Indeed in more progressive centers, many new departures are now in the experimental stage. Goetze at Leipzig, as a result of long and original studies and trials, has developed courses in which pasteboard work and modeling are made of equal rank with wood and iron, and he has connected them even with the kindergarten below. In general the whole industrial life of our day is being slowly explored in the quest of new educational elements; and rubber, lead, glass, textiles, metallurgical operations, agriculture, every tool and many machines, etc., are sure to contribute their choicest pedagogical factors to the final result. In every detail the prime consideration should be the nature and needs of the youthful body and will at each age, their hygiene and fullest development; and next, the closest connection with science at every point should do the same for the intellect. Each operation and each tool--the saw, knife, plane, screw, hammer, chisel, draw-shave, sandpaper, lathe--will be studied with reference to its orthopedic value, bilateral asymmetry, the muscles it develops, and the attitudes and motor habits it favors; and uniformity, which in France often requires classes to saw, strike, plane up, down, right, left, all together, upon count and command, will give place to individuality.
Sloyd has certain special features and claims. The word means skilful, deft. The movement was organised in Sweden a quarter of a century ago as an effort to prevent the extinction by machinery of peasant home industry during the long winter night. Home sloyd was installed in an institution of its own for training teachers at Nääs. It works in wood only, with little machinery, and is best developed for children of from eleven to fifteen. It no longer aims to make artisans; but its manipulations are meant to be developmental, to teach both sexes not only to be useful but self-active and self-respecting, and to revere exactness as a form of truthfulness. It assumes that all and especially the motor-minded can really understand only what they make, and that one can work like a peasant and think like a philosopher. It aims to produce wholes rather than parts like the Russian system, and to be so essentially educational that, as a leading exponent says, its best effects would be conserved if the hands were cut off. This change of its original utilitarianism from the lower to the liberal motor development of the middle and upper classes and from the land where it originated to another, has not eliminated the dominant marks of its origin in its models, the Penates of the sloyd household, the unique features of which persist like a national school of art, despite transplantation and transformation.[1]