being repeated by all those who oppose the new Rockefeller school. “The
old education is superior to any training which makes interest not
discipline, efficiency not knowledge, the standard.” Now this point at
issue between interest and discipline has been so thoroughly discussed
by John Dewey in his “Interest as Related to Will” and other writings,
that one is surprised at this late day to find responsible educators
who are willing to give the impression that they are unacquainted
with Dewey’s arguments. Even if disciples like Dr. Flexner and myself
in our enthusiasm unconsciously caricature him, the philosophy is
there in its classic form in Dewey for all to read. The curious notion
of the “old” educator that interest makes work “easy,” instead of
intensifying the effort, is only possible, of course, to minds soaked
in a Puritan tradition. Dewey shows that interest and discipline are
not antagonistic to efficiency and knowledge, but that knowledge is
merely information effectively used and manipulated, and discipline is
willed and focused interest. Each has an element of the other. It is
meaningless to talk of interest vs. discipline when all real interest
has an organizing effect on one’s activity, and any real discipline is
built up on a foundation of interest. Indeed in one of my articles to
which Miss Hamilton takes exception, I define discipline as “willed
skill,” which is as far from any conception of “making things easy,”
of “smattering and superficiality,” as could well be imagined. It is
a superstition, of course, as Miss Hamilton says, to suppose that all
children burn with a hard gem-like flame of curiosity to know, but it
is equally a superstition to suppose that with all children strenuous
drudgery flowers into the immense joy of work and creation, or that
effort taken consistently against the grain of interest can suddenly
be transmuted into spontaneous activity. A certain habit, a mechanical
routine spirit, may be evolved by drudgery, but not imaginative skill.
All true discipline comes from overcoming obstacles beyond which one is
conscious of a goal in itself worth while. It is only a feeble spirit
which can be drugged by effort in and for itself. In those admired
cases where facility comes after conscientious but uninteresting
effort, let the old-fashioned educator ask herself whether the child
gained the satisfaction of accomplishment _because_ he went through
the discipline, or whether it was not only _because_ he liked the
satisfaction of accomplishment that he was willing to go through the
drudgery. If you admit the latter, then you have admitted the case
for the new education. Temperaments, impulses, interests--or, if you
like, the lack of interests--will insist on dominating, on determining
the way each child takes his experience. All education can ever do is
to provide the experience, and stimulate, guide, organize interests.
Anything else may produce, at its best, a trained animal. It will not
be education, and it will not produce men and women.
The task of the democratic school is to provide just this general
experience and stimulation. Miss Hamilton’s paper shows that such a
school would be a challenge to the kind of institution she has in
mind when she speaks of education. When leisure-class functions and
leisure-class education clasp in a perfect circle, a new sociological
and industrial emphasis, such as the “Modern School” suggests, might
make the leisure-class pupils uneasy, restless, questioning. If you
began emphasizing interest instead of drudgery, you might find yourself
calling into question the sincerity of those “impersonal intellectual
interests.” If you emphasized efficiency instead of knowledge, you
might make uncomfortably evident the unreality of much of what passes
for culture in society to-day. You would be making insecure the moral
and intellectual justifications of caste. But that is exactly the
critical and undermining work which a democratic education is designed
to stimulate.
These new educators are seeking a type of school which shall provide
for children as human beings and not as members of any one social
class. They want a school which creates a common sympathy, a common
intimacy with the various activities and expressions of the modern
well-rounded personality, just so far as each individual is capable,
with his endowments and intelligence, of acquiring such an intimacy.
The “Modern School” would turn the child’s attention to the projects,
objects, processes, facts, of the active world about him, not because
they are good in themselves, but because they are the common stock of
all classes. The development of communal functions and services forces
every family more or less into touch with the active world out of which
the “Modern School’s” curriculum grows. It is in the study of these
“real things,” rather than in the logical systems of text-books, the
predigested ideals of literature or a leisured class, the technical
manipulation of dead languages and official science, that common
interest and the sense of common possession will arise. The expectation
is that interpretations and ideals which grow out of such a study will
be more vital and sound because they will have come out of the child’s
own experience, and not have been merely shoveled into his memory. It
is expected that the “strenuous effort” of the past, which was so much
an effort of memory and routine, will become, in a curriculum harnessed
to occupational life, an effort of interest and intelligent enthusiasm.
Out of such a spirit and such a school should issue the self-sustained
discipline by which all good work is done in the world.
XXI
A POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
Now that the passage of the Smith-Hughes bill is assured, interest
moves to the distribution of this federal subsidy for vocational
continuation and part-time schools. For the actual sums appropriated,
even the maximum which will be available in nine years, are too small
to be of constructive significance. Indeed there is something grotesque
about the solemn and arduous study which went into the passage of this
timid educational bill by a Congress which could appropriate a full
third of a billion for armaments. The Smith-Hughes bill has all the
aspect of a pious wish rather than the beginning of a thorough national
policy in education. There was nothing revolutionary in this principle
of federal aid. The principle was established by the Morrill act of
1862 and recently confirmed by the Smith-Lever bill for agricultural
education. The halting character of this new legislation must be
explained partly by the novelty of vocational training in America and
by the extremely confused condition of mind about it.
We scarcely know yet how to institute a vocational education that will
make out of our youth effective workers and at the same time free and
initiating citizens. The hopeless lack of coördination between industry
and our educational system blocks and bewilders our efforts. In working
towards a solution we meet two very real perils. When we attempt a
coördination we run the risk of turning the public school into a mere
preparatory school for factory, store and workshop, producing helpless
workers riveted by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary
industrial life. The better trained they are, or at least the more
intense their specialization, the greater will be their subjection.
Organized labor fears, and not unjustly, that a public vocational
education might be the means of over-crowding the labor market and
thereby “furnishing strike-breakers to industry.” This is always the
danger when we attempt to adjust our training too tightly to existing
industrial conditions. On the other hand, if we try to evade this
danger and make the young worker’s training more general, so that a
number of fields of industrial opportunity will be open to him, we may
leave him more helpless than ever, for he has no assurance of being fit
for the very concrete demands of skill that paying industry will make
upon him.
This is the dilemma. If the organization of vocational training is
left in charge of the representatives of the employers, educators
fear, and fear rightly, that the first result will ensue. If it is
left exclusively in the hands of educators, the employers fear the
other danger. Vocational education in this country has, therefore,
run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools,
“pre-vocational” courses in the regular schools, trade courses,
“coöperative” courses, until a certain skepticism has been aroused in
the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether
we can institute a workable system at all in our present public
school. Skepticism has meant hesitation. In spite of the propaganda
and survey work of an influential society of educators, employers
and labor men--the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial
Education--progress has been very slow. Only eight states have provided
for the encouragement of vocational education and in only one is
continuation schooling compulsory. The whole movement has needed some
very definite concentrated stimulus and some new, clear focusing of the
issues.
This is the real value of the new federal bill. If it is negligible
in its actual power for aid, its indirect effects should be of great
importance in the way of stimulus. It will undoubtedly suggest to the
majority of states the immediate establishment of a comprehensive
system of continuation schools. The grants will be just large enough
to make it seem possible. They are not nearly large enough to exempt
the states from local appropriations. According to the federal bill
these must duplicate the federal grants. The latter will therefore
mean actual additional resources, an increment to local and state
appropriations. If the states are wise, and appropriate this increment
to the payment and training of teachers, then these small sums may be
made to mean just the difference between the present hardly attained
mediocrity of vocational teaching and a new and effective type of
artisan-instructors.
The bill puts the distribution of the funds in the hands of such
state boards as the legislatures shall designate. The latter may
designate the regular state board of education, or a special board
of industrial education working under the direction of the regular
board, or it may create a new and independent board to handle
these funds. No state is likely to trifle with this now thoroughly
discredited “dual” system originally sponsored in Illinois under the
form of separate boards controlled wholly by employing interests. The
practical choice will lie between the purely “educational” control and
the mixed educational, industrial and labor control, such as exists
in Wisconsin. The objection to the former grows persistently on the
ground that the new vocational methods and work tend infallibly in
the hands of the professional educator to drift back to the academic.
Educators have too often shown a willingness either to divorce the
“pre-vocational” work entirely from the regular school, or else to
emasculate it of its realistic potency. Instead of seeing the new
practical emphasis infusing and reinvigorating the regular primary
and secondary school, the enthusiast for the “new” education has too
often had to watch merely the slow reduction of the vocational work
to the old unimaginative level of “manual training.” The question of
control, therefore, which the new bill puts indirectly to the states
is of the greatest moment, both to the traditional type of school and
to the new activities. The board that distributes the funds will in the
last analysis control the policy. Certainly the conservatism of the
professional educator is far less to be feared than the narrowness and
self-interest of employers’ associations. In following the provisions
of the federal bill that the aided schools shall be below college
grade, for children over fourteen, the state board will control the
standards of the individual schools. Whichever form of control is
adopted, the trend towards state centralization of the school system is
likely to be greatly strengthened.
In this development the states will be influenced largely by the
experience of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where the continuation
schools, part-time schools, apprentice classes, which the bill
encourages, have been longest in operation. The Wisconsin experience
will be found particularly instructive. The state subsidizes its
vocational schools by duplicating the funds raised by the community
under an obligatory half-mill tax. The local schools are under the
control of a special board of industrial education appointed by the
local board of education, and consisting of the superintendent
of schools with two labor representatives and two employers. The
distribution of the state funds is in the hands of the regular state
educational administration. There is an advisory industrial board of
similar composition to the local boards. At present the situation
is much confused owing to the reluctance of this state board of
industrial education to remain merely advisory. A “developer” has
been appointed as its secretary, an expert in the field, but without
administrative power over the schools. His attempts at acceleration
have produced their inevitable and intense resentment among the regular
school officials. Obviously such a system, with two boards contending
for mastery, creates an impossible situation. With the exception of
this--and the actual effect of this very largely personal and political
feud upon the local development seems to have been negligible--the
Wisconsin system seems to be based on sound principles. The local
industrial boards have worked with effectiveness and responsibility.
In Milwaukee a remarkable system of continuation schools has been
built up, which provides for no less than eight thousand children
between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, children whom the public
and parochial schools have sloughed off into “blind-alley” work, and
at whose education and guidance the city makes a last stab in the
four-hour-a-week continuation school. One definite principle these
Milwaukee schools seem to have established--that education must not
be “preparatory” to work, that there is no real place for the merely
“pre-vocational,” but that education should accompany work and do
that just as long as there is anything to learn. The ideal vocational
education will be a liberal “part-time” education, in which the school
furnishes the background and the constant opening of new suggestions
and possibilities, and the shop or trade or office provides the arena
for acting skilfully on what is learned.
The Wisconsin system is particularly suggestive. For the local boards
constitute one of our first American attempts at representation by
interest instead of political parties or arbitrary geographical
divisions. Their success is largely ascribed in Wisconsin to this
fact, that they do accurately represent just the three classes most
concerned in this form of education--organized labor, the employers,
and the professional schoolman. The labor representatives are on the
board to see that the policy does not swing over to narrow employing
interests, the employers are on the board to see that the school is
kept in touch with the practical demands of industry. The professional
educator holds the balance of power between these two interests. With
this administrative development to build on, with the improvement in
teaching caliber that the new federal grants should bring, with the
state centralization of the school system to which the new bill will
give impetus, the future is good for a national system of education for
work and with work, a free and democratic vocational training.
XXII
AN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
Nothing is more significant of the new spirit in public education
than our use of the term “vocational training.” It strikes out at a
blow the old antithesis between the cultural and the utilitarian. For
a genuine vocation implies neither a life devoted to thought, nor a
dull mechanical job to which personal and artistic and intellectual
interests are mere trimmings--recreations which can be easily omitted
by those who cannot afford to pay for them. A vocation is rather a
nucleus of any kind of interesting activity by which one earns one’s
living, and around which whatever else comes to one’s experience
clusters to enhance its value and interest. It is not fantastic to hope
that the very demands of modern industrial technique will make of most
trades just such nuclei. When we justify trade-schools and industrial
courses by the existence of law and medical and engineering schools, we
are implying that the skilled worker in modern industry can and should
lead a life as genuinely “professional” as the lawyer and doctor and
engineer.
New York City has at the present time (June, 1915) a unique opportunity
to meet these important issues. In no other city has the question been
so squarely presented. New York has to choose between what is called
the Ettinger plan, put into operation by a local superintendent to
solve “part-time” and vocational training problems, and the Gary plan,
as worked out by William Wirt and now on trial under his personal
direction in several of the New York schools. In that choice may be
indicated the tendencies and purposes of industrial education in this
country.
The Ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest way the difference
between “cultural” and “industrial” work. The child chooses between
them in his sixth or seventh year of school. If economic pressure is
going to force him into manual work, he is allowed to try a number of
different trades in the school industrial shops in order to discover
what he is best fitted for. This hasty experimentation has received the
schoolman’s label of “prevocational.” Having chosen his trade, the
young worker specializes in the shop, under conditions as nearly as
possible like the trade, continuing in trade-school or technical high
school, or in the industry under a coöperative scheme, as in the German
schools. His academic studies, as far as they are continued, are of a
severely practical character, theory and science being used merely to
explain the industrial processes which he is learning. The ideal is a
specialized school, gradually breaking off from the traditional one and
developing radically different methods and interests. The object of the
industrial course is to turn out a competent workman who has escaped
the blind occupations of those who leave school at the minimum age.
The school under this plan may give the child an elementary industrial
training, with an intellectual orientation better than he could get
under any system of apprenticeship, but it can scarcely be said to give
a vocational training. The Ettinger plan treats the child solely as
a potential workman who is to be absorbed as a permanent subordinate
in one specialized trade of a rigidly organized industrial system. It
makes of the school a mere downward extension of the staple trades and
machine industries, a sort of kindergarten where the employer gets
his workmen trained, free of cost to himself. It quite ignores any
other rôles the young worker may be called upon to play in society--as
citizen or as member of an economic class. It makes an undemocratic
class-division in the public school, and by divorcing the academic from
the industrial work gives to both the wrong setting.
The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational
life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of
trades but as a community, a network of occupations and interests, of
interweaving services, intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees
the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community
and pays for the things he enjoys. The school itself is organized as
a community, self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work,
study and play as is the larger community. The industrial work is
made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this
school community life. The Gary child begins in his third or fourth
school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him. If
he is to work at a trade after he leaves school, he gets a long and
thorough training under real workmen in the school shops engaged in
the repair and maintenance of the school-plant. He is at no time called
upon to choose between the “academic” and the “industrial.” His work
is a focusing of all the interests of the school, and the attitudes
developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life
and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood.
Science, apart from the light it throws upon the artisan’s trade,
is bound to mean something to him, for in the Gary school it has
answered his questions about the physical world around him. History
and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something
because they have answered questions about the social institutions
and the relations of men. Art and music will continue to interest him
because they have been an integral part of the school life. The Gary
plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical
citizen, ready, like the energetic professional man, to affect the
standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life.
The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically
unsound. It requires special teachers, and expensive shops which are
unproductive. Without state or federal subsidies, the cost of any
extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or
elementary school will continue to be prohibitive. The Gary plan, which
connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance
of the school-plant, demands and can afford a much greater variety
of shops than the ordinary school. And since the workmen-teachers
earn their salaries by their work, the children get their industrial
training practically without cost to the community. By the Gary plan
the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other
liberally varied “cultural” features are put into operation at the same
time. This effectually prevents that “exploitation” of the children
which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training
as “apprentices” in the school shops.
Many who admit the superior social aims of the Gary plan are inclined
to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be
radically different. But the Gary plan and the Ettinger plan are not
merely two different ways of reaching the same end. They not only
involve different conceptions of the school and of industrial society,
but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people.
The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes
now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education. These
plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor
with genuine industrial interests, but only with the interest of the
employer. No person who feels that the public schools should train
critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial
system into which they go, and not mere docile workers, counting
socially no more than their tools, will fail to realize the vast
importance that the Gary plan should prevail over all these schemes.
XXIII
ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION
At a recent labor conference in New York City, May, 1916, called to
present a program for the local public schools, Mr. Gompers expressed
himself as open-minded towards the Gary plan which is about to be
extended to thirty-five more New York schools. This open-mindedness
of Mr. Gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude
taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city, who have apparently
tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine
and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of
the elementary schools. But organized labor has better business than
opposing educational reform, and Mr. Gompers’s remarks, made with full
responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan
spirit of the conference, suggest that the responsible leaders of
labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important
movement.
Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public
school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and
intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the
hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational
teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come
out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow
machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds
of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the
institutions and movements of the world about them. Labor above all
classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which
acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial
processes and occupations. The education that labor desires is one
which will give, particularly to those who engage in industrial
callings, the desire and ability to share in social control, and to
become masters of their industrial fate.