It was the American Business Man who proposed the first “practical”
reform; and if you have any doubt of the validity of the Caste
theory, note what happened. The American Business Man knew that these
millions of youths were going to enter his shops and factories; they
were not going to be members of a leisure class, they were going to
be wage-slaves; and so he proposed to educate them to be efficient
wage-slaves.
And he might have succeeded in imposing his capitalistic version of
the Caste theory of education upon our public schools, had it not been
for the trade unions, who perceived in these capitalist plans a means
of breaking down their own apprentice system. “What! turn the schools
into training-schools for strikebreakers? No!” they said--and they
bitterly opposed every attempt to introduce industrial training into
the schools, and mustered to their aid the old notions of the Magic of
Books. “Let the children have an _education_”--meaning book-learning;
“it will be time enough for them to learn to _work_ when they leave
school,” was the general verdict. And so in this clash of economic
interests, one theory warred with another, and the theory of Education
as a mysterious communion with the Magic of Books happily won.
Happily--for though the controversy had its unfortunate results, in
the fixing of a prejudice in the minds of the working people against
industrial education, we should not fail to realize that in that
controversy the trade unions were right. We do not want to educate
the children of the poor in this twentieth century to be a human
sub-species; it would be better to give them fragments of a leisure
class education than fix them into the wage-slave mould; it would
be better that they learned Greek and Latin (or, for that matter,
Sanscrit!) than merely a trade. It would be better to turn them out as
they came in, helpless and ignorant, than to make them into efficient
machines.
But such a choice is not necessary. It is possible to have an education
which produces human beings who are neither out of touch with their
age nor hopelessly confined within it--a generation which will be the
masters and not the slaves of its environment.
The outlines of such an educational system were already being drawn,
in theory and even experimentally in fact. But these radical proposals
threatened to cost more money than governments are accustomed to expend
on peaceful and constructive enterprises. Yet something had to be done
in response to a popular sense of the imperfections of our system.
Something was done accordingly.