INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION
We have as yet no deep philosophy of industry. For better or for worse
work came into the world as a result of desire. Men did not desire
work, but they desired that which could be obtained only by work.
These desires multiplied and the modern industrial world is the
result. When material objects alone were desired, the motive of work
was relatively simple; but as we pass from the desire for goods to the
desire for wealth, and to the desire for wealth as a means of gaining
power and prestige, the industrial movement becomes more complex. We
go on and on, producing ever greater wealth and generating more and
more power, and we do this we say with no deep purpose and with no
philosophy of life. For the justification of it all, if it be under
our control at all, we can only say that through industry we realize
an abundant and enriched life.
The good and evil of work put upon us some of the most perplexing of
our problems. Industry, we say, is the way to the rich and the
abundant life. It makes life more complex. The relations of life are
multiplied by it. It represents and it achieves man's conquest over
nature. It puts force into his hands. It has its ideal side and its
romance. It gives scope to pure motives of creativeness. But the
industrial life has also its dark side. It has created the city with
all its good and its evil. It has created great nations, but see what
the added populations consist of. It brings on the old age of nations.
It stands for struggle that is often fruitless and unproductive. It
engenders moods and arouses interests and powers that lead to wars
and revolutions. It fosters sordid interests, and has made almost
universal the necessity of an excess of toil in order barely to live.
The great majority of workers do not live in their work, because they
produce nothing that is in itself satisfying. The spirit remains
outside their daily life. Life is divided into a period of toil
without deep interest and motive, and play which may be only a
narcotic to kill the sense of monotony and fatigue. Individuals have
specialized at the expense of a whole life. Men have been exploited
and used like material things. Bergson says that by industry man has
increased his physical capacities, but now it is likely that his soul
will become mechanized rather than that his soul will become great
like his new body. Industry, worst of all, has become an end in
itself, rather than a means to higher ends. To live, on the one hand,
to gain wealth on the other, men give all there is in them to toil.
We saw all this before the war, but one important result of the war
has been that we now see that this industrial life which has so
rapidly created new institutions, and which grips the world almost
like a physical law, is not in all its ways so fixed and inevitable as
we had perhaps thought. In regard to the industrial life, more than in
any other department of life, we see new and radical thought, and the
possibility of conscious effects, although it must be admitted that
some of the proposed changes may well cause apprehension.
We had hoped, even before the war, to see industry and art become
gradually more closely related, and to see industry become more
socialized. Its physical hardships were to some extent already being
ameliorated. We hoped to separate the great industrial interests from
politics, and to curb the powers industry has that make it a trouble
producer in the world. But now, after the war, we see possibilities of
more fundamental changes in the industrial order than these
improvements implied. Our thoughts now touch upon the whole theory of
the industrial life. We see that by a coördinated effort and common
understanding which it is no longer chimerical to hope for, the
conditions of the industrial life might be very different. In the
first place we are convinced that the world could produce vastly more
and could use its products with far greater economy than now. We see
that much greater return for less labor could be gained. Even the
desires themselves upon which many of the evils of industrialism are
based have shown themselves to be controllable. It is no longer idle
to believe that the restraint and coöperation necessary to eliminate
most of the poverty from the world are possible to be attained. The
isolation of the individual worker, which has made his struggle so
hard, seems about to be relieved to some extent at least. We even hope
for permanently better relations between the capitalist and the
laborer, and to see some of the evils of competition, even the
industrial competition among nations, lessened.
Although the interest here is in the relations of industry to
education, rather than in the practical changes pending in the
industrial world, we must think of the two as related. Changes that
take place in political and industrial conditions will be likely to be
temporary and ineffectual unless they are supported by changes in the
field of education. The reformer and the educator must work together.
Noyes says that the most fundamental change that has occurred during
the war has been the world-wide assertion of public control of
industry by the government. Perkins says that centralization is the
order of the day, and that the government now properly takes on many
functions that once belonged to the states, and that this process of
centralization naturally extends to international relations. Smith
speaks of the growing interdependence of government and industry which
will especially give security to investment in productive enterprises.
Hesse says that there must be national team work in all industries,
and that in a democracy everything that autocracy can accomplish must
be repeated, but upon a basis of voluntary coöperation. In France it
has been proposed by Alfassa that there shall be established a
department of national economy, to bring about a closer coöperation
than there has been in the past among private interests, and to
centralize industry. Wehle thinks that in America, even before the
war, industrial concentration was leading to political concentration
and that the states were losing their relative political importance.
The grappling of states individually with large industrial problems is
now, he says, at an end. Dillon has expressed the view that England
ought to adopt industrial compulsion. Clementel, the French minister
of commerce, thinks France ought to substitute for liberty without
restraint in the industrial field, liberty organized and restricted.
There can be no doubt that the world is thoroughly awake to the need
of more effectual coöperation in industry, and it is natural that the
first thoughts should turn to government control as the simplest and
readiest method of securing it. When we examine these suggestions
about the coördination and centralization of industries it becomes
evident that most writers have been strongly influenced by Germany's
remarkable success, both in peace and war, under the system of
governmental control of industries. The manner in which the German
government turned all the country into one great industrial plant has
appealed to the imagination, and many writers see in centralization
under the control of government the means of curing most of the evils
of industrialism. There are many proposals, all the way from the plan
to introduce cabinet ministers with limited power to have oversight
over industry to the total abolishment of the capitalistic system and
all the rights of property. Many of course, while still believing in
concentration and coöperation, cling to the system of private and
individual ownership, and believe that the best results will be
obtained in the end without any radical change in the relations
between government and industry, and without resorting to any
socialistic reform.
Another phase of the problem of industry in which we may expect to see
great changes in the future concerns the status of labor and its
relation to capital. The rising of the laboring class is certainly the
greatest internal result of the war. Here again the question is
whether the changes will take place by coöperation or by
compulsion--either on the part of government or of some organized
class. Will labor and capital continue to be antagonistic, or will
they find common interest; or will the only solution be again some
radical change involving change of government or abrogation entirely
of our present system of ownership? That the position of labor has
become stronger as a result of the war no one can doubt. Perkins says
we are just entering upon a period of copartnership, when the
tool-user will be part tool-owner, and capital and labor will share
more equally in the profits. Increase in wages will not be the remedy,
but only profit sharing. Others think the same; they see that the
laborer's discontent is not all a protest against his hard physical
conditions. He wants more social equality, more equality of status in
the industrial world. He objects not so much to what the capitalist
has as to what he is.
There has no more illuminating document come out of the war than the
report on reconstruction made by a subcommittee of the British Labor
Party. This report calls for a universal minimum wage; complete state
insurance of the workers against unemployment; democratic control of
industries; thorough participation by the workers in such control on
the basis of common ownership of the means of production; equitable
sharing of the proceeds by all who engage in production; state
ownership of the nation's land; immediate nationalization of
railroads, mines, electric power, canals, harbors, roads and
telegraph; continued governmental control of shipping, woolen,
leather, clothing, boots and shoes, milling, baking, butchering, and
other industries; a system of taxation on incomes to pay off the
national debt, without affecting the living of those who labor.
Although such a document as this could hardly up to the present time
have been produced by American workmen, since here political doctrines
of socialism have never obtained a strong hold upon the laboring
classes, in England these radical demands are nothing surprising. They
have the support at many points of so keen a thinker as Russell.
Russell does not, it is true, believe that Marxian socialism is the
solution of the problem of capital and labor, but he does believe in
the state ownership of all land, that the state therefore should be
the primary recipient of all rents, that a trade or industry must be
recognized as a unity for the purposes of government, with some kind
of home rule such as syndicalism aims at securing. Industrial
democracy, as planned in the coöperative movement, or some form of
syndicalism, appears to him to be the most promising line of advance.
That such demands and proposals as these are significant signs of the
times can hardly be doubted. That from now the status of the workman
will be changed and changed in directions more satisfactory to the
workman we may accept as one of the chief results of the war.
Politically the laborer is prepared to assert his independence. Both
his social and his industrial status are likely to be improved. He
will be better safeguarded against unemployment. Wages in the old form
and the old tradition that the worker has no contract with his
employer will, in all probability, be less generally acceptable. Work,
if these new conditions are realized, will mean more to the worker.
His own interests and the purposes of his work will be more
harmoniously related. The individual made more secure in his work,
protected more by law and participating more in the affairs of
business and government, will have a sense of playing a more dignified
part in the social economy. Conceal as we may the inferiority of the
laborer's position under the pretenses of democracy and liberty and
equality, this inferiority of position exists and the inequality that
prevails in democratic society is certainly one of the fertile sources
of evil in the world to-day. We have still to see to what extent the
workman, his lot ameliorated in many ways, and his position changed,
will himself become a new and different man, and thus make the world
itself a different place in which to live. All that is thus suggested
we have a right at least to hope for now. If it is also worked for
with intelligence and good will, why should it not come to pass?
The third idea which is beginning to make great changes in the whole
field of the industrial life and throughout all the practical life is
the _idea of economy_. This means that in many ways questions of the
values, the purposes, and the ways and means of what is done in the
world are being sharply examined. Labor has been uncritical of its
purposes, and lavish and wasteful of its energies, however watchful it
may have been of its rights. Production has been governed too much by
desire, too little by careful consideration of need. Distribution has
been carelessly conducted, allowing large losses of time and material.
Consumption has been quite as careless as the rest, and has been
thoroughly selfish as well. The war has changed many of our ideas.
Thrift has become a word with a new meaning. We see what industry at
its worst might do in the world, and on the other hand what wise
control of all the motives and processes that enter into labor and all
the economic life might accomplish.
Some of these changes are coming from readjustment in the coördination
of industrial processes themselves. We hear much of standardization
and stabilization. An economic technique and the control of
fluctuating conditions might do much to increase the efficiency of
industry in every way. This idea of the application of scientific
procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of
the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the
spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of
unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most
advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of
mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual
details of movement and the whole process of expenditure of energy,
counting costs in terms of time and energy, in much the same way as
all the items of value that enter into production are estimated. Some
writers, for example Gilbreth, see in this movement a great advance.
It is a way of giving equal opportunity to all. Economy becomes a
factor in freedom, since it helps to eliminate the drudgery and
depression of toil.
Plainly, then, economy or thrift has a much wider meaning than mere
saving. It is many-sided, and the study of economy in the use of
essentials is but a part of it. The war has, of course, emphasized
this, and this idea of saving has served the purpose of awakening an
interest in the whole theory and purpose of work. There is a better
understanding of values, and of the difference between the essential
and the unessential, and we see that not all labor that commands pay
is useful labor. Many things that the public knew but little about
before are becoming better understood. Industry, finance, business,
taxes, transportation, have all to some extent become popular
subjects. The present high cost of living raises questions in the
theory of the economic aspect of life that have compelled the
attention of the public. The theory of money, interest, savings,
foreign investments, the place of gold in the world's economy is
carried a step further and is popularly more extended. We hear all
sorts of proposals about the production, the distribution and the
consumption of goods, which are intended to make living easier and
less expensive. Increased production of staples and more direct route
from producer to consumer are urged upon all, and the economists have
many suggestions for increasing our prosperity: while financiers try
to direct to the best purpose our investments at home and abroad.
Fisher attacks the whole theory of costs at what he believes its root,
suggesting a plan of "stabilizing the dollar itself" by using the
index numbers of standard articles as units of value, and regulating
the weight of gold in the dollar according to the fluctuations of
these. All these plans, hasty and narrowly conceived as many of them
seem to be, are of interest and have value, for they indicate a
serious determination to solve the fundamental problems of the
practical life.
Any educational theory that could hope to deal adequately with the
needs and the impending changes in the industrial situation of to-day
must take into consideration the basic facts both of the individual
and the social life. Teaching of industry and all attempts to teach
vocation must be seen by all now to be but a small part of education
with reference to the industrial life. We must do much more
fundamental things than these. We must plan far ahead and seek to lay
a firm foundation for the idea of coöperation which appears to be the
leading thought of industrialism to-day. Every individual, we should
say, ought to be educated in the fundamentals of labor, so that he may
understand for himself what labor means. Finally the idea of thrift in
all its implications must be made a part of the educational program.
All this may seem too ideal and impracticable to think of in
connection with industrial education, but if we consider industry and
industrialism as the center of our whole civilization, as it appears
to be now, what less ideal educational foundation will be sufficient
as preparation for and control of the industrial life? No teaching of
trades, we assert, will be enough. We shall need to apply, in
industrial education or in an educational plan that takes industry
into account, all the methods of teaching: those that employ industry
itself, but also art, erudition, and play.
It is first with industrialism as a world condition that education is
concerned. Industrialism has been, as all must recognize, too
individualistic. It has motives and moods and products, and it grows
in social conditions, that are full of danger for society.
Industrialism lacks a soul, as Bergson would say. Yet it is a movement
that sweeps on with almost irresistible force. Its most characteristic
product is not what it turns out in shops, but city life itself. Many
would agree with Russell in saying that all the great cities are
centers of deterioration in the life of their nations. Education,
then, must undertake to control industrialism. This does not mean,
necessarily, that it must try to check it, but that the motives in
individual and social life that produce industrialism must in some way
be under the control of educational forces.
First of all it seems certain that no political arrangement, and no
change taking place entirely within the industrial system itself, and
no simple and direct educational procedure will give us control over
the forces of industrialism. It is mainly by preventing the city
spirit or mood from developing too fast and thus engulfing the
children of the nation that we can introduce a conscious factor strong
enough to hold industrial development within bounds. This means, we
must earnestly demand, turning back the flow of life from country to
city by educating all children in the environment of the country. This
would have a double effect upon the industrialism of the day. _It
would break up the present inevitable inheritance by the city child of
all the ideals and moods of the city, and it would give opportunity
for training in the activities that are basic to all industry, which
alone, in our view, can give to industry a solid and normal
foundation._ By such effects, in such a general way, upon the children
of an industrial nation, we might reasonably hope to prevent the evil
effects upon our national life from the fatigue, the routine, and the
deadening of the spirit which even under improved conditions cannot be
overcome in an industrial life that is left to its monotonous grind
and its morbid excitements and exaggerations.
Another work that education must in the end do for the industrial life
is to infuse into it an ideal and a purpose. Industry is too
individualistic, we say. It works for a living, for power, from
necessity. It lacks through and through as yet the spirit of free and
intelligent coöperation for common and remote ends. Coöperation in the
industrial world, we have seen reason to believe, is likely to be the
great word of the future. It is precisely the work of education to
make the future of industry an expression of free activity, to make it
democratic, and to such an extent, we might hope, that socialism,
whether as a governmental interference or as a class system, would not
be necessary--or possible. In trying to give industrialism an ideal,
we must presumably go back to elemental mental processes. We must, in
the beginning, present the world's work dramatically to the child. We
must give work interest, and it is certainly one of the chief purposes
of that nondescript subject we call geography thus to give the child a
deep appreciation of the world as a world of men and women engaged in
work. We must show industry as a world-wide purpose, not as something
essentially individual and competitive. We must show it as an
adventure on the part of man in which he goes forth to seek conquest
over the physical world; we must think of it as a means to an end, of
fulfilling purposes not all of which perhaps can as yet be foreseen,
but which certainly can be no mere satisfaction of the individual's
desires of the day. This is what we mean by putting a soul into
industry. Soul means purpose--purpose which includes more than the
desires of the individual, and in which the interests of the world as
a whole are involved. Industry that has thus a purpose, and that is
imbued with a spirit of freedom takes its place among the psychic
forces and becomes a part of the mechanism of mental evolution. It is
this idealism of industry, toward the production of which we must turn
every educational resource, that must offset its materialism. This is,
in part, the work of the æsthetic experiences, the dramatic
presentation of the day's work to the child; but art can of course
work only upon the soil of experience; the child must see the world
teeming with human activity, but he must observe it in a detached way,
rather than as a participant in its realism and its dull and its
unwholesome moods. Then we shall have a content upon which the
æsthetic motives can work. In this idealized industrial experience, we
try to make visible the real motives which in the future must dominate
the world's work.
All this may seem too general and too ideal, but if we do not begin
with broad plans, and if we do not take a far look ahead, we shall
fail now at a vital point of the social development of man. The result
at which we aim is _the socialisation of the motives of industry_. We
make work voluntary by bringing into it persuasively and insidiously
deep motives and interests which represent social purposes and ideals.
Given these motives and the beginning of a change from the relatively
more individualistic to the relatively more social spirit in industry,
the actual means of coöperation would not be far to seek. Work would
become by its own inner development under such conditions, something
different from an unwilling service of the individual, a compulsory
service to family or state. Everything we can do to give to children
and to all workers an intelligent appreciation of the social meaning
and purpose of work is both industrial training and an education in
basic social relations. This socialization of the moods of work and
the founding of them upon the necessary experiences, is as important
as anything education is at the present time called upon to do. Given
this foundation, precisely the form industrial education, in the
ordinary sense, shall take, seems to be of secondary importance.
Turning now to another phase of the industrial problem on its
educational side, one cannot escape the conviction that the rising
tide of the powers of labor presents urgent problems to the educator.
The common man, as we call him, is to take a greater part in the
affairs of business and state, and the education of the common man
with reference to the especial capacity, as worker, in which he seeks
this new position, becomes highly important. This education of the
people with specific reference to work is of course something more
than teaching vocation. Education, indeed, with any explicit attention
to labor itself, whether in its industrial or its political
implications, is but a part of the educational problem. All education
for the democratic life is involved in it. The whole problem of
specialization comes up, and indeed all questions of social education
in one form or another.
Specialization, in particular, can no longer be treated with the
indifference that has so far characterized our industrial education.
The ideal of fitting the boy for work is as naïve in one way as that
of our generalized education is in another. _If the war has taught us
anything beyond a doubt, it is that specialization must never be such
a differentiation as shall infringe upon the common ground of human
nature._ We must take this into consideration in all our vocational
training. We must preserve an identity in all the fundamental
experiences. In a democracy this appears to be wholly necessary, and
to outweigh all considerations of efficiency. The individual must be
kept whole and generic, so that each individual is an epitome, so to
speak, of the virtues and the ideals of the nation. The humanity of
the man must be first, and his special function secondary. This does
not imply that we must not give to all children individual and
vocational training. All must be directed towards life work. We may
even carry vocational training further than it has been extended
anywhere as yet, but we must see that industry occupies the right
place in the school, and in all educational processes. It is neither
the whole method and purpose of the school, nor something simply added
to the curriculum. It is a phase of the life of the school, both in
its active and its receptive states. The child must live in an
atmosphere in which both present and future usefulness are assumed and
provided for. The idea of a life of work must be made early an
accepted plan of the child, and it must be one of the entirely general
tasks of the school to see that the tendency of the child in the
school is toward occupation. Occupation must in fact be made to grow
naturally out of the life the child leads in the school.
All those disharmonies in our industrial countries such as the
prevalent discord between working and capitalistic classes seem, we
have said, to be social rather than economic in nature. Social
education, then, is the main cure for them, if we wish to attack them
at their root. The motives of pride and the sense of inferiority have
to be dealt with in a practical manner. We sometimes quite overlook
the importance of habitual moods or states of feeling in society and
in the school. These moods are powers which motivate conduct. Any form
of education in which the poorer and less favored are given an
opportunity to acquire the experiences, and through these the moods,
that especially distinguish the more favored class, strikes at the
general disparity in society which takes form in such antagonisms as
that between capital and labor. It is not difference in degree but
difference in kind of experience that appears to separate the classes
from one another. The difference seems to lie in those parts of life
which are sometimes believed to be the unessentials and which indeed
our whole educational policy assumes apparently to be trivial. _The
fundamental differences between the poor and the rich, the favored and
the common people, is in the sphere of the æsthetic._ Distinction of
manner and an environment rich in æsthetic qualities are the main
advantages of the few, as compared with the many. Social experience is
what is most needed by the many, but of course this experience can
never be gained by making the educational institutions merely
democratic, and especially social experience cannot be gained in a
school in which all situations are studiously avoided in which really
significant social relations are likely to be experienced. We gain no
social experience in the naïve and the highly special activities of
the school which for the most part is arranged in such a way as to
exclude organized social relations. This is a process in which such
leveling as there is tends to be downward, whereas what we need is for
all the truly aristocratic elements in our national life to have an
opportunity to propagate themselves and to extend to the many. Leaving
aside the need of a differently organized social life in the school,
we might say that there is hardly a greater need in democratic
countries now than that of recruiting the rank and file of teachers
from a socially superior class. These socially favored individuals
have given themselves loyally to the service of country in a time of
war, for two if no more of their deepest motives have been appealed
to--the dramatic interest and the spirit of _noblesse oblige_. There
are duties in times of peace which are quite as important, but which
as yet appeal to no strong motive, and have not even been presented in
the form of obligation. Once these common tasks were made to appear a
part of the fulfillment of duty to country, the way to finding deep
satisfaction in them might be opened. Social and dramatic elements
would be introduced as a matter of course.
Another need throughout our whole effort to educate all in and for a
life of work, one which has appealed to many writers in recent years,
is the need of making all the experience of work more creative or more
free and animated or joyous in mood. _This means, again, that in all
industrial education the mood must be social and the form æsthetic or
dramatic._ Social values must be felt through social activity, and the
sense of worth in labor and of value of the product which is felt in
the social mood must be enhanced by the dramatic form of the activity
and the artistic quality of the product. This is also the condition
for creative activity. Some writers apparently now see in this need of
making the activity of all those who work more creative, more free and
more joyous the crucial problem of education and of social adjustment.
This is Russell's constant theme. Helen Marot in "Creative Industry"
says that our problem is to develop an industrial system that shall
stimulate and satisfy the native impulse for creative production. It
is difficult to see how, by any other educational process than one
which is essentially æsthetic and social, we can make much headway
toward changing the conception of work from the now prevalent one of a
means of making a living, more or less under compulsion, to that of a
voluntary social act done both for its utility from the standpoint of
the individual and also because of its social value, and performed to
some extent, however humble the work, in the spirit of the creative
artist.
For the adult generation that now works (and for how many generations
to come we do not know), we cannot hope to make ideal conditions. Work
will still be work, with its evil implications, as toil without
complete inner satisfaction, and without sufficiently free motives.
But the direction in which practical changes should be made seems
clear. There must still be a lessening of the hours of routine labor,
until there are perhaps no longer more than six or five devoted to
vocation. The remainder of life is not for idleness but must be in
part productive or the lessened hours of routine will not be possible.
There must be possibility of both practical and recreational
activities outside the regular day's work, as well as for educational
work, all of these in part at least publicly provided for. This
activity may serve many purposes and accomplish a variety of results.
As educational it ought to open up new opportunities; it must fulfill
the desire for creative activity; it must be a socializing power; it
must lead to an appreciation of the nature and value of skill and
efficiency; it must introduce all to the higher world of art and the
intellectual life. Above all it must impress deeply the truth that
growth in the normal life is never ended.
The third phase of industrial education which is to be emphasized now
is the teaching of what we have called _thrift_. This idea of thrift,
for pedagogical purposes, is equivalent to the broad principle that
purposes in this world are achieved by the expenditure of force--by
the control of energies which are not unlimited in amount as now
controlled and which are subject to definite laws. Since objects which
are to be secured by the expenditure of energy differ in value it is a
part of this education in thrift, indeed an important and necessary
part, to give to all such knowledge and powers of appreciation as will
enable them to recognize that which is essential, and to give the
essential and the unessential their proper places in the whole economy
of life.
It will never be right of course to inspire a parsimonious spirit in
regard either to goods or to energies. Life itself and all its
energies must be given freely; material goods must not be evaluated
too minutely. The miserly life is not what we wish to teach. Still
there is a wise attitude toward all material things and toward all
values which recognizes goods as means to ends, which places true
values high and demands economy in the use of all things that must be
conserved in order to attain them.
It must be a part of the work of physiology, which thus branches out
into psychology, to teach to all the efficient use of human energies.
These energies are the precious things in the world; they must be
valued and respected as the source of all efficiency. The idea of
economy of movement, from this standpoint, has an important place in
all motor or industrial or manual training. Processes must be
regarded as definite series of acts in which we may approach
perfection. Technique in motor operations is not to be regarded
lightly as a mere finish applied to useful acts. It is the expression
of an ideal of efficiency and economy. Children recognize the value of
technique in games; its wider and more practical application needs to
be impressed.
In the same way knowledge of the precise values and uses of material
things ought to be imparted. The war has had the effect of showing all
of us the values of materials and the relations of materials to one
another. It has given us a sense of the great powers of natural
wealth, and also of its limitations and the weak points that exist now
in our economy. The war has proved to us how closely related the
things we use lavishly and wastefully may be to the most ideal
possessions. It has shown that the production, the distribution and
the use of wealth of all kinds are parts of the accomplishment of the
main purposes of life and that all these things belong to the sphere
of _duty_; and that no individual can escape obligations in regard to
economy.
Education, therefore, must lay foundations both for an understanding
of economy and for the practice of it. First of all, every individual,
we may assume, ought to have some experience in the production of the
elementary forms of material goods, and in the conversion of them into
higher values and in their conservation. We looked carefully to some
of these activities as a war measure. It is hardly less necessary in
times of peace. We should teach these things, not simply because the
practice of them is educational, but because the practice of them is
useful, and is a necessary service, on the part of every individual,
to the world. Adding to the world's store of goods and consciousness
of the need of doing this directly or indirectly should be regarded as
a fundamental duty and habit. To establish both the habit and the
sense of duty, we may suppose, a stage is necessary in which the
individual's contribution shall be direct and tangible. Hence the
value of those educational activities that deal with foods and their
conservation.
On a little higher plane, and in a little different way we can apply
the same thoughts to the whole cycle of material things. The
distribution of wealth is of course in part a technical and a
theoretical problem. It is also a practical and a general one. All at
least ought to be judges of the waste that now goes on in the
industrial life because the "middleman" has occupied such a place of
vantage in the economic order. In teaching occupation and in all
preparation for vocation ought we not to take this into consideration?
Occupations that are purely distributive and which involve a great
waste of human energies and of materials have been unduly emphasized,
at least by default of more positive preparation, by the school.
Because they are easy and untechnical and have a little elegance about
them, in some cases, they fit in very well with the generality and
bookishness and detachment from real life that the school sometimes
represents.
The occupations that are more creative, both in the field of material
things and of ideas, have, relatively speaking, been neglected.
Inventiveness especially seems to be a quality that we have supposed
to be a gift of the gods, and we have given but little attention to
producing it, or even giving it an opportunity to display itself. Have
we not gained from the war new impressions both about the powers of
the human mind in producing new thoughts and in controlling both
material and psychic forces, and also about the necessity for
developing originality and independence? Is it too much to expect now
that greater ingenuity be displayed in education itself to the end of
producing more originality? This is a hackneyed request to make of the
school, but it seems certain that we do not succeed in obtaining
through our educational processes the highest possible degree of
productiveness of mind, as regards either quantity or quality. It is
because indeed we seem to be very far from our limit in these
respects, and because better results might perhaps so easily be gained
that it seems necessary to make this plea so often. More activity,
more art, greater enrichment of the mind, ought to have the desired
result, especially if the environment of the school could be so
changed that its moods would be more joyous and intense. These changes
are at any rate demanded for so many other reasons that if they fail
to make the intellect more productive, they will not be completely a
failure.
Education in the use of wealth must now be regarded as a part of
_moral_ education. In America we have ignored the necessity of thrift,
and the idea of thrift has certainly had no part in education. The
proper use of everything we produce or own is a fundamental part of
conduct, and it ought to be a persistent theme in education. We have
now the interest and incentive that have come from the war, we say,
for we have felt, if only remotely, what poverty means, and we have
seen that no amount of natural wealth and no degree of civilization
can wholly insure us against famine and disaster. We need throughout
our national life now, again, something like the old New England
conscience in the uses of things, applied in a different way, of
course, and now made more effectual by our broader science. The
encouragement of this spirit will perhaps make the difference in the
end between having a world seriously engaged in progressive tasks with
its material forces well in hand, and a world which in all its
practical affairs, large and small, is operated according to the
principle or the lack of principle of a _laissez faire_ attitude
throughout life. Saving in a good cause, and with a clear conscience
and determined purpose, is one of the elements of the higher life and
is far removed from miserliness. It is a principle of _adaptation of
means to ends_, and that any school which trains this power is
reaching fundamental principles of the practical life needs hardly to
be said.
The higher uses and appreciation of wealth which we are wont to call
plain living and high thinking, the moral idea of philanthropy, the
æsthetic values and hygienic implications of the right kind of
simplicity must not be omitted from the educational idea of thrift. To
impart something of the spirit of restraint and generosity, and to
make the child feel what living simply, and with definite purpose, and
making means serve one's real ends in life imply, to teach the joys of
the higher uses of common things, is no mean achievement. But can we
indeed do these things which after all have their main virtue in being
general and social, and a part of a program? All we can say is that if
we are to have a better order, and if we think education has any place
in it, economy in its broadest sense, but economy also as applied to
the details of daily life must also have a place in it. It is both
fatuous and insincere to talk about good things to come, and not be
willing to pay the price in labor and in sacrifice necessary to obtain
them honestly. Especially when the price of these things is in itself
no demand for the sacrificing of any real good, but quite to the
contrary is a summons to a more joyous life, we should be glad to pay
it.