EDUCATION AND WORK
In the closing sentence of the preceding chapter, I used the words
“spiritual life.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that I did not have
in mind anything vaguely metaphysical, supernatural or mystical. I
meant the phrase to designate a hierarchy of values which is possible
to an organism capable of exercising choice among its experiences.
It is in the sense that it deals with qualities and their relative
importance that education may be said to be spiritual, spiritual in a
purely naturalistic sense. It is the ordering of interests and habit
patterns so that behavior is characterized by a tone and a significance
that it would not otherwise possess.
There are those who write and speak of education as if the mind and its
ideas existed in a world apart from the world of things. It is possible
for a man to pursue his studies in complete isolation from the world
about him. But as mental life is possible only in response to some
environment, such pursuit of learning merely substitutes an artificial
and sequestered environment for the actual one. If the meanings and
values disclosed in this artificial environment remain permanently
different from those which might be realized in the world of our daily
tasks and relationships, such education is merely an elaborate escape
from reality. The educated mind responds to our common world. It
differs from the uneducated mind not in that it responds to a different
set of situations, but in that it responds with a different system of
values. Education is not so much a special interest separated from
other interests as it is a method of transforming all our interests.
It ought to have something of importance to do with work, since most
people are engaged in some form of work most of their time. And when in
an industrial age like the present, the whole life of society revolves
about the system of production of wealth, it is impossible to precede
with education and ignore the challenge to it of our industrialism. It
may not be the task of education to provide a solution of the labor
problem. But education certainly fails of its function when men are
unable to retain its values while struggling with such problems.
People rarely behave like educated human beings when they are
confronted by an economic issue. Liberality of outlook, tolerance,
temperance of judgment, self-control, ability to see when one is
making oneself ridiculous, respect for the truth, are not often found
on either side of an industrial conflict. Fantastic notions of the
relation of education to work abound because there is much confusion
about the meaning and value of work for human personality. Labor is at
the same time idealized and despised.
Ruskin, Carlyle, and many humanitarians have held labor to be most
praiseworthy. Work is a blessing, in it are peace of mind and
self-respect. Work is noble, and it ennobles him who does it. A
contemporary writer on the subject of education warns us that the hand
may not be “dishonored with impunity.” By dishonored he means that hand
work may be considered inferior to brain work to the extent that there
is great disparity between the rewards. Distinction has been made
between work of hand and work of brain. The former is real work. Once
in a parade of working men in Pittsburgh, I saw on a banner carried
at the head of a column of metal workers, these words in very large
capitals, _We Work_. The implication was that some others, slightly to
their discredit, did not really work. From the idealization of work to
the idealization of the worker is a logical step. The working class,
a class which in earlier centuries was looked upon as the despised
“proletariat,” attained a new status in nineteenth century thought.
Men began to look to labor as the one class capable of righting the
age-long wrongs of humanity, and to believe the control of society by
organized labor to be the only means to the establishment of peace and
justice. Most of the writers who praised labor were themselves members
of the so-called leisure class. A few like Tolstoi vainly tried to
support themselves by manual toil. Many who wrote convincingly of the
blessings of labor did not personally avail themselves of its ennobling
advantages. In the earlier humanitarian sentiment of the nobility of
labor, the worker was envisaged as a free and independent person in
whose wholesome activity there was healthfulness. Good workmanship
commanded general respect and revealed the dignity of labor. There were
simplicity and grandeur in the primitive act of a man eating his bread
in the sweat of his brow. He who lived close to earth gained something
of the silent, calm majesty of nature. Able to cope with natural forces
and giving mankind as good as he received, he need ask favor of no man.
Rousseau says, “Outside of society, an isolated man, owing nothing to
any one, has a right to live as he pleases; but in society, where he
necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the
price of his support; to this there is no exception. To work, then, is
a duty indispensable to social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak,
every idle citizen is a knave.
“Now of all the occupations which can furnish subsistence to man, that
which approaches nearest to the state of Nature is manual labor; of all
the conditions the most independent of fortune and of men, is that of
the artisan. The artisan depends only on his labor. He is free--as free
as the husbandman is a slave; for the latter is dependent on his field,
whose harvest is at the discretion of others. The enemy, the prince,
a powerful neighbor, may take away from him this field; on account
of it he may be harassed in a thousand ways; but wherever there is a
purpose to harass the artisan, his baggage is soon ready; he folds his
arms and walks off. Still, agriculture is the first employment of man;
it is the most honorable, the most useful, and consequently the most
noble that he can practice. I do not tell Emile to learn agriculture,
for he knows it. All rustic employments are familiar to him; it is
with them that he began, and to them he will ever be returning. I
say to him, then, Cultivate the heritage of your fathers. But if you
lose this heritage, or if you have none, what are you to do? Learn a
trade.... I wish to give him a rank which he cannot lose, a rank which
will honor him as long as he lives. I wish to raise him to the state of
manhood; and whatever you may say of it, he will have fewer equals by
this title than by all those which he will derive from you.... It is
important to learn a trade, less for the sake of knowing the trade than
for overcoming the prejudices which despise it. You say you will never
be compelled to work for a living. Ah, so much the worse--so much the
worse for you! But never mind; do not work from necessity, but work
for glory....
“You enter the first shop whose trade you have learned: ‘Foreman, I am
in need of employment.’ ‘Fellow-workman, stand there and go to work.’
Before noon comes you have earned your dinner, and if you are diligent
and frugal, before the week has passed you will have the wherewithal
to live for another week; you will have lived a free, healthy, true,
industrious and just man. It is not to lose one’s time to gain it in
this way.”
Here as always Rousseau is romantic. This is all very beautiful--until
you try it. I am inclined to think that most men who entertain this
view have never worked for a living. The happy few amongst the
toilers of earth may here and there have enjoyed this independence.
It is certainly not the experience of the rank and file in our
present industrial system. With the development of the system, and
the consequent organization of labor, the idealization of work is
supplanted by the idealization of the labor movement and its aims.
In the writings of Marx, labor as work is represented merely as so
much homogeneous effort-filled time which is measured and reckoned in
strictly numerical terms, as if its qualitative or personal elements
could be ignored or were non-existent. Skill and artistic genius are
represented as the mere telescoping or contraction of a number of
labor-time units into a given period--a speeding up, as it were, not
something inherently superior in kind. This point of view might satisfy
one who was concerned only with the number of hours of employment
and indifferent to what he did or how he did it. But it takes little
account of that pride in achievement without which those who assert the
dignity of labor are making a virtue of necessity.
Marxians assert with much truth that pride in achievement is crushed
by the methods of machine production and by the exploitation of
labor under a system of “wage slavery.” But this is to abandon the
older idealization of work and of workmanship. Labor is now viewed
_realistically_ as an irksome servitude. Marxians argue that labor
creates all wealth and is therefore justly entitled to it all. It is
beside our point to enter into a discussion of this proposition. I am
merely seeking to show that in this philosophy, emphasis is shifted
from the idealization of work to the idealization of the labor movement
itself. A Marxian could agree with Aristotle that mechanical toil is
debasing, only he would add “under the present system.” Emancipate
labor, give it its rights, reward it justly and force all to do their
share of it, and then work will be ennobling. Which is to say, work
will be ennobling only in an ideal society. This position is an attempt
to restore with one hand what is taken away with the other. Work is
robbed of its dignity when excellence in it is not thought worthy
of consideration, when superiority of workmanship is represented
merely as a greater quantity of abstract labor-time. Advocates of
the cause of labor do not say much about the distinction between
superior and inferior workmanship. And here we have an example of
the mass-psychology of which I spoke earlier. In the degree that you
consider men as mass, you ignore individual worth.
There has been a slight tendency to regard labor as an instinct. The
impulse to work is of course a universal human trait. Work is normal,
natural, right, and those who have no desire for it are going contrary
to the demands of human nature. Some such position as this is taken by
Mr. Veblin in his delightful satire, “The Instinct of Workmanship.”
The author of this book holds with McDougall that man has an instinct
to work, but that unfortunately the instinct has been corrupted. This
corruption began in primitive times with elders, medicine men and
warriors. And throughout historic time, with each succeeding privileged
class, human nature has become steadily more perverted and abject,
until this instinct reaches its final stage of corruption in the
present capitalist system. Thus a last count is added to the indictment
of capitalism. It has corrupted labor’s instinct of workmanship.
I have never known whether Mr. Veblin meant his humor to be taken
seriously, or intended his book to be a subtle thrust at the
theologians. His argument may be regarded as a clever parody of
the doctrine of the fall of man in Adam’s sin, with the consequent
curse upon all the descendants of our first parent. In any case, his
contention adds somewhat to the confusion as to the true significance
of labor. I have not found evidence to prove that man has an instinct
of workmanship. Hence the relation of education to work is not that of
the rational control of instinct, for if the knowledge of simple labor
processes were innate, men would not even need “practical” education in
them.
Not all men have held a high opinion of labor. Nietzsche says work is a
disgrace. There are doubtless many people who secretly agree with him.
I have known working men who suffered from an “inferiority complex.” It
is possible that the protest of labor is not wholly against injustice,
but is in part a protest against the feeling of inferiority. It is
not uncommon to find young people who are ashamed to work. It is not
only among the rich and privileged that we find those who look down
on labor. The same attitude exists in all classes, for much the same
reason that the majority of people despise the poor and emulate the
rich. Work has in the past been the lot of the slave. Most men are at
present driven to labor by necessity, and many entertain the hope of
escaping from the necessity as soon as possible.
We have even Biblical authority for this attitude. The punishment of
Adam for his act of disobedience is a life of labor. Henceforth he must
earn his living, tilling the ground and eating his bread in the sweat
of his brow--in other words, labor is a curse. And so it is regarded
by the law of the land. When a man is convicted of a crime the court
sentences him to prison and to “hard labor”--until such time as he is
pardoned and may return to his career of crime and life of leisure.
It is interesting to note the place assigned to work by the Hebrew and
Christian religions which, having their origin in the folkways and the
daydreams of the masses, are very sympathetic to the poor toilers of
earth. Yet we are told that to keep the Sabbath holy, the day must not
be defiled with labor. There is no mention of the blessedness of labor
in the Beatitudes; the command to consider the birds of the air and the
lilies of the field which toil not neither do they spin and yet are
clothed and fed, reveals a spirit very remote from that of industry.
Heaven is thought of as a place of eternal rest.
A similar popular valuation of labor is revealed in the myths of
antiquity. The gods do not work. Vulcan, the exception to this rule,
is always made to appear ridiculous among the gods; they are said to
laugh at his awkwardness. The “labors” of Hercules are not really
toil but exhibitions of miraculous strength. For the most part in the
legends which have expressed the wish-fancies of mankind, the hero
does everything but work; he fights, makes love, kills dragons, goes
on strange voyages, wins a kingdom, in fact, his adventures may be
interpreted as symbolic expressions of the wish of mankind to escape
the common burden of toil.
I think, moreover, men belittle their work when they accept the
broad distinction between the “brain” worker and the “hand” worker.
Psychologists say that thinking is as truly bodily activity as is any
other form of labor, and there is very little so-called work that does
not require thought. There is every conceivable gradation from that
labor which is almost wholly routine, to that which consists of nothing
but solving problems. No one knows the point where labor ceases to be
brain work and becomes manual. The world’s work requires of men many
kinds of activity, some of great importance, some of little. There is
no use either of idealizing it or in despising it. Men do their work
because they have to and are neither noble nor ignoble because of it.
The problem is how can I in my situation make my position a place
where a man has really lived and toiled and thought and realized
values through his effort, and has not permitted himself to become an
automaton or a fool. The labor problem however tends to become one
primarily not of the significance of work at all, but of improving the
material conditions of those who toil. This latter problem is wholly
justifiable. But because of the prevailing mental confusion about labor
itself, it is generally assumed that if a man works he should receive a
different sort of “education” from that of other educated people, and
that his training should be the means to ends that have little to do
with interest in education as such.
There are those who always view the education of workers strictly from
the standpoint of its value for social security. Just as a well-known
statistician not long ago advised the American investor to support
the Church, whether or not he agreed with its doctrines, because
the influence of the Church upon the masses, he said, was on the
side of invested capital, so there are those who believe that giving
educational opportunity to working men is a sort of premium paid upon a
general policy of social insurance.
The fear of the menace of labor often inspires efforts for the
education of workers in the hope that with better knowledge labor will
become safe and sane. There is a wide-spread belief that education
like religion is a conservative influence. If working men were only
better informed they would have a more sympathetic understanding of the
intentions of their employers; they would show some appreciation of
their economic opportunities under our free institutions; they would
know better than to go on strike, or listen to their union leaders,
or dally with socialistic ideas. Perhaps so, but I have yet to see an
educational effort which was consciously directed to these ends that
was either sincere or intellectually respectable.
From a wholly different point of view, the relation of education to
work would seem to present no problem at all. Work itself is said to
be the only genuine method of education. A popular writer who holds
advanced ideas on this subject, says that the four years at college are
wasted, that “as early as fifteen or sixteen a youth should be brought
into contact with realities and kept in contact with realities from
that age on. That does not mean that he will make an end of learning
then, but only that he will henceforth go on learning--and continue
learning for the rest of his life--in relation not to the ‘subjects’ of
a curriculum, but to the realities he is attacking.” In this passage
one detects the odor of Rousseau. We discussed this theory when we were
considering liberal education as animal training. At best it is but
half true. If learning necessarily came from contact with realities,
every one would be educated. But there is no assurance that people will
see the significance of the realities they “attack.” The importance of
experimental study is not a new discovery. Science has long employed
the laboratory method. And even laboratory work, work done in an
environment which is carefully arranged to stimulate discovery, does
not always develop habits of independent judgment.
The notion that experience is necessarily the best teacher is popular.
The newspapers encourage it. If a man makes a success in business,
interviewers seek his opinion on every conceivable subject. In worker’s
classes there is occasionally a student who has no doubt that his
experience in the shop is a better education than that which people get
from books. Such students do not as a rule gain much from study, for no
matter what subject is under discussion, they always know more about it
than the instructor.
Experience as such teaches just what is experienced and nothing more.
Few minds are able to reflect judiciously upon experience or to draw
correct conclusions from it. Labor is something that can be known only
by one who has experienced it, and this experience is important for
anyone who desires a broad knowledge of human life. But it is with work
as it is with travel: each is an aid to education only as it quickens
insight. The man on the Bowery who boasts that he has traveled over
America from coast to coast may really never have left the Bowery; in
each place he has visited, he finds himself in the same sort of lodging
house, in the same environment, among the same sort of companions, all
with the same interests.
So with many kinds of work. Much of it is mere routine. He who from day
to day does the same thing, until he is able to perform the movements
with a minimum of effort and attention, is certainly acquiring a habit,
but we have seen that not all habit formation is education. Those
who work with certain kinds of machinery frequently complain of the
monotony of their work. I think that one of the serious objections to
such work is that it has so little educational value. Perhaps this
objection may be offset by the fact that machine production makes
possible a shortening of the working day and hence gives the worker
more leisure time. Some think that adult education is important because
it gives people something to do in their unemployed hours. But people
do not always improve their minds during the time when they are free
from labor, and many whose work is routine, possess by nature or
develop routine habits of mind which interfere with their education.
They become victims of fixed ideas, of slogans and catchwords.
Perhaps the nearest approach to a real integration of education and
work is vocational training. This is the “education” which most people
seek. Universities offer an increasing number of courses in practical
subjects such as engineering, mining, business methods. Various trades
are taught in public schools. By far the greater number of courses
offered to adult students are sold with the promise that they will
increase the purchaser’s efficiency and “put more pay in his envelope.”
I have already discussed this useful knowledge. Both the individual
and society profit by it. And in addition to its practical advantages,
there is a sincerity and lack of pretense about such education which
distinguish it from much of the traditional education. It must be
thorough or it cannot meet the test of practical experience. If
men learned mechanics with no more thoroughness than that which
characterizes the study of the classics, the country would go into
bankruptcy.
But as I have tried to show, this training for practical efficiency
is too narrow. It does not necessarily widen the student’s interests
or deepen his insight or improve his judgment concerning matters that
lie outside the range of his technical information. Advocates of this
type of education often become partisan and declare that it alone is
education.
It is doubtless too soon to speculate upon the effects of our new
policy of reducing immigration to the point where it is almost
negligible. Whether the effect is to intensify competition among
working people, or to lessen it because of a labor shortage, in either
case the result is obvious. Somebody must do the actual work of the
country. We shall soon have a working class in America that is more
than one generation old. That is, we are now for the first time in
our history tending toward a relatively fixed and permanent working
class. The various national strains in it will be held together long
enough to become acquainted with one another, long enough to find more
in common than a common opposition to capital, long enough to develop
a working class tradition which is American. Workers will not only
strive individually to become middle class; they will be obliged to
improve their condition as a class. To the economic struggle there
will be added efforts for culture. Many workers are already beginning
to seek education as an aid to a more satisfactory and less sordid
existence while working at their tasks. Sooner or later education
must cease to be the distinguishing mark of a privileged class, or a
device which aids a man to the goal of his ambition; it must become a
universal practice of learning how to live like a civilized being in
any occupation.
I have said that people’s ideas of the relation of education to work
are for the most part confused and fantastic, and that among the
causes of this confusion was a misconception of the meaning of labor.
We saw that the older romantic idealization of labor gives way to
the idealization of Labor not as work but as an organized movement.
There are “friends of Labor” who think of workers’ education as class
education. And by class education they do not mean the extension of the
opportunity for liberal education to people who toil for their daily
bread. They are not interested in liberal education, any more than
they are interested in work. They wish working men to be given such
instruction as will be useful in the “class struggle.” Labor is to have
its own kind of education.
It is said that educators are but the retainers, the “high-brow”
policemen of the vested interests and must always teach what the
masters require. The educators’ task is to train the masses to be more
productive and willing servants of the masters, to train the sons of
the owners in the idealogy so that they may work it to advantage, to
mould them to the type of the most successful and provide them with the
insignia and passwords of culture which will show that they belong to
the fraternity of the privileged. Traditional education, being nothing
but a weapon of the ruling class, is not for the workers. The workers
are now passing through a period of discipline which is preparing
them to be the future masters of the world. As the old education was
for the old master class, the new must likewise be the ideology of
the future master class, the organized proletariat. The workers must
educate themselves, for any education that capitalists provide for
them will be the capitalist education which enslaves the worker. The
new education in proletarian ideals must be wholly different from the
past. Its aim is not to provide useless and ornamental knowledge, or
escapes and consolations, but to equip labor to emancipate itself from
the rule of capital and to conquer and control industrial society. Thus
labor education is sometimes little more than old fashioned radical
propaganda. Where this is not the case, workers may still be urged to
the pursuit of knowledge by militant appeal. The following is quoted
from a bulletin issued by a state director of labor education in the
West:
“He (the worker) lives in a society committed to the practice of
buying his labor cheap and selling its product dear, to the theory
that property is sacred and life of little value. In support of this
position toward labor, the press, the pulpit, and too often the
school lend their aid....
“All this passion for justice will accomplish nothing, believe me,
unless you get knowledge. You may be strong and clamorous, you
may win a victory, you may effect a revolution, but you will be
trodden down again under the feet of knowledge unless you get it for
yourselves. Even if you should win that victory, you will be trodden
down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in the
hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win over ignorance.”
If as an individual a man is interested in his education only in so
far as it may be to his economic advantage, we regard him as a rather
stupid materialist. It is no less stupidly materialistic to urge a
class to seek knowledge merely for the sake of a common economic
advantage. As a rule, ignorant men place a strictly material valuation
upon education. If education is nothing but the training of certain
groups of animals in the best methods for taking material advantage
of one another, it makes little difference which group wins in the
class struggle. This theory means that the belief that education can
make a difference in the kind of living is a delusion, and that the
only significant differences in human life are the results of economic
forces.
Have we, in the notion of a special type of education for the working
class, a correct view of the relation between education and work?
Let us admit for the sake of argument, that traditional education is
class education, elaborated in the interest of the dominant elements
in society. Even then it might have a function other than that of an
aid to systematic exploitation. It might serve as a guide to the use
of leisure time. It might aid men in discriminating between ends which
were worthy of effort and those which were not. It might be necessary
for the development of personality, and to enable people to discover
that which would give some intelligible meaning to their existence.
Hitherto the privilege of the fortunate few, it might conceivably be a
good which may now be the possession of the many.
I cannot see that the interests I have just mentioned are necessarily
those of any particular class. And it would seem that insofar as
traditional education has failed, the failure has been the result of
subordinating these very universal human interests to the special
economic advantages of a particular class. Along with the class spirit,
irrelevant factors enter into education. Education becomes illiberal
and propagandist, a drill in herd opinion. Prejudice is not removed; it
is intensified. A spirit of intolerance is bred concerning anything
which might effect class interest.
And now it is argued that since liberal education has been spoiled by
one class in making it the servant of its class interests, the working
class is justified in again spoiling it for its own special interests.
If men prefer a substitute to the real thing, it is their own affair.
But a person is either being educated or he is not, and whether he is
or not is a matter quite independent of his particular occupation. Of
course a man’s education will make a difference in the spirit in which
he works and in the quality of his workmanship, for it changes the man.
If traditional education is unfit for the working man, it is not fit
for anyone. I can see no reason why economic differences should be made
the basis of cultural differences. The knowledge that has value should
be accessible to all regardless of their economic interests, or the
profession they practice. If a bad education should not be given to a
worker, it is not because he is a working man but because he is a man.
Anything that it is good for one class to know is good for another. A
banker may appreciate Shakespeare’s sonnets, so may a tailor; but there
is not one Shakespeare for the first and another Shakespeare for the
second. If biology is worth knowing, its value is not changed because a
machinist studies it. If a philosophy is true, it is true for the man
who can understand it, whether he be a railroad president or a coal
miner. There is no proletarian arithmetic or capitalist algebra or
Marxian astronomy.
To be sure, a worker’s education should take account of the economic
situations in his environment. So should the education of all men.
It is sometimes said that within the ranks of labor there is a new
civilization in the making. Working men are said to have ideals and
standards, an ethic and culture of their own which are now manifest
as working class “idealogy.” I have not noticed it. From the time I
was a small boy, I have had somewhat unusual opportunities to know the
labor movement, and during the last twenty years have sought to make
a psychological study of it. The “labor point of view” is commonly
that which propagandists wish the worker to have. In America the
“revolutionary class-conscious proletariat” exists only on paper. If
we consider the ideals, habits and ambitions of working people, it is
difficult to conclude that they form a culture group apart. The working
man votes for Al Smith and Calvin Coolidge, dresses like the grocer
and the bank clerk, drives a motor car if he can afford it, reads the
popular journals, has about the same ideas of patriotism, morals,
government, and success in life as his employer, and tends in every way
to become more and more “middle class.”
Suppose the change contemplated by many radicals should occur and
that there should be a “social revolution.” What of the education of
workers then? The worker would still spend his days at the machine or
bench. Is it not conceivable that men might then in their pursuit of
knowledge have some interests other than the economic? Under no system
should people permit their entire personalities to be drawn into and
used up by industry. Industry is a means, not an end. It is in its
proper place when it makes possible the achievement of culture. As a
man becomes educated, he should learn so far as circumstances permit,
to put his work in its proper place. The relation of education to work
is no different from its relation to all the interests and activities
and demands which life makes of us. A community may be said to have
a culture only when all men--each in his own way,--cooperate in the
realization of certain values, which give to all their actions and
strivings a perspective, an order, a meaning. It is in this sense that
Europe in the thirteenth century may be said to have had a culture.
In discussing the cultural values of any period of history, there is
danger of over-simplification. The picture which I have of that century
may not be historically correct, but it will serve to illustrate my
point. Catholic Christianity at the close of the Middle Ages possessed
a set of values which entered into everything that people did or
thought and gave it meaning. The secular did not really exist for
the men of that age. All work was religious work. Everywhere there
was ceremony, the shrine, sacredness. The fields were blessed before
plowing; harvest was a gay religious festival. Every labor process
and every station in society was brought to the service of the common
ideal, and from it gained added significance. For it the peasant tilled
the ground, its themes were the inspiration of the sculptor, the
painter, the musician, the builder. In the service of this valuation of
the experiences of life the King ruled, the soldier fought, the monk
said his prayers, the philosopher meditated.
The cultural ideal of an age is revealed in the type of man for whom
the people have greatest reverence. Such a man is the meaning of
living for the men of that age. Inquire of the thirteenth century in
whom is its ideal realized, and the answer is clear. It is realized in
the saints. I do not mean to suggest that everybody in those days was
saintly. But there was common agreement that human life existed for
the achievement of sainthood. People achieved it in varying degrees
and by methods which appear strange to us of the twentieth century.
But all men hoped to achieve it in the next world if not in this. The
existence of the saints in Heaven was a storehouse of merit upon which
all could draw. And one living saint was held to be enough to justify
the existence of an entire age.
I trust it is not necessary for me to add that the saint is
not my ideal of the meaning of life. Ideals of asceticism and
other-worldliness have no interest for me. But I wonder what would
happen if people should “go in” for education with the unanimity
of agreement as to its value that they once showed with regard to
religion. I hesitate to make the suggestion lest I appear to suggest
something solemn, sanctimonious, pious and official. We have enough of
that sort of thing now among professional educators.
If instead of the attainment of sainthood the attainment of wisdom
could be made the commonly accepted goal and meaning of the activities
of modern men, we should again have a culture in which industry would
take its proper place. We have for it now no other goal than the
making of money, and hence industry runs amuck while the spirit of
commercialism crushes out all our values. We keep the wheels going
round, but the quality of living and the meaning of our work decline.
Cooperation in the service of the ideal gives way to a competitive
struggle for material possession and power and our lives are used up in
making a living. Only the peoples that have achieved a culture have a
goal for which to labor.