“But in either case,” exclaims an indignant mother, “the child ceases
to be a child--under either the democratic or the capitalistic plan--”
No, madam! The object of a genuine democratic education is to enable
him to remain always a child.
“Then,” says another interlocutor, “I must have misunderstood you. I
thought you conceived of education as _growing-up_.”
Growing up, yes--out of the helplessness, the fear, the misery of
childhood, which come only from weakness and ignorance: growing up into
knowledge and power.
“But putting aside forever his toys and games,” protests the mother.
“Forgetting how to play!”
No, madam. Learning rather to take realities for his toys, and entering
blithely into the fascinating and delightful game of life. Forget how
to play? That is what he is condemned to now. It is a pity. And that
is precisely what we want to change.
“By setting him to work?”
What! are we to quibble over words? Tell me, then, what is the
difference between work and play?
Or rather, to shorten the argument, let me tell you. Play is effort
which embodies one’s own creative wishes, one’s own dreams. Work
is any kind of effort which fails to embody such wishes and such
dreams.... When you were first married, and began to keep house--under
difficulties, it may be--was that work or play, madam? Do not be afraid
of being sentimental--we are among friends. Is it not true that at
first, while it was a part of the dream of companionship, while it
seemed to you to be making that dream come true, it was play--no matter
how much effort it took? And is it not true that when it came to seem
to you merely something that had to be done, it was work, no matter how
easily performed?--And you, my friend, who built a little house in the
country with your own hands for pleasure, and worked far beyond union
hours in doing it--was not that play?
It was _your own house_, you say. Just so; and it is the child’s own
house, that cave in the woods which he toils so cheerfully to create.
And it was their own house, the cathedral which the artisans and
craftsmen of the middle ages created so joyously--the realization of a
collective wish to which the creative fancy of every worker might make
its private contribution.
You know, do you not, why we cannot build cathedrals now? Because
craftsmen are no longer children at play--that is to say, no longer
free men. They toil at something which is no affair of theirs, because
they must. They have become the more or less unwilling slaves of a
system of machine production, which they have not yet gained the
knowledge and power to take and use to serve their own creative dreams.
But men do not like to work; they like to play. They want to be the
masters and not the slaves of the machine-system. That is why they
have struggled so fiercely to climb out of the class of slaves into
the class of masters; it has been that hope which has sustained them
in what would otherwise have seemed an intolerable condition. And that
is why, as such a hope goes glimmering, they join together to wrest
from their employers some control over the conditions under which they
work; and also why their employers so often prefer to lose money in
strikes rather than concede such control--for the sense of mastery is
dearer even than profits. That is, incidentally, why so many workers
prefer a white collar job to a decent union wage--because it permits
them to fancy themselves a part of the master class. And finally, that
is why the industrial system is now at the point of breakdown--because
a class of workers who have no sense of mastery over their jobs cannot
and will not take enough interest in their work to meet the new and
stupendous demands upon production. When pressure is put upon them,
they revolt--and hell is raised, but not the production-rate.
Every production manager knows that even our most efficient industries
are producing far less than their maximum; and he knows why. The
psychology of slavery does not make for efficiency. There was a time
when inefficiency didn’t matter--when infants in agony from lack of
sleep and girls terrorized by brutal foremen could produce more than
could be sold, and were preferable to workers who had to be bargained
with. Capitalism denied the worker the right to dare to think his job
his own. But the wiseacres of capitalism now encourage the worker to
believe his interests identical with those of his employer; they take
out some of his wages and give it back to him in a separate envelope
and call it “profit-sharing.” But the production manager knows that
such a mess of doubtful pottage will scarcely take the place of their
birthright. He knows that he has got out of the workers the utmost
that their slave psychology will permit. He knows that there is no
use to go on telling them that the business is their affair. He knows
that the only thing left to be done is to make it their affair--to put
into their collective control not only wages and hours, but what they
create and how they create it. The job must be theirs before they can
put into it the energy of free men. Their creative wish alone can bring
production to its maximum. But that is not what he is paid to do. He,
too, is denied the right to shape industry to his dream; he may not
make it efficient; he must try to make it more profitable. He, too,
is a slave ... a slave who wishes his master would set him free to
play for a while with this great beautiful toy. He would show us how
to increase production by 100 per cent on four hours work a day. He
would show us how work could be made a joy to everybody. He would--but
what is the use? He sits and looks out the window and wishes that
something would happen. Perhaps these young men and women who have
learned to play with machinery, who know it as a splendid toy and not
as a hateful tyrant, who want to use it to make themselves and the
world happier--perhaps a generation of such workers, the products of a
democratic and efficient educational system, will have the knowledge
and the power to take and use this machinery to serve their own
creative dream of a useful and happy new society....
Madam, have I answered your question?