggestions to the boy who has unoccupied time on his hands and makes possible school credit for shop work done at home. Practice and thinking about the practice, doing useful things while at the same time the work is directed and interpreted - this is the cardinal principle on which the treatment of practical arts work has been based throughout.

The farmer will find the book a mine of information as to all such things as the care and use of shop tools, the repair and construction of farm implements, devices and buildings of all kinds. School boys will have in it an admirable guide in undertaking to make either at home or at school useful things which have a definite and helpful place in country, village, and town life. It should give them a genuine interest in the repair and construction of new as well as familiar things and make them self-reliant workers relieved from dependence on "the specialist for much of the ordinary mechanical work-of the country district."

The book carries a special message also to the teacher who is in any way engaged in the teaching of manual training, practical arts, or shop work in the rural, consolidated, or agricultural high school. Throughout, the vocational opportunities of practical arts work in its application to agricultural life are emphasized. Teachers are too often singularly lacking in a conception of the purpose and possibilities of farm shop work as it has been taught in the schools. When they have been trained in manual training classes dealing almost entirely with the problems of the work in cities or with more or less traditional courses, they find it difficult to adjust their courses and methods to meet rural conditions and requirements. They need, as all of us as teachers do, to have their work interpreted in terms of its use in the lives of their students, as the authors have done.


DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK:
Farm shop work - practical manual training