ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE GERMAN WAY
Statemanship in Germany covered "industrial strategy" as well as
political. Its labor protection and regulations were in line with its
imperial policy of domination. Within recent years labor protection
from the point of view of statesmanship has been urged in England and
America. The waste of life is a matter of unconcern in the United
States so long as private business can replenish its labor without
seriously depleting the oversupply. It becomes a matter of concern
only when there are no workers waiting for employment. The German
state has regulated the conditions of labor and conserved human energy
because its purpose has been not the short-lived one of private
business, but the long-lived one of imperial competition. It was the
policy of the Prussian state to conserve human energy for the strength
and the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was good for the Empire was
good, it was assumed, for the people. The humanitarians in the United
States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country
accepted this naïve philosophy of the German people, which had been so
skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that
its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy,
however, that workers and capitalists understand their own interests
and are more capable than the state of looking after them, stood in
the way of adopting on grounds of statesmanship the German methods.
The American working man has never been convinced that he can get odds
of material advantage from the state. His method is to get all he
can through "pull," good luck or his superior wits. He could find
no satisfaction like his German brothers in surrendering concrete
interests for some abstract idea of a state. He could find no greater
pleasure in being exploited by the state than he now finds in
exploitation by private business. The average American values life for
what he can get out of it, or for what he can put into it. He has
no sentimental value of service, nor is service anywhere with us an
institutionalized ideal. We judge it on its merits, detached perhaps,
but still for what it actually renders in values.
In conformity with American ideals, wage earners look to their own
movements and not to the state for protection. Their movements require
infinite sacrifice, but they supply them with an interest and an
opportunity for initiative which their job lacks. The most important
antidote for the workers to factory and business methods is not
shorter hours or well calculated rest periods or even change-off from
one kind of routine work to another. As important as these may be,
reform in labor hours does not compensate the worker for his exclusion
from the directing end of the enterprise of which he is a part and
from a position where he can understand the purpose of his work The
trade union interference with the business of wealth production is in
part an attempt to establish a coördination of the worker which is
destroyed in the prosecution of business and factory organization. The
interference of the union is an attempt to bridge the gulf between
the routine of service and the administration, and direction of the
service which the worker gives.
I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious
attempt at such coördination. It is not. The conscious purpose is the
direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and
to increase labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the
sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal
gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows
that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest,
not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's
participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in
the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain
the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as
men unequipped with the administrative power--as men without will.
There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements
purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in
the United States. The German workers depended on their political
representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their
organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck
set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when
their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.
If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize
what it means for the people of a nation to let the title to their
lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the
protection they have been given and for the regulation of their
affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other
countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of
their assumed independence.
How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their
destiny is affected by it is illustrated better by their educational
system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative
protective practices or policy.
George Kerschensteiner, the director of the Munich schools, in his
book on "The Idea of the Industrial School," tells us that the
_Purposes <and Duties_ of the schools are to realize the ideal ethical
community, and that this realization is possible in so far as the
educational provisions are made from the standpoint of the ethical
concept of each state. In America we do not think of the state as the
embodiment of our ethical concepts. The state, as we know it, is one
of the several instruments for realizing ends, ethical as well as
material. The state is supposed to serve the common ends of all
people. A state may be used, we are all aware, as an instrument,
either by Prussian junkers or American business men; either may
capture a state to serve their ends. But as a state serves special
individuals it belies its professed reason for existence, and in
America is in danger of falling from grace, so far, that is, as the
common people are concerned. But when a state stands in the minds of a
people as the embodiment of their ideals as it has in Germany, it
must for its own purpose spend time and substance in purchasing the
people's confidence. In assuming the place of guardian it must of
necessity minister to the physical needs of the people. If it retains
the people's confidence in its guardianship, it is incumbent on it
to pursue this policy. It is incumbent on such a state to mould the
people's ideas of what their needs are. The schools obviously offer
the most hopeful media for the accomplishment of that result, and
they have been used in Germany more effectively in this way than the
schools of any other country. The German school system follows hard
and fast preconceptions of aims and ends, and because of this it
was possible for Germany to put over its own particular sort of
efficiency.
As a first requisite of efficiency, Germany classifies its people,
gives them a place in the scheme of things, and holds them there.
By circumscribing within definite limitations the experience of
individuals it produces specialists at the sacrifice of a larger human
development. The classification of the people and the training of them
naturally for the German purpose falls to the schools. The sorting
out of individuals begins at the early age of ten in the elementary
schools, when each child's social and economic position is practically
determined. It is decided then whether he shall be one of the great
army of wage workers or whether he shall fall into some one of the
several social classes and vocations which stand apart from the common
mass of wage earners. The children in the German schools, who are
selected at the age of ten for a more promising future than the trades
hold out, have more leeway in the making of their decision. But even
these children from the American point of view are summarily disposed
of and fatally consigned.
The telling off of children at the age of ten and assigning them to
a place in the social scheme for life is not American in spirit, nor
does it conform to our habits and institutions. But, it is complained,
the American habit of taking chances is not efficient. The habit of
letting children escape into life with their place unsettled creates
confusion and makes calculations in serious things like industry
difficult. Therefore, unfaithful to the development of our own
concepts of life we are expected to emulate Germany and to determine
the destiny of the child. Germany undertakes to eliminate the chances
of the individual and the taking of chances by the state, while the
American ideal is to leave its people free to make the most of each
new exigency that life turns up.
At the age of fourteen it is decided in Germany what industry or trade
the children shall enter, that is, the children who at ten are told
off to industry. After they enter their trade, their special education
for their job is looked after in the continuation schools as well
as in the shop. Their attendance at the continuation schools
is compulsory. This compulsory attendance does not only insure
supplementary training for a particular job, but holds the children to
the industry which was chosen for them. That is, a boy is compelled,
if he works in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the continuation
school for waiters, until he is eighteen. He may not go to a
continuation school for butchers if he decided at the end of a year
or so in his first job that he would rather be a butcher, or that he
would rather do anything than wait.
The continuation schools protect German manufacture and the national
industrial efficiency against indulgence in such vagaries. A butcher
would prefer to engage lads who have had experience in butcher shops
and butcher continuation classes. Avenues of escape from jobs just
because they are uncongenial are thus quite effectively closed
together with, the chance to experiment with life--the chance which
Americans take for granted. But it is just this element of waywardness
and the opportunity America leaves open for its indulgence among
working people that makes labor from the standpoint of American
manufacture so inefficient. For want of opportunity to put
individuality to some account we frequently fall back on waywardness
in an awkward and futile protest against domination.
While the German scheme of placing its workers is efficient in its own
way, so also is the training for each particular trade. A child is
trained first to be skillful and second, to quote Mr. Kerchensteiner,
"to be willing to carry out some function in the state ... so that
he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state." "Having
accomplished this," he says "the next duty of the schools is to
accustom the individual to look at his vocation as a duty which he
must carry out not merely in the interest of his own material and
moral welfare but also in the interest of the state." From this, he
says, follows the next and "greatest educational duty of the public
school. The school must develop in its pupils the desire and strength
... through their vocation, to contribute their share so that the
development of the state to which they belong, may progress in the
direction of the ideal of the community."
His assumption in defining the "greatest duty" is that the members of
the state are free to evolve and will evolve a progressive ethical
community. But after a child has passed through the hands of a
competent teaching force which fits him successfully into a ready-made
place, after he has accepted this ready-made place on the authority
of modern technology and business, on the authority of the state
and religion, that the place given him is his to fill; to fill in
accordance with the standards determined by the schools and by
industry--after all this, it is difficult to imagine what else a child
could do but conform. He could do no more, thus trained, than go
forward in the direction he is pushed and in the direction determined
before he was born. This is not our idea of a progressive life.
It has been understood generally in America that Germany's preparation
and classification of her future workers and their placement in
industry, was more responsible than any other policy for Germany's
place in the world market. British and American manufacturers before
the war urged the emulation of German methods of education and a
reorganization of school systems more in conformity with the German.
The demand of the manufacturers for reorganization came at a time
when intelligent educators in America were recognizing that some
reorganization was necessary to bring the school experience of
children into relation with their environment and with the actualities
of life. The industrial education movement in this country was based
on the German, and the German idea was the dominating one. The
movement here has shown little-imagination as it adopted a system
foreign to America, instead of initiating schemes which represented
the aspirations of a free people.
Herman Schneider, of the University of Cincinnati, has made one of the
most intelligent contributions in the adaptation of the German scheme
of education. He divides trades into two classes, which he calls
energizing and enervating. In those which are energizing there is an
element of individual expression and opportunity for self-direction.
The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic
state of mind and body. His comment on the situation is: "We are
rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of
purely physical workers. The physical workers are becoming more and
more lethargic. The work itself is not character building; on the
contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is
hardly energizing mentally. The real menace lies in the fact that in a
self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in
danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because
of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood."
Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by
alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the
school, thus coördinating the worker's experience, with the assistance
of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the
pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in
the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school. The arrangement
also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop
processes in the course of apprenticeship. The experience while it
lasts may have educational value for the pupil. But in spite of what
it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a
blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise
which apprenticeship supposedly holds out. That is, the pupil, when he
becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where
his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed
off from the chance to develop and use the knowledge or training he
received. If, as Dean Schneider asserts, "we are rapidly dividing
mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical
workers," and if "we cannot reverse our present economic order of
things," then any apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a
pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most energizing of the trades
leads the pupil nowhere in particular. Even the skilled trade of
locomotive engineering, which Dean Schneider classes as the most
highly energized of trades, does not escape. As a spokesman for the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers observes: "The big electrical
engines which are being introduced in the railroad system are rapidly
eliminating the factors of judgment on the part of the engineer and
transforming that highly skilled trade into an automatic exercise."
The one-time value of a trade apprenticeship to a youth was that
it furnished the background for mastery of machine processes; but
apprenticeship under modern factory methods can do no more than make a
youth a good servant to machines. The Schneider system fills, as well
as can be filled, a scheme of apprenticeship in conformity with
the prevailing shop organization and requirements, but it is not a
fulfillment for youth; it is not educational. There is no progression
from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the
knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in administration
and reorganization of industry is cut off. The best of trades is a
blind alley, educationally speaking.
However abortive such an effort as Dean Schneider's might be in
giving workers opportunity to enrich their experience for their own
reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better
training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid
subject matter. This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it
should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting
character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth
exploitation and not wealth creation. All of the industrial
educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the
adaptation of their experiments to that fact.
A staff of investigators, who made a year's survey of the industries
of Cleveland with a view of determining what measures should be
adopted by the school system of the city to prepare young people for
wage earning occupation and to provide supplementary trade training
for those already employed, concluded that the choice of occupations
should be governed primarily by economic considerations; that even
from the point of view of the school, educational factors could not
take precedence over economic. They said: "The primary considerations
in the intelligent selection of a vocation relate to wages,
steadiness of employment, health risks, opportunity for advancement,
apprenticeship conditions, union regulations and the number of chances
there are for getting into it. These things are fundamental, and any
one of them may well take precedence over the matter of whether the
tastes of the future wage earner run to wood, brick, stone or steel."
This conclusion is fatalistic, but it is a brave one. It does not fall
back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of
history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor
hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does
not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or
physical science can enrich, under the circumstances, the worker's
experience to any important extent. It accepts the bald truth that all
the material classed as cultural will count for nothing of value in a
factory worker's life in comparison with the highest possible wage in
the most enervating of industries. It stresses this highly important
factor, as it should, but merely as a physical necessity. There
is vital education in the consciousness of self-support, in the
consciousness that one is earning the living one gets. But under
present conditions the educational experience of wage recompense is
not so significant as it might be if it measured the value of the
labor performed; if it paid the worker according to his needs, and if
he gave in return for the wage according to his ability.
The Gary school system is a notable effort in public school education
to fulfill children's desire for productive experience. It is in
striking contrast to the German scheme as it is based on processes
which have educational force and significance. In saying this I
differentiate between training for industry and participation in
the industrial activity which is an organic part of the life of the
children and of the community. The children are an actual part of the
repair and construction working force on Gary school buildings and on
the equipment. As the children are involved in the upkeep of a school
it becomes their school. They experience the responsibility of
maintaining the school plant, not by some artificial scheme of
participation, but by the actual application of trade standards and
acquired technique to operations which have for them and those with
whom they live important significance. They gain in their work a first
hand knowledge of industrial processes and activity. In conjunction
with skilled mechanics they work on the carpentry, the plumbing, the
masonry, the installation of electricity used in the school building.
They do the school printing and accounting.
The children's life in these schools is an experience in industry
where there is nothing to hide, no trade secrets to keep back. The
children have the full opportunity of seeing their work through to its
completion and understanding its purpose and recognising its value and
use. It provides more than any other school system a liberal field for
productive endeavor. But the Gary schools are not industry; they are a
world apart; they represent, as all schools are supposed to, moments
sacred to education and growth. They are not subjected to the test
of coördination in the world of industry. They give the children a
respect for productive enterprise that should be invaluable later
in effecting their resistance to the prostitution of their creative
power. They do not give them experience in the administrative side of
industry for which the children of high school age are ready and in
need. But in an admirable way they subordinate training in technique
to purpose and give the children the experience of exercising control
over their own industrial activity. As an industrial experience for
children of grammar school age, it is richer than any other school
system which has been developed.
The industrial education of Germany which was recommended for our
adoption and which we have emulated to an alarming degree in our
industrial towns, imposes prevailing methods of industry and technique
of factory processes as final and determined. As industrial history
and technique are taught in the schools, in effect they bind the
children to the current industrial practice and to the current
conditions. They stifle imagination and discourage the concept that
industry is an evolving process. The effect of technical training in
the German continuation schools (and the tendency is the same in our
own industrial education courses) is to teach the children that the
methods and processes as they are carried forward in the shop are
_right_. No question of their validity is raised in the school. They
are accepted by the children in the spirit of authority which the
school carries, as they would not be so finally accepted by them in
the shop. The impress of a developed curriculum, connected with an
active trade experience, that is, a trade in which the children are at
work, like the curriculum of a continuation school, is greater than
the curriculum which has been evolved for its abstract cultural
values. As the curriculum coördinates shop and school activities and
as it fails at the same time to stimulate inquiry on the part of the
pupil into industrial or special trade processes as they are practiced
in the shop, it becomes a positive, inhibiting factor in the
intellectual life of the children. The perfection of an industrial
school room equipment with its trade samples, its charts and maps, its
literature, relating to the extension, of trade and of commerce, has
the tendency like the curriculum to impose on the children the weight
of accomplishment, if this equipment is not used to stimulate inquiry
and experiment in industry as the ever fresh field for adventure that
it is. But the intention of these industrial schools is to train
the children in the acceptance of processes and methods which are
established. Nowhere, in no country, has this intention been so
successfully realized, because nowhere has it been so successfully
organized as in Germany through its continuation school system. And
nowhere as in Germany are the people so successfully subjected to
an institutionalized life as it has been worked out in the light of
modern technology and business.
* * * * *
There are other and special reasons why the best of industrial
education experiments in America have not met with greater
hospitality. The average American parent still believes that a boy
"rises" in the industrial world, not as they once thought through his
ability as a workman. The men of their acquaintance who have been
successful, have attained wealth and position, not as a rule through
their mastery of technique or their skill in a trade; they have not
come by their promotion merely on account of good workmanship, but
through influence. It might be that they had had their "chance"
through a relative or successful business man, or it might be that
they "got next" to a politician, who required no other qualification
than "smartness." A boy in a telegraph or a lawyer's office has a
better opportunity to reach influence than a boy in a workshop.
The scholastic requirement for such advancement as these vocations
contemplate, is provided for in the established school program of the
lower grades. A certain display of a few historical and literary
facts beside a facility in reading, writing, and arithmetic are the
qualifications which average parents believe are the necessary ones
for their children's advancement. And, taking the situation in general
as it is, they are right, and will be as long as the whole social
system discounts productive effort and rewards exploitation of
productive enterprise.
Obviously false from an educational point of view as these school
standards are, they are true to the facts, to the actual situation
which the parents have to face. The wave of popular opposition to a
reorganization of the schools for a preparation of the children for
factory life expresses the original conception of popular education
among sovereign people. The common school system exists, it is still
assumed, to fit the children to rule their own lives; to give them
an equipment which will protect them from a servitude to others. Its
ability to do this had not been questioned a generation ago and,
theoretical as its original intention is to-day, its traditional
purpose to develop the power of each child to govern his destiny,
holds over. If training children to read, write and count, training
them in facts relating to history and language, did not, as it had
been hoped, lay the world at the feet of the children, training them
in factory processes, parents felt competent to declare, laid the
children at the feet of exploiters. That is where in any case, in
the light of common experience, they might expect them to land. To
reorganize the schools with that possibility in mind was for the
parents a surrender of their gambling chance.
The promoters of industrial education, with some success, have made it
clear to the community generally that parents were giving heavy odds
in their gamble, but these promoters would have made this more obvious
to parents if they could have shown that the assets accruing from the
new school curriculum increased more materially than has the wage
earning capacity of their children. The results for individual
children are not sufficiently striking to advertise the departure, and
if they were, the departure would not warrant the endorsement of the
community on the ground of the higher wage, as wages are fixed by
competition. They are advanced by a general increase in productivity.
But the increase that occurs through more efficient methods in
productive enterprise is not a real increase; it does not relatively
affect the social or economic position of the wage earner.
In the last analysis, the wage return is not an educator's criterion,
in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey. The
Survey's recommendation for a reorganization of the school system is
based on the belief that the school is, or should be, an integral
expression or reflection of the life of the community; that to
function vitally it must be contemporaneous with that life, as are all
serviceable institutions. As a school reflects the life of a community
it enriches the experience of the children and endows them with the
knowledge and power to deal with environment. When a school system
disregards, as our established system does, the entire reorganization
of the industrial world, it stultifies growth and cultivates at the
same time an artificial concept of life, a false sense of values.
The German system of industrial education has recognized the
reorganization of the industrial world, but this recognition has meant
the sacrifice of individual life and development; it has come to
mean in short the prostitution of a people and the creation of a
Frankenstein.
None of our industrial educational systems or vocational guidance
experiments disclose the full content of the industrial life nor do
they give the children the knowledge or power to deal with it. The
general dissatisfaction with these school movements is that they
neither prostitute the schools in the interest of the employers nor
endow the children with power to meet their own problems. The training
in technique which they supply has a bearing on the every day life
around them which stories of Longfellow's life have not. But that
technique, divorced as it is from its purpose, its use or final
disposition, is as valueless as a crutch for a man without arms.
An elaboration of technology through instruction in the general
principles of physical science, industrial and political history and
the aesthetics of industry only emphasizes the absence of the
really significant factors. The conspicuously absent factors in all
industrial educational schemes are those which give men the ability to
control industry. No work in subject matter is educational which does
not in intention or in fact give the person involved the ability to
participate in the administration of industry, or the ability to judge
the extent of his mastery over the subject. Industrial educational
schemes, even the best of them, leave the pupils helpless before
their subject. As they furnish them with a certain dexterity and
acquaintance with processes and a supply of subject matter necessarily
more or less isolated, the pupils gain a sense of the power of the
subject to control them, rather than an experience in their power to
master the subject. The industrial school emphasizes the fact that the
administration and disposition of wealth production is no concern of
those versed in the technique of fabrication.
Many educators appreciate the lack of content provided by industrial
school systems as, with weak emphasis, they undertake to embroider the
system with history and aesthetics of textiles or other raw material
which the workers handle, or introduce the story of past processes.
As this furbishing of impoverished industry fails dismally to add
content, it succeeds in emphasizing the actual poverty that exists.
Dr. Stanley Hall makes the suggestion that books on the leading trades
should be written to stimulate the interest and intelligence of the
young who are engaged in industry or preparing to become the wage
earners of the trades. In speaking of "the urgent necessity now of
books on the leading trades addressed to the young," he says;[A] "The
leather industry, particularly boot and shoe manufacture, is perhaps
the most highly specialised of all in the sense that an operator
may work a lifetime in any one of the between three and four score
processes through which a shoe passes and know little of all the rest.
Now the _Shoe Book_ should describe hides and leathers, tanning,--old
and new methods, with a little of the natural history of the animals,
describe the process of taking them, of curing and shipping, each
stage in the factory, designating those processes that require skill
and those that do not, and so on to packing, labeling and shipping,
with descriptions showing the principles of the chief machines and
labor-saving devices, at any rate so far as they are not trade
secrets; it should include a glance at markets, prices, effects of
business advance, depression and strikes, perhaps something about
the hygiene of the foot, about bootblacks and what is done for them,
history of the festivals and organizations from St. Crispin and the
guilds down, tariffs, syndicates, societies, statistics, social
conditions in shoe towns, nationality of operatives,--all these
could be concisely set forth to show the dimensions, the centers of
interest, the social and commercial relations of the business, etc.
What is not yet realized is that all these things could and should be
put down in print and picture, almost as if it were to be issued as a
text-book or a series of them; all of this could be done to bring out
the very high degree of culture value now latent in the subject. Just
this is what pedagogues do not and will not see, and what even shoe
men fail to realize; viz., that the story of their craft rightly told,
would tend to give it some degree of professional and humanistic
interest and dignity which the most unskilled and transient employee
would feel. It would foster an esprit de corps, pride in membership
and above all an intelligent view of the whole field that would make
labor more valuable and more loyal. This material, once gathered,
should be used in some form in all industrial schools and courses in
towns where this industry dominates. It would bring a wholesome sense
of corporeity, historic and economic unity, would give a touch of the
old guild spirit and more power to see both sides on the part of both
employers and workmen. Nothing is so truly educational in the deepest
psychological sense of that word as useful information vitalized by
individual and vocational interest."
[Footnote A: Stanley Hall, Educational Problems; p. 624.]
Dr. Hall's idea of a Book of Industry might have emanated from the
heart of Mr. Carnegie. With the same benign detachment he seems to
have mused at his desk about the shoe industry and the people engaged
in it. It would not take more than a passing acquaintance with the
girls and men in shoe manufacturing towns to know that if there was
established a village library equipped with the history of shoes,
the aesthetics of shoes, shoe economics, shoe technology, and shoe
hygiene, not one of the girls or men who worked in the shoe factories
would darken its doors to read about shoes. They would not for this
simple reason; the workers' "individual and vocational interest" does
not exist. They would say that they already knew more than they cared
to about shoes. No literature could add culture or dignity to the
job of stitching vamps for all the working hours and days of a wage
earner's year, while there is no experience of cultural value in
the occupation, divided as the making of a shoe is into some ninety
operations, and distributed among ninety workers. Dr. Hall's
suggestion that a Shoe Book be written is a good suggestion but he
must supply a better basis for a reader's interest than industry has
given him, that is, industry as it is now administered. He cannot
impose culture or dignity through books on a trade which is
prostituted by business for profiteering. If the purpose of the Shoe
Book was to create the glamor that was intended around the present
day arrangement of making shoes, it would be a false contribution in
schoolroom equipment; it would be as pernicious as other literature
that introduced an artificial note into a real and living experience
like industry.
The most romantic account of shoe making will do nothing to bridge the
gulf between capital and labor as Dr. Hall seems so confidently to
believe it should. The problem is not so simple or so easily disposed
of. As Dr. Hall himself says: "As long as workmen are regarded as
parts of the machinery to be dumped on the scrap heap as soon as
younger and stronger hands can be found, the very point of view
needful for the correct solution of vocational education, is
wanting."[A] Dr. Hall recognizes some evils which are inherent in the
present scheme of industry and which are antagonistic to growth,
but neither he nor any of the advocates of the German methods of
industrial education make provisions in their educational schemes for
eliminating the aspect which contemplates the dumping of workers on
scrap heaps. None of the advocates view the equipment of workers for
industry in terms radically different from the terms in which they
are viewed by business men; they offer them technique and matter of
insignificance and indirection; they make no suggestion or move
to open up the adventure of industry for the worker's actual
participation in it; they accept the organization of industry which
excludes their participation as an unalterable fact; even unalterable
as an experience in the prevocational schemes of education.
[Footnote A: Stanley Hall--Educational Problems, p. 632.]
National, state and local campaigns have been carried on in America
during the last fifteen years for the protection of childhood and
youth. They have been on the whole successful in their purpose to
get children out of factories and stores and into schools. It was
an embarrassment to the pioneers in the campaign to find that the
children were against them; that they preferred factory or commercial
life to the schools. The evidence of this preference was their
wholesale exodus from schools when they reached an age where they were
acceptable to employers or where they were not prevented by law. Back
of the exodus, universal as it is, there is an urge of elemental
force. A common accounting for it, the nearest at hand, is that
parents of working class children are penurious; or that they are too
ignorant to understand the deteriorating effect of factory life on
children; or that they are too hard pressed in their physical needs to
consider the best interest of the children. This reason given for the
failure of the schools to supply children with matter of interest or
significance to them, explained only why children did not want to stay
in school; it did not explain their eagerness to enter industry. None
of the reasons accounted for the zest of the children for wage earning
occupation.
The failure of the schools to hold the children gave educators who
recognized the artificial character of school curricula, their best
reason for introducing matter relating to industrial life. The
children's preference was indeed a valuable indication where reality
or real subject matter would be found. The change off from old school
subject matter to instruction in methods of industry was a logical
experiment. But the movement for industrial education was not inspired
by a watchful sympathetic observation of children's needs; it was in
line with the general theory, more or less accepted, that schools
should be a reflection of the children's environment; it was in line
with the demand of employers for efficient workers either equipped for
specific processes or adaptable to factory methods.
If the promoters of industrial education had been observers of
children from twelve to fourteen and sixteen years, they would have
found that as they left school they were eager not for skill in
technical processes, not for wages, not for greater freedom of
association in adult life, not for any of these alone, but for all of
these as they were a part of the adventure of the adult world in which
they lived. "We have neglected to study the most vital thing in the
situation, namely the zests of the young ... we have not taken account
of the nature of the great upheaval at the dawn of the teens, which
marks the pubescent ferment and which requires distinct change in the
matter and method of education. This instinct is far stronger and has
more very ostensive outcrops than in any other age and land, and it is
less controlled by the authority of school or the home. It is a period
of very rapid, if not fulminating psychic expansion. It is the natal
hour of new curiosities, when adult life first begins to exert its
potent charm. It is an age of exploration, of great susceptibility,
plasticity, eagerness, pervaded by the instinct to try and plan in
many different directions."[A]
[Footnote A: Stanley Hall--Education Problems, pp. 544-545.]
Children of this adolescent time would respond more readily to school
instruction, related to the adult activities which held their
interest and connected in some way with their own conception of their
functioning in the adult world. Courses of study in processes of
industry and practice in the technique of those processes would have
actual bearing on the environment of which they were eager to be a
part.
But instruction in mechanical processes and practice in technique of
manufacture are the husks of industry when divorced from the planning,
the management, the examination of problems, the determination of the
value of goods in their use and in their place in the market, the
division of labor throughout an enterprise, the relation of all
persons involved to each other and to the product. The schools with
their industrial education courses do not undertake to supply their
young people with an opportunity to plan; they are true reflections of
factory existence as they eliminate all the adventure of industry, the
opportunity for experiment and discovery; they do not satisfy the high
impulse of young people to be of use, to be a part of the world of
work. The spirit of the schools is preparation for something to come;
the spirit of the children is in the present, and the present pressing
impulse of adolescence is to share adult responsibilities.
The impulse of youth to take its place in adult life is exploited by
industry and repressed or perverted by a system of education which
fits the children into a system of industry without giving them the
insight and power to effect adjustments. The actual job in a trade has
satisfying features which the school lacks. It pays wages. That fact
for eager children is estimated beyond its purchasing power. For
them it is an acknowledgment, a very real one, that they have been
admitted, are wanted in the big world where they are impelled by their
psychic needs, to enter. It places them more nearly on an equality
with the older members of their family and entitles them to
consideration which was not given them as dependent children. They
learn shortly of how little account they are to the boss employer but
they are establishing all the time a new basis of contact and a new
place in their personal relations; they are establishing it because
they have economic value in the world outside of home as well as in
it.
The industrial schools and the old type of schools are both adult
schemes of getting children ready for adult life, not by experiencing
it, but by doing certain things well so that they can be entrusted to
do later on, what adults in their wisdom have decided that they are to
do. But they fail to prepare children for the future as they fail to
supply the children's present urgent needs. They use the period for
ulterior purposes; purposes ulterior to the period of growth with
which they are dealing. As they use this period for another time than
its own, in effect they exploit it. Without consciousness of the fact
so far as the children are concerned, the schools exploit this period
of growth as effectively as the employers reap the profits of child
labor. Employers as beneficiaries have more reason than the schools
for diverting youth from its own purposes, as they are under the
necessity of a price system which is competitive. The schools as
well as industry use up the placticity of youth; they kill off the
eagerness of children to explore and plan, and cast it aside for more
consequential ends.
The consequential ends in America, we have seen, have been less
clearly defined than in Germany. Within a year, the United States has
become conscious as a nation of place and power, conscious that it is
to play a part with the other states of the world. In playing this
part, will it retain its rôle of servant of the people, or will it
assume with its new world dignity the rôle, if not of master, then of
leadership? If still servant, will it serve more efficiently than it
has our dominant institution, industry? If the silent partnership
between business and the state is strengthened, will not the promoters
of industry be in a better position than before to appeal through the
state, through the patriotism intensified by our newly acquired world
position, for a more universal and a systematized adaptation of
workers in industry? The schools in their disinterested capacity,
disinterested, that is, in the profits of production, it would seem
could be used most effectively toward this end. German manufacture
made that clear to American manufacture before the war. It also must
be remembered that it was Prussian pride for imperial position that
inspired the complete and efficient surrender of the German schools to
the needs of the German manufacturers.
America is, of course, "different." All peoples are. But so is our
position in the world different from what it was. Our position is not
now, nor could it be, the German position. Our past is different,
and that will continuously have its effect on our future. But we are
facing a great period of change, and the strongest forces in the
country are the industrial, and the strongest leaders are the
financiers. What the financiers and industrial managers most want is
efficient, docile labor. The German system of education, in spite of
the fact that we are different, might conceivably have that effect on
the youth of this country. Under the pressure of industrial rivalry
after the war, under the pressure of an imperial industrial policy, it
may be that the people of the country will yield to the introduction
of a scheme of education which it has been proved elsewhere can fit
children better than any other known scheme into a system of mass
production.
It is clear that industry could set up models of behavior more
successfully in the name of education than in its own, and to the
extent American children come up to these models the more employable
they would be from the standpoint of business. If the pressure is
sufficiently strong the people may yield to the introduction of a
system of compulsory continuation schools similar to those of Germany.
If they do, I believe they will eventually fail. But there is danger
through loss of energy and loss of purpose in their introduction. Is
it impossible for us to hold to our native experimental habits of life
and attain standards of workmanship? Is it possible to realize the
full strength of associated effort and at the same time advance wealth
production?
Germany's industrial supremacy was due, as Professor Veblen shows,
to the fact that machine industry was imposed ready-made on a people
whose psychology was feudal. The schools of Germany, an essential part
of her industrial enterprise, were organized on the servility of the
people. We now know what building as Germany has built her educational
and industrial system on the weakness of a people means. We are in the
process of discovering whether in sacrificing the expansion of her
people she can secure a permanent expansion of her Empire. It would
seem the better part of statesmanship in America after the war to
build industrially on the strength of our people and not on the
weakness of another. It is the business of educators to point out the
danger and to discover whether efficiency may not be gained in the
country by giving children in their adolescent period the impulse for
production and high standards of work, not for the sake of the state,
but for themselves, for the sake of the community,--out of love of
work and for the value of its service.