A few years ago so great an emphasis on manual training and industrial
arts was evident in our school work that some feared a decline in the
cultural ideal in the educational process. The trend was bringing its
benefits, to be sure, but there seemed ground for fear that the end
might be a generation educated in hand and seriously lacking in educated
mind and personality.
It has not worked out as many expected it would. The result has rather
been the contrary one. We face today an unexpected situation at the close
of a war that has tried the powers and resources of the earth. We have an
abundance of people who are willing to work at seemingly dignified and
necessarily high-salaried tasks. We have a shortage of men willing to do
the manual labor necessary to make the world go round.
The difficulty does not lie in any lack of training for manual tasks. We
have never had so many people with hands trained to construct buildings
and machinery, to set type, and to till soil to the best advantage. The
schools have been training people for this kind of work long enough so
that several graduating classes have been emptied out into the arena of
the world’s life. The number is constantly increasing. Yet the shortage
seems to grow.
The trouble seems to root in a certain mistaken attitude toward labor.
Our people do not find it easy to get over the notion that gentlemen do
not labor with their hands. The idea persists, in spite of all the wealth
of our philosophy to the contrary, that a certain aristocracy inheres in
idleness. People are ashamed to be seen in their working clothes, and if
anyone comes upon them when they are engaged in some manual task, they are
prone to make excuses. They seem to feel that they have been overtaken in
a fault.
Parents, trained in the ways mentioned, are partially responsible. Many of
them go on in the path of error, despite the fact that they realize their
mistaken attitude. Their solicitude for their children impels them, and it
often impels them to courses that are not best for the
children themselves.
Just the other day I heard a mother say that she realized the need of the
world for workers, and that she realized the benefits of work to the
individual. Yet she could not bring herself to feel willing that her two
sons should spend their lives working with their hands.
“I cannot help wanting them to prepare for some line of work that will be
easy and dignified,” she said.
So the story has been through the years. So long as this is the motive
from which parents send their sons and daughters to school we can hardly
expect any great change in the situation.
A certain notion persists that education and work are incompatible. The
assumption is that something is wrong when an educated man is seen
employed at something involving physical exertion.
The other day a friend told me that he had just learned a strange thing.
In a certain nearby city, he said, a graduate of the state university and
of a well-known law school was working as a motorman on a street car.
Perhaps something had gone wrong in the case of this man. The wages now
paid to street car motormen compare so poorly with the money made by a
successful lawyer that one is naturally led to this suspicion. At the
same time, however, there is no reason why educated men should despise
such work as that of a motorman. Neither is there any reason why the
position of a motorman should not be made attractive to men of the
highest grade.
The day is coming when low grade men will not be desired for any kind of
work on earth. If there is real truth in the old saying that whatever is
worth doing at all is worth doing well, we shall gradually learn that we
must set men at all our work who are capable of doing it well. It is a
great question whether cheap labor is really cheap after all. The chances
are that the most capable labor obtainable in any line is the
highest economy.
In a recent short story, one colored man is made to remark to another
that work is not to be expected from a gentleman of brains like himself.
“Brains,” he went on to say, “is to keep you from wukkin’.”
This has too long been the general notion about intellectual ability.
Training, both real and fancied, has too often been made the excuse for
parasitism. The purpose of education is not to qualify one for getting
through life on a minimum of toil. It is rather calculated to enable one
to perform a maximum of work with a minimum of friction and waste.
In other words, education at its best is not a means to idleness but
to efficiency.
The most representative products of our best schools are sufficient proofs
of the productive element in the highest educational ideal. They are not
idlers, but workers. Their work does not consist of mere fuss and parade.
It brings forth the fruit of achievement. The idler is either a product of
no school at all, a product of a school with a mistaken educational ideal,
or a mutation from the really cultured type.
In this regard, our notion of education is essentially different from the
European one. In the Old World, the prevailing idea of an educational
institution was that its work was the preparation of young people to be
polished aristocrats. The desired product was the graceful and courtly
gentleman or lady. That conception may have been somewhat changed by the
war, but such was what it was before the world was so largely made over
in that great crucible of death.
Our idea of the aim of education is much the same here, except that our
schools and teachers try to foster a somewhat different idea of what it
takes to make an aristocrat. They do not proceed upon the theory that an
idler is an aristocrat. The accepted canon in educational circles is that
a man is not trained at all unless trained to be good for something, and
that he must prove his culture by bringing forth fruits meet for it.
In their efforts to establish the productive ideal in the thinking of the
public as well as in the work of the school itself, our educational system
has many handicaps to overcome. One of them is the fact that idleness has
been so long and so well glorified in fiction and on the moving picture
screen. Too many characters that walk before the eyes of our people,
especially the boys and girls, are rich without working for their wealth.
They live in palatial houses. They wear the finest of clothing. They
indulge in the most expensive pleasures. Yet they toil not, neither do
they spin.
This sort of thing has soaked into the public mind pretty deeply. It has
exerted its effect upon the life of this generation. The number who would
like to live without much exertion are a more or less direct result of it.
It is one of the things that must be overcome. Some day it will begin to
right itself, for the public will realize the mistaken assumption
underlying it. Then a reaction will set in, but we dare not wait for the
reaction. We must be trying to stem the current for the sake of those who
need to be shown the light now. Just now we are probably at the crest of
the billow.
It is to the credit of the public school system that it has always
glorified work. We have never needed work and workers so much as we do
now. Our armies have torn the world to pieces. We must now have workers
to rebuild it into a finer and grander thing than it was before.
Therefore, the person who expects to take up room on it and live from it
must produce. The life of society is co-operative. Each must do his share.
The test of learning is service.