Here, then, is the situation as it stands. Our education is out of
relation to the time in which we live. It is breaking down under the
pressure of economic forces which demands that it turn out people who
do not have to be _re-educated_ by modern industry. It cannot remain as
it is. It will either be made the instrument of a democratic culture
which accepts the present but foresees the future; or it will fall
into the hands of those who are planning to make it a training school
for wage-slaves. Here is the latter program, as described by the
superintendent of schools in a great American city:
“Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades
of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led us to
experiment with industrial education in the grades.... Our controlling
idea was that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of
industrial life should be grouped in prevocational schools in which
they would receive, in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such
instruction and training in constructive activities as would develop
aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the
opportunity to _rotate term by term through various shops_ is afforded
in seven schools to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the 7th, 8th
and 9th years.”
Between these two programs you must choose. Either efficient democratic
education, or efficient capitalistic education.
“But,” asks some one, “what is there to choose between them? Democratic
education and capitalistic education both seem to me to consist in
turning the school into a workshop.”
Not at all! The democratic plan is rather to turn the workshop into a
school. That may seem like a large order, but I may as well confess to
you at once that the democratic scheme proposes ultimately to bring
the whole of industry within the scope of the educational system:
nothing less! But the benevolent assimilation of industry by education
in the interest of human progress and happiness, is one thing; and the
swallowing of the public school system by industry in the interest of
the employing class, is quite another.
For the present, however, democratic education merely brings the
workshop into the school, so that the processes of industry may be
the more readily mastered; while capitalist education merely sends
the school-child into its workshops, in order that he may become
more effectively exploitable. The difference should be sufficiently
obvious: in the school-workshops of capitalism the child is taught how
to work for somebody else, how to conduct mechanical operations in an
industrial process over which he has no control; in the democratic
workshops of the school he learns to use those processes to serve his
own creative wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave--and
bear in mind that this refers to the children of the poor--for the rich
have their own private schools for their own children. In the other,
the child learns to be a free man.
That is just what irritates the capitalist reformers of our public
school system. Since the children of the poor are going to be factory
hands, what is the use of their having learned to be free men? They
might as well have learned Greek and Latin, for all the use it is going
to be to them!
And that is why you must exercise your choice. The merits are not
quite all on one side of the question. There are disadvantages in
the democratic plan of education. These disadvantages have nowhere
been made more clear than by H. G. Wells in his fantastic scientific
parable, “The First Men in the Moon.” You will remember that his
explorers visited the Moon in a queer sort of air-craft, and found
there a people with institutions quite unlike our own. They too,
however, had classes, and they had solved the problem of the education
of these classes in a forthright manner which is utterly unlike our
timid human compromises. One of the visitors from Earth thus describes
the Lunar System:
“In the Moon ... every citizen knows his place. He is born to that
place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and
surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has
neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’
Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a
mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end.
They check the incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage
his mathematical bias with a perfect physiological skill. His brain
grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and
the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential
part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies
in the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its
application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line.
His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions
engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and
seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame; his
limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect
face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere
stridulation for the stating of formulae; he seems dead to all but
properly enunciated problems.... And so he attains his end....
“The bulk of these insects, however, ... are, I gather, of the
operative [working] class. ‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are
in actual nature--it is no figure of speech; the single tentacle of
the mooncalf-herdsman is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting,
guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages
to these important parts ... others again have flat feet for
treadles, with ankylosed joints; and others--who I have been told are
glass-blowers--seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common
Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need
it meets....
“The making of these various sorts of operatives must be a very
curious and interesting process.... Quite recently I came upon a
number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the fore
limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine minders
of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system
of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by
injections, while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I
misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer
little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various
cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and
he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were
being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but
such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me
disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to
see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched
looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of
limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of
course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our
earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then
making machines of them.”
The Lunar system has indeed much to be said for it; and the capitalist
plan of wage-slave education has at least the merit of being a definite
step in that direction.