SCHOOL FOR CRAFTSMEN
Dartmouth Cooperates in a New Educational Approach
THE MODERN WORLD is a technological world, and its advances in innumerable directions have been wonderful to behold. This development has resulted, however, in the eclipse of many good things, among them the hand crafts of America. An organization which has been deeply concerned with the present status of the craftsman is the American Craftsmen's Educational Council, which for some time has been working toward a nation-wide revitalization of the manual arts and a clearer definition of their relation to ljiodern industry so as to restore them as a full means of making a living. With the cooperation of Dartmouth College, the Council recently took a major step toward that goal when it formally opened in Hanover on January 15 the School for American Craftsmen.
Dartmouth's cooperation in this unique and promising educational project is being extended through the Dartmouth College Student Workshop, which Professor Virgil Poling has directed on the campus since its establishment in January 1941. Known to the American Craftsmen's Educational Council for the outstanding job which he has been doing in teaching hand crafts to Dartmouth students for their extracurricular benefit, Mr. Poling was first asked by the Council to sit with them as an adviser, was then named chairman of the Council's educational committee, and as plans for the new training program neared completion was finally asked to serve as Director of Training in the School and to set up the first two-year course in Hanover. Approval of Dartmouth's participation in this fashion was voted by the Board of Trustees, which has since contributed a member to the School's administrative committee; facilities for the new school were made available in Bissell and Hallgarten Halls; and with the arrival here on March 1 of a few more members of a student group that will eventually number about one hundred at the most, the School will be off on its first organized term. A three-term year, following the College's Navy V-12 schedule, has been adopted. Already assembled to direct training in four separate courses in textiles, ceramics, woodworking and metal working, a faculty of seven expert craftsmen and designers is now getting settled in Hanover, and a fulltime personnel director has also joined the staff.
Some publicity has already been given to the fact that for the present and immediate future the School in admitting students will give preference to disabled war veterans, who by learning hand crafts will acquire the means for making their own independent living and for becoming happier members of their home communities. To this end the new School has received the warmest endorsement of federal and state rehabilitation officers. The first two students in the School are New Hampshire veterans—one, a former Marine, in the metal class, and the other, a Seabee, in the pottery class. Both have been in Hanover since December and have not only made remarkable progress in their training but have displayed an enthusiasm for crafts work that presages real success in this phase of the program. For veterans attending the School, the tuition charge of $40.00 a month, covering instruction, books and materials, will be financed by the government under the G. I. Bill of Rights. The Hanover training center is designed primarily to serve New England and New York, but its courses will be open to qualified students from all over the country. Those admitted must have completed at least a high school education or an acceptable equivalent in actual experience in craft skills or industrial employment, and preferably they must be interested in a craft as an occupation. Originally the School planned to house its single men in one of the vacant Dartmouth dormitories, but it is now thought that enough offcampus rooms are available to take care of the comparatively small student body.
The training program which Mr. Poling has outlined for the craft students will cover a period of two years, the first to be spent in the training shops at the College and the second in Continuation Training Centers which are to be established in towns near Hanover. The American Craftsmen's Educational Council has already purchased an old mill in Lyme and an unused church in Haverhill for two of the four continuation centers—one each for the four crafts taught in the School. The first year in Hanover will cover basic theory and design in addition to intensive training in one of the major crafts. Workshop methods and organization, understanding of tools and materials, and workshop safety are also listed among the other topics for this "freshman year." Instruction will largely take the form of apprenticeship training, with the faculty acting as teacherforemen in the shops and the students as apprentice workers.
After completing the first year in Hanover, students will move on to the continuation centers which will operate not only as advanced training units but also as active producing groups affiliated with the American Craftsmen's Cooperative Council, which operates the well-known America House in New York as a marketing outlet. Direction of the continuation centers will eventually be entrusted to some of the School's more skilled graduates after they have undergone further advanced training in design, techniques and teaching methods. When the apprentice student has completed his work in both the Hanover shop and the continuation center and is ready to go into full production, he will have three possible avenues of employment open to him. He may become an independent producer, he may continue with the producing group as a cooperating craftsman, or he may go into some industry requiring fine skill. Even after he sets out on his own the graduate of the School will continue to have the help and guidance of the American Craftsmen's Educational Council in both design and marketing two practical respects in which the producing craftsman has run into trouble in the past.
This is the barest possible outline of the training and employment program which the Council has begun to put into operation through its School for American Craftsmen. Dartmouth's participation in the program will be confined largely to the initial period of getting the School started and on its own feet—a stage which Mr. Poling thinks will be reached in about two years. After that the training-producing units for the various crafts will be functioning strongly enough to take over fully the elementary and advanced work of the School.
Meanwhile, as Director of Training and "Dean" of the Hanover unit, Mr. Poling has been assigned no small role in the realization of the Council's ambitious plans. A skilled craftsman himself, he is a graduate of Ohio State University (1930) and has behind him eight years as director of the department of fine arts at the Harley Country Day School in Rochester, N. Y., and four years as director of Dartmouth's Student Workshop, during all of which period he has acquired a steadily mounting reputation as one of the country's leading crafts teachers. He will have general supervision of all instruction in the new School, but any actual teaching that he does among the veterans and other apprentice craftsmen will depend upon whether he ever has any time not occupied by the Dartmouth College Student Workshop, which will not be curtailed by the new program and which will naturally continue to be his main job. Although not nearly so busy as it was before the outbreak of the war, the College workshop continues to attract undergraduates, including many Navy V-12 trainees, and a new call for service has arisen in the need for various and sundry ship models as teaching aids in the Navy courses.
The need of teaching time from Mr. Poling may never arise in the new School, however, for he has gathered together for the various shops an excellent faculty of craftsmen and designers. Work in ceramics is being directed by Linn Maine craftsman, and by Mrs. Marianne Haile, an English ceramist. Metal working is taught by Alden Wood of New York City and Miss Sammy Tate, a young designer who has come to Hanover from Texas. Instruction in textiles is provided by Robert Heartz of Exeter, N. H., a well-known weaver in the League of New Hampshire Arts and Crafts, and by Mrs. Eva Crockett of New York, a graduate of Black Mountain College. Ernest Brace of Woodstock, N. Y., is the newest addition to the crafts faculty and on March 1 assumes charge of the instruction in woodworking. Every member of the faculty is first of all a producing craftsman and in the role of a master among apprentices will carry on his own work as much as necessary to demonstrate actual production by an expert craftsman.
In addition to these members of the faculty, the School for American Craftsmen also has the services of Eliot Hutchinson of, Rochester, N. Y., as its personnel director. Mr. Hutchinson has been a member of the psychology department at the University of Rochester and of the personnel department of Bausch and Lomba rich background of experience against which to handle the employment and other problems of the School's trainees.
In setting up its new training center in Hanover, the American Craftsmen's Educational Council has been just as intent upon providing complete training facilities as it has been upon assembling an expert teaching staff. The basement of Bissell Hall is being transformed into an elaborate ceramics shop, with several small kilns already in operation and one large kiln on its way, to be erected on a concrete block when it arrives. Potters' wheels, clay bins, mixing vats, and many more things needed for the fascinating craft of ceramics will make Bissell Hall's basement a large and complete shop for this course. Upstairs on the top floor of Bissell, the School's woodworking shop will adjoin the Student Workshop and will have the complete array of hand and machine tools needed for
training and production. A stone's throw away, in Hallgarten Hall, the metal work- ing department occupies the main floor and basement, while the top two floors have been assigned to the textiles course. A siz- able collection of rings, earrings, pins, and other work in silver and pewter indicates that the metal workers, including the School's original student, have quickly set- tled down and gone into productive work. On the floors above, the storeroom bins are filled with yarns and other materials, and while renovation goes on around them Mr. Heartz and Mrs. Crockett manage to keep their looms busily turning out hand- some hand-woven textiles. Plans call for the installation of twenty-five or thirty looms in this department, and a great stack of lumber for this purpose rests at the woodworking shop. All in all, the School's four separate shops will constitute one of the country's finest and most completely equipped craft training centers, thanks to the Council's willingness to spend the money necessary to make them so.
SCHOOL BLAZES NEW TRAIL
The School probably will be able to make no claim that it is unique in its training equipment, complete as that will be, but in one respect it will be blazing a new trail among schools and departments of crafts and design. Its training will be firmly keyed to production for use and for marketing and will for the first time apply some industrial practices to the hand arts so that the postwar craftsman, by knowing his markets and shaping his designs and fabricating methods to supplement rather than compete with industry, may achieve a sound economic status. The whole training approach of the School for American Craftsmen is based upon its belief that crafts education up to now has been too wrapped up in "art" and too little concerned with utilitarian and occupational aspects that need not rule out the artistic. On this subject Mr. Poling says:
"Arts and Crafts" as they have generally been practiced in this country have never achieved more than a vicarious status both in production and merchandising. The products of this unrealistic effort have at all times suffered from design and production techniques which had no relationship to specific consumer needs for either utilitarian or decorative use. The result was that, except in rare instances, craftsmen were unable to achieve a proper livelihood, and the hand arts themselves had no economic recognition.
The hand arts obviously cannot compete with machine-made products. On the contrary, there must be found for them a special area of production and use. The objects made must be as exhaustively analyzed and planned for as are the products of industry. This special area will result from development of custom fabrication of all products within the practical reach of the hand arts, particularly in the fields of household and personal accessories, whether it be a single object or the products of limited multiple production. For success in establishing such products, it is necessary that industrial procedures be adapted to their production. The sound development of such industrial practices to the use of the hand arts is a new educational concept and developing this concept successfully is the aim of the School for American Crafts men.
Much o£ Dartmouth's willingness to cooperate with the American Craftsmen's Educational Council has come from its belief that new and important educational principles are being put into practice by the School. Postwar advantages for many persons in New England, and particularly for disabled war veterans, are inherent in the program, and the College stands to learn much for the development of its own workshop activities, which have won a firm place in the extracurricular life of the campus. President Hopkins, as co-chairman. of the School's administrative committee, and Dean Bill and Dr. Ruggles, as committee members, give Dartmouth important representation in the School's direction, beyond Mr. Poling's executive role. Horace H. F. Jayne, vice-director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and president of the American Craftsmen's Educational Council, is the other co-chairman of the School's administrative committee, which also includes Mrs. Vanderbilt Webb, Kenneth Chorley, president of Colonial Williamsburg, William J. Barrett, the Council's treasurer, and Lou Block, general director of the School at New York headquarters. Other Dartmouth representation in the School's affairs exists in the membership of Carl Gray '23, chairman of Connecticut's Reemployment Commission, and J. Fredrick Larson, College architect, on the School's advsory committee.
TRAINING DIRECTOR of Hanover's new school for craftsmen is Prof. Virgil Poling, busy at one of the lathes in his Dartmouth Student Workshop.
THE PICTURES TO THE RIGHT show scenes of early activity in the School for American Craftsmen. Top, ex-Marine Claire Moore, the school's first trainee, shapes a bowl in the metal class, under direction of Alden Wood. Center, Linn Phelan and Mrs. Mari- anne Haile pour slip clay into drying vats in the ceramics shop. Bottom, Robert Heartz, weaving in- structor, works at his large loom in the textiles center in Hallgarten.
THE PICTURES TO THE RIGHT show scenes of early activity in the School for American Craftsmen. Top, ex-Marine Claire Moore, the school's first trainee, shapes a bowl in the metal class, under direction of Alden Wood. Center, Linn Phelan and Mrs. Mari- anne Haile pour slip clay into drying vats in the ceramics shop. Bottom, Robert Heartz, weaving in- structor, works at his large loom in the textiles center in Hallgarten.
THE PICTURES TO THE RIGHT show scenes of early activity in the School for American Craftsmen. Top, ex-Marine Claire Moore, the school's first trainee, shapes a bowl in the metal class, under direction of Alden Wood. Center, Linn Phelan and Mrs. Mari- anne Haile pour slip clay into drying vats in the ceramics shop. Bottom, Robert Heartz, weaving in- structor, works at his large loom in the textiles center in Hallgarten.
