EDUCATIONAL METHODS
As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the
value and function of each member of the community, however humble he
may be. We have come to believe that the most "brutish man" has a value
in our common life, a function to perform which can be fulfilled by no
one else. We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free
the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask
this not merely because it is the man's right to be thus connected, but
because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to
get along without his special contribution. Just as we have come to
resent all hindrances which keep us from untrammelled comradeship with
our fellows, and as we throw down unnatural divisions, not in the
spirit of the eighteenth-century reformers, but in the spirit of those
to whom social equality has become a necessity for further social
development, so we are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in
the mass of men, and demand that the educator free that power. We
believe that man's moral idealism is the constructive force of progress,
as it has always been; but because every human being is a creative agent
and a possible generator of fine enthusiasm, we are sceptical of the
moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that
there may be greater freedom, strength, and subtilty of intercourse and
hence an increase of dynamic power. We are not content to include all
men in our hopes, but have become conscious that all men are hoping and
are part of the same movement of which we are a part.
Many people impelled by these ideas have become impatient with the slow
recognition on the part of the educators of their manifest obligation
to prepare and nourish the child and the citizen for social relations.
The educators should certainly conserve the learning and training
necessary for the successful individual and family life, but should add
to that a preparation for the enlarged social efforts which our
increasing democracy requires. The democratic ideal demands of the
school that it shall give the child's own experience a social value;
that it shall teach him to direct his own activities and adjust them to
those of other people. We are not willing that thousands of industrial
workers shall put all of their activity and toil into services from
which the community as a whole reaps the benefit, while their mental
conceptions and code of morals are narrow and untouched by any uplift
which the consciousness of social value might give them.
We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and
writing, suspecting them to rest upon the assumption that the ordinary
experience of life is worth little, and that all knowledge and interest
must be brought to the children through the medium of books. Such an
assumption fails to give the child any clew to the life about him, or
any power to usefully or intelligently connect himself with it. This may
be illustrated by observations made in a large Italian colony situated
in Chicago, the children from which are, for the most part, sent to the
public schools.
The members of the Italian colony are largely from South
Italy,--Calabrian and Sicilian peasants, or Neapolitans from the
workingmen's quarters of that city. They have come to America with the
distinct aim of earning money, and finding more room for the energies of
themselves and their children. In almost all cases they mean to go back
again, simply because their imaginations cannot picture a continuous
life away from the old surroundings. Their experiences in Italy have
been those of simple outdoor activity, and their ideas have come
directly to them from their struggle with Nature,--such a hand-to-hand
struggle as takes place when each man gets his living largely through
his own cultivation of the soil, or with tools simply fashioned by his
own hands. The women, as in all primitive life, have had more
diversified activities than the men. They have cooked, spun, and
knitted, in addition to their almost equal work in the fields. Very few
of the peasant men or women can either read or write. They are devoted
to their children, strong in their family feeling, even to remote
relationships, and clannish in their community life.
The entire family has been upheaved, and is striving to adjust itself to
its new surroundings. The men, for the most part, work on railroad
extensions through the summer, under the direction of a _padrone_, who
finds the work for them, regulates the amount of their wages, and
supplies them with food. The first effect of immigration upon the women
is that of idleness. They no longer work in the fields, nor milk the
goats, nor pick up faggots. The mother of the family buys all the
clothing, not only already spun and woven but made up into garments, of
a cut and fashion beyond her powers. It is, indeed, the most economical
thing for her to do. Her house-cleaning and cooking are of the simplest;
the bread is usually baked outside of the house, and the macaroni bought
prepared for boiling. All of those outdoor and domestic activities,
which she would naturally have handed on to her daughters, have slipped
away from her. The domestic arts are gone, with their absorbing
interests for the children, their educational value, and incentive to
activity. A household in a tenement receives almost no raw material. For
the hundreds of children who have never seen wheat grow, there are
dozens who have never seen bread baked. The occasional washings and
scrubbings are associated only with discomfort. The child of such a
family receives constant stimulus of most exciting sort from his city
street life, but he has little or no opportunity to use his energies in
domestic manufacture, or, indeed, constructively in any direction. No
activity is supplied to take the place of that which, in Italy, he would
naturally have found in his own surroundings, and no new union with
wholesome life is made for him.
Italian parents count upon the fact that their children learn the
English language and American customs before they do themselves, and the
children act not only as interpreters of the language, but as buffers
between them and Chicago, resulting in a certain almost pathetic
dependence of the family upon the child. When a child of the family,
therefore, first goes to school, the event is fraught with much
significance to all the others. The family has no social life in any
structural form and can supply none to the child. He ought to get it in
the school and give it to his family, the school thus becoming the
connector with the organized society about them. It is the children
aged six, eight, and ten, who go to school, entering, of course, the
primary grades. If a boy is twelve or thirteen on his arrival in
America, his parents see in him a wage-earning factor, and the girl of
the same age is already looking toward her marriage.
Let us take one of these boys, who has learned in his six or eight years
to speak his native language, and to feel himself strongly identified
with the fortunes of his family. Whatever interest has come to the minds
of his ancestors has come through the use of their hands in the open
air; and open air and activity of body have been the inevitable
accompaniments of all their experiences. Yet the first thing that the
boy must do when he reaches school is to sit still, at least part of the
time, and he must learn to listen to what is said to him, with all the
perplexity of listening to a foreign tongue. He does not find this very
stimulating, and is slow to respond to the more subtle incentives of the
schoolroom. The peasant child is perfectly indifferent to showing off
and making a good recitation. He leaves all that to his schoolfellows,
who are more sophisticated and equipped with better English. His parents
are not deeply interested in keeping him in school, and will not hold
him there against his inclination. Their experience does not point to
the good American tradition that it is the educated man who finally
succeeds. The richest man in the Italian colony can neither read nor
write--even Italian. His cunning and acquisitiveness, combined with the
credulity and ignorance of his countrymen, have slowly brought about his
large fortune. The child himself may feel the stirring of a vague
ambition to go on until he is as the other children are; but he is not
popular with his schoolfellows, and he sadly feels the lack of dramatic
interest. Even the pictures and objects presented to him, as well as the
language, are strange.
If we admit that in education it is necessary to begin with the
experiences which the child already has and to use his spontaneous and
social activity, then the city streets begin this education for him in a
more natural way than does the school. The South Italian peasant comes
from a life of picking olives and oranges, and he easily sends his
children out to pick up coal from railroad tracks, or wood from
buildings which have been burned down. Unfortunately, this process leads
by easy transition to petty thieving. It is easy to go from the coal on
the railroad track to the coal and wood which stand before a dealer's
shop; from the potatoes which have rolled from a rumbling wagon to the
vegetables displayed by the grocer. This is apt to be the record of the
boy who responds constantly to the stimulus and temptations of the
street, although in the beginning his search for bits of food and fuel
was prompted by the best of motives.
The school has to compete with a great deal from the outside in addition
to the distractions of the neighborhood. Nothing is more fascinating
than that mysterious "down town," whither the boy longs to go to sell
papers and black boots, to attend theatres, and, if possible, to stay
all night on the pretence of waiting for the early edition of the great
dailies. If a boy is once thoroughly caught in these excitements,
nothing can save him from over-stimulation and consequent debility and
worthlessness; he arrives at maturity with no habits of regular work and
with a distaste for its dulness.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of boys of various nationalities
who conscientiously remain in school and fulfil all the requirements of
the early grades, and at the age of fourteen are found in factories,
painstakingly performing their work year after year. These later are the
men who form the mass of the population in every industrial neighborhood
of every large city; but they carry on the industrial processes year
after year without in the least knowing what it is all about. The one
fixed habit which the boy carries away with him from the school to the
factory is the feeling that his work is merely provisional. In school
the next grade was continually held before him as an object of
attainment, and it resulted in the conviction that the sole object of
present effort is to get ready for something else. This tentative
attitude takes the last bit of social stimulus out of his factory work;
he pursues it merely as a necessity, and his very mental attitude
destroys his chance for a realization of its social value. As the boy in
school contracted the habit of doing his work in certain hours and
taking his pleasure in certain other hours, so in the factory he earns
his money by ten hours of dull work and spends it in three hours of
lurid and unprofitable pleasure in the evening. Both in the school and
in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his
recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness
of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a
day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes
more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the
industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a
time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no
self-expression on the part of the worker. It sometimes seems that the
public schools should contribute much more than they do to the
consummation of this time. If the army of school children who enter the
factories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, they
might do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which presses
so heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has our
commercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensibly
commercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life was
receiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? The
training of these children, so far as it has been vocational at all, has
been in the direction of clerical work. It is possible that the
business men, whom we in America so tremendously admire, have really
been dictating the curriculum of our public schools, in spite of the
conventions of educators and the suggestions of university professors.
The business man, of course, has not said, "I will have the public
schools train office boys and clerks so that I may have them easily and
cheaply," but he has sometimes said, "Teach the children to write
legibly and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of
punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey; and you will fit them to
make their way in the world as I have made mine." Has the workingman
been silent as to what he desires for his children, and allowed the
business man to decide for him there, as he has allowed the politician
to manage his municipal affairs, or has the workingman so far shared our
universal optimism that he has really believed that his children would
never need to go into industrial life at all, but that all of his sons
would become bankers and merchants?
Certain it is that no sufficient study has been made of the child who
enters into industrial life early and stays there permanently, to give
him some offset to its monotony and dulness, some historic significance
of the part he is taking in the life of the community.
It is at last on behalf of the average workingmen that our increasing
democracy impels us to make a new demand upon the educator. As the
political expression of democracy has claimed for the workingman the
free right of citizenship, so a code of social ethics is now insisting
that he shall be a conscious member of society, having some notion of
his social and industrial value.
The early ideal of a city that it was a market-place in which to
exchange produce, and a mere trading-post for merchants, apparently
still survives in our minds and is constantly reflected in our schools.
We have either failed to realize that cities have become great centres
of production and manufacture in which a huge population is engaged, or
we have lacked sufficient presence of mind to adjust ourselves to the
change. We admire much more the men who accumulate riches, and who
gather to themselves the results of industry, than the men who actually
carry forward industrial processes; and, as has been pointed out, our
schools still prepare children almost exclusively for commercial and
professional life.
Quite as the country boy dreams of leaving the farm for life in town and
begins early to imitate the travelling salesman in dress and manner, so
the school boy within the town hopes to be an office boy, and later a
clerk or salesman, and looks upon work in the factory as the occupation
of ignorant and unsuccessful men. The schools do so little really to
interest the child in the life of production, or to excite his ambition
in the line of industrial occupation, that the ideal of life, almost
from the very beginning, becomes not an absorbing interest in one's work
and a consciousness of its value and social relation, but a desire for
money with which unmeaning purchases may be made and an unmeaning
social standing obtained.
The son of a workingman who is successful in commercial life, impresses
his family and neighbors quite as does the prominent city man when he
comes back to dazzle his native town. The children of the working people
learn many useful things in the public schools, but the commercial
arithmetic, and many other studies, are founded on the tacit assumption
that a boy rises in life by getting away from manual labor,--that every
promising boy goes into business or a profession. The children destined
for factory life are furnished with what would be most useful under
other conditions, quite as the prosperous farmer's wife buys a
folding-bed for her huge four-cornered "spare room," because her sister,
who has married a city man, is obliged to have a folding-bed in the
cramped limits of her flat Partly because so little is done for him
educationally, and partly because he must live narrowly and dress
meanly, the life of the average laborer tends to become flat and
monotonous, with nothing in his work to feed his mind or hold his
interest. Theoretically, we would all admit that the man at the bottom,
who performs the meanest and humblest work, so long as the work is
necessary, performs a useful function; but we do not live up to our
theories, and in addition to his hard and uninteresting work he is
covered with a sort of contempt, and unless he falls into illness or
trouble, he receives little sympathy or attention. Certainly no serious
effort is made to give him a participation in the social and industrial
life with which he comes in contact, nor any insight and inspiration
regarding it.
Apparently we have not yet recovered manual labor from the deep distrust
which centuries of slavery and the feudal system have cast upon it. To
get away from menial work, to do obviously little with one's hands, is
still the desirable status. This may readily be seen all along the line.
A workingman's family will make every effort and sacrifice that the
brightest daughter be sent to the high school and through the normal
school, quite as much because a teacher in the family raises the general
social standing and sense of family consequence, as that the returns are
superior to factory or even office work. "Teacher" in the vocabulary of
many children is a synonym for women-folk gentry, and the name is
indiscriminately applied to women of certain dress and manner. The same
desire for social advancement is expressed by the purchasing of a piano,
or the fact that the son is an office boy, and not a factory hand. The
overcrowding of the professions by poorly equipped men arises from much
the same source, and from the conviction that "an education" is wasted
if a boy goes into a factory or shop.
A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of twin boys, whom he befriended
and meant to give a start in life. He sent them both to the Athenæum for
several winters as a preparatory business training, and then took them
into his office, where they speedily became known as the bright one and
the stupid one. The stupid one was finally dismissed after repeated
trials, when to the surprise of the entire establishment, he quickly
betook himself into the shops, where he became a wide-awake and valuable
workman. His chagrined benefactor, in telling the story, admits that he
himself had fallen a victim to his own business training and his early
notion of rising in life. In reality he had merely followed the lead of
most benevolent people who help poor boys. They test the success of
their efforts by the number whom they have taken out of factory work
into some other and "higher occupation."
Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools and
institutions of learning most accessible to working people. First among
them is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism of
type-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce and
methods of distribution. Commodities are treated as exports and
imports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, of
course, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturing
processes to which they have been subjected. These schools do not in the
least minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is in
the shop and not in the office. We assume that all men are searching for
"puddings and power," to use Carlyle's phrase, and furnish only the
schools which help them to those ends.
The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academic
course in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learning
too much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits in
earning money. He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits,
nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for those
of his friends who have not risen in life. "It is as though nets were
laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or
other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught
and held from substantial service to their fellows." The academic
teaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extension
lectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, and
concerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences.
The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of
a hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental
exertion. There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist in
attending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessed
of a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fuses
into availability or realization.
Among the many disappointments which the settlement experiment has
brought to its promoters, perhaps none is keener than the fact that they
have as yet failed to work out methods of education, specialized and
adapted to the needs of adult working people in contra-distinction to
those employed in schools and colleges, or those used in teaching
children. There are many excellent reasons and explanations for this
failure. In the first place, the residents themselves are for the most
part imbued with academic methods and ideals, which it is most difficult
to modify. To quote from a late settlement report, "The most vaunted
educational work in settlements amounts often to the stimulation
mentally of a select few who are, in a sense, of the academic type of
mind, and who easily and quickly respond to the academic methods
employed." These classes may be valuable, but they leave quite untouched
the great mass of the factory population, the ordinary workingman of the
ordinary workingman's street, whose attitude is best described as that
of "acquiescence," who lives through the aimless passage of the years
without incentive "to imagine, to design, or to aspire." These men are
totally untouched by all the educational and philanthropic machinery
which is designed for the young and the helpless who live on the same
streets with them. They do not often drink to excess, they regularly
give all their wages to their wives, they have a vague pride in their
superior children; but they grow prematurely old and stiff in all their
muscles, and become more and more taciturn, their entire energies
consumed in "holding a job."
Various attempts have been made to break through the inadequate
educational facilities supplied by commercialism and scholarship, both
of which have followed their own ideals and have failed to look at the
situation as it actually presents itself. The most noteworthy attempt
has been the movement toward industrial education, the agitation for
which has been ably seconded by manufacturers of a practical type, who
have from time to time founded and endowed technical schools, designed
for workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitably
reflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferring
a few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and a
few less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but did
not aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work which
the permanent specialization of the division of labor demands.
The Peter Coopers and other good men honestly believed that if
intelligence could be added to industry, each workingman who faithfully
attended these schools could walk into increased skill and wages, and in
time even become an employer himself. Such schools are useful beyond
doubt; but so far as educating workingmen is concerned or in any measure
satisfying the democratic ideal, they plainly beg the question.
Almost every large city has two or three polytechnic institutions
founded by rich men, anxious to help "poor boys." These have been
captured by conventional educators for the purpose of fitting young men
for the colleges and universities. They have compromised by merely
adding to the usual academic course manual work, applied mathematics,
mechanical drawing and engineering. Two schools in Chicago, plainly
founded for the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration of this
tendency and result. On the other hand, so far as schools of this type
have been captured by commercialism, they turn out trained engineers,
professional chemists, and electricians. They are polytechnics of a high
order, but do not even pretend to admit the workingman with his meagre
intellectual equipment. They graduate machine builders, but not educated
machine tenders. Even the textile schools are largely seized by young
men who expect to be superintendents of factories, designers, or
manufacturers themselves, and the textile worker who actually "holds the
thread" is seldom seen in them; indeed, in one of the largest schools
women are not allowed, in spite of the fact that spinning and weaving
have traditionally been woman's work, and that thousands of women are
at present employed in the textile mills.
It is much easier to go over the old paths of education with "manual
training" thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler to appeal to the old
ambitions of "getting on in life," or of "preparing for a profession,"
or "for a commercial career," than to work out new methods on democratic
lines. These schools gradually drop back into the conventional courses,
modified in some slight degree, while the adaptation to workingmen's
needs is never made, nor, indeed, vigorously attempted. In the meantime,
the manufacturers continually protest that engineers, especially trained
for devising machines, are not satisfactory. Three generations of
workers have invented, but we are told that invention no longer goes on
in the workshop, even when it is artificially stimulated by the offer of
prizes, and that the inventions of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century have by no means fulfilled the promise of the earlier
three-quarters.
Every foreman in a large factory has had experience with two classes of
men: first with those who become rigid and tolerate no change in their
work, partly because they make more money "working by the piece," when
they stick to that work which they have learned to do rapidly, and
partly because the entire muscular and nervous system has become by
daily use adapted to particular motions and resents change. Secondly,
there are the men who float in and out of the factory, in a constantly
changing stream. They "quit work" for the slightest reason or none at
all, and never become skilled at anything. Some of them are men of low
intelligence, but many of them are merely too nervous and restless, too
impatient, too easily "driven to drink," to be of any use in a modern
factory. They are the men for whom the demanded adaptation is
impossible.
The individual from whom the industrial order demands ever larger
drafts of time and energy, should be nourished and enriched from social
sources, in proportion as he is drained. He, more than other men, needs
the conception of historic continuity in order to reveal to him the
purpose and utility of his work, and he can only be stimulated and
dignified as he obtains a conception of his proper relation to society.
Scholarship is evidently unable to do this for him; for, unfortunately,
the same tendency to division of labor has also produced
over-specialization in scholarship, with the sad result that when the
scholar attempts to minister to a worker, he gives him the result of
more specialization rather than an offset from it. He cannot bring
healing and solace because he himself is suffering from the same
disease. There is indeed a deplorable lack of perception and adaptation
on the part of educators all along the line.
It will certainly be embarrassing to have our age written down
triumphant in the matter of inventions, in that our factories were
filled with intricate machines, the result of advancing mathematical and
mechanical knowledge in relation to manufacturing processes, but
defeated in that it lost its head over the achievement and forgot the
men. The accusation would stand, that the age failed to perform a like
service in the extension of history and art to the factory employees who
ran the machines; that the machine tenders, heavy and almost dehumanized
by monotonous toil, walked about in the same streets with us, and sat in
the same cars; but that we were absolutely indifferent and made no
genuine effort to supply to them the artist's perception or student's
insight, which alone could fuse them into social consciousness. It would
further stand that the scholars among us continued with yet more
research, that the educators were concerned only with the young and the
promising, and the philanthropists with the criminals and helpless.
There is a pitiful failure to recognize the situation in which the
majority of working people are placed, a tendency to ignore their real
experiences and needs, and, most stupid of all, we leave quite untouched
affections and memories which would afford a tremendous dynamic if they
were utilized.
We constantly hear it said in educational circles, that a child learns
only by "doing," and that education must proceed "through the eyes and
hands to the brain"; and yet for the vast number of people all around us
who do not need to have activities artificially provided, and who use
their hands and eyes all the time, we do not seem able to reverse the
process. We quote the dictum, "What is learned in the schoolroom must be
applied in the workshop," and yet the skill and handicraft constantly
used in the workshop have no relevance or meaning given to them by the
school; and when we do try to help the workingman in an educational way,
we completely ignore his everyday occupation. Yet the task is merely one
of adaptation. It is to take actual conditions and to make them the
basis for a large and generous method of education, to perform a
difficult idealization doubtless, but not an impossible one.
We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize life
through his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association in
regard to ancient buildings. We say that "generation after generation
have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them,
until they have become the property of all." And yet this is even more
true of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held in
human hands. A machine really represents the "seasoned life of man"
preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancient
building does. At present, workmen are brought in contact with the
machinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set of
industrial implements had been newly created. They handle the machinery
day by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth. Few
of the men who perform the mechanical work in the great factories have
any comprehension of the fact that the inventions upon which the factory
depends, the instruments which they use, have been slowly worked out,
each generation using the gifts of the last and transmitting the
inheritance until it has become a social possession. This can only be
understood by a man who has obtained some idea of social progress. We
are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of
labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby,
and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product
long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the
division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing
them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to
build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, and another breaks
them, they are quite inevitably united by their interest in the road.
But this naturally presupposes that they know where the road is going
to, that they have some curiosity and interest about it, and perhaps a
chance to travel upon it." If the division of labor robs them of
interest in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact of interdependence
amounts to nothing.
The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievance
beyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know what
it is all about. We may well regret the passing of the time when the
variety of work performed in the unspecialized workshop naturally
stimulated the intelligence of the workingmen and brought them into
contact both with the raw material and the finished product. But the
problem of education, as any advanced educator will tell us, is to
supply the essentials of experience by a short cut, as it were. If the
shop constantly tends to make the workman a specialist, then the problem
of the educator in regard to him is quite clear: it is to give him what
may be an offset from the over-specialization of his daily work, to
supply him with general information and to insist that he shall be a
cultivated member of society with a consciousness of his industrial and
social value.
As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting to
make his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is a
workingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaning
into his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results.
Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when they attempt educational
institutions in connection with their factories, are prone to follow
conventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find,
indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of
the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The
latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the
specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtues
pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was
perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues
of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly
organized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If a
workingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must see
industry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that will
include not only himself and his immediate family and community, but the
industrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterity
of hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machinery
and subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the more
necessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should get
a sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine with
a material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totally
unrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing what
becomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course,
unquestionably deadening to his intellectual and moral life. To make
the moral connection it would be necessary to give him a social
consciousness of the value of his work, and at least a sense of
participation and a certain joy in its ultimate use; to make the
intellectual connection it would be essential to create in him some
historic conception of the development of industry and the relation of
his individual work to it.
Workingmen themselves have made attempts in both directions, which it
would be well for moralists and educators to study. It is a striking
fact that when workingmen formulate their own moral code, and try to
inspire and encourage each other, it is always a large and general
doctrine which they preach. They were the first class of men to organize
an international association, and the constant talk at a modern labor
meeting is of solidarity and of the identity of the interests of
workingmen the world over. It is difficult to secure a successful
organization of men into the simplest trades organization without an
appeal to the most abstract principles of justice and brotherhood. As
they have formulated their own morals by laying the greatest stress upon
the largest morality, so if they could found their own schools, it is
doubtful whether they would be of the mechanic institute type. Courses
of study arranged by a group of workingmen are most naïve in their
breadth and generality. They will select the history of the world in
preference to that of any period or nation. The "wonders of science" or
"the story of evolution" will attract workingmen to a lecture when
zoölogy or chemistry will drive them away. The "outlines of literature"
or "the best in literature" will draw an audience when a lecturer in
English poetry will be solitary. This results partly from a wholesome
desire to have general knowledge before special knowledge, and is partly
a rebound from the specialization of labor to which the workingman is
subjected. When he is free from work and can direct his own mind, he
tends to roam, to dwell upon large themes. Much the same tendency is
found in programmes of study arranged by Woman's Clubs in country
places. The untrained mind, wearied with meaningless detail, when it
gets an opportunity to make its demand heard, asks for general
philosophy and background.
In a certain sense commercialism itself, at least in its larger aspect,
tends to educate the workingman better than organized education does.
Its interests are certainly world-wide and democratic, while it is
absolutely undiscriminating as to country and creed, coming into contact
with all climes and races. If this aspect of commercialism were
utilized, it would in a measure counterbalance the tendency which
results from the subdivision of labor.
The most noteworthy attempt to utilize this democracy of commerce in
relation to manufacturing is found at Dayton, Ohio, in the yearly
gatherings held in a large factory there. Once a year the entire force
is gathered together to hear the returns of the business, not so much
in respect to the profits, as in regard to its extension. At these
meetings, the travelling salesmen from various parts of the world--from
Constantinople, from Berlin, from Rome, from Hong Kong--report upon the
sales they have made, and the methods of advertisement and promotion
adapted to the various countries.
Stereopticon lectures are given upon each new country as soon as it has
been successfully invaded by the product of the factory. The foremen in
the various departments of the factory give accounts of the increased
efficiency and the larger output over former years. Any man who has made
an invention in connection with the machinery of the factory, at this
time publicly receives a prize, and suggestions are approved that tend
to increase the comfort and social facilities of the employees. At least
for the moment there is a complete esprit de corps, and the youngest and
least skilled employee sees himself in connection with the interests of
the firm, and the spread of an invention. It is a crude example of what
might be done in the way of giving a large framework of meaning to
factory labor, and of putting it into a sentient background, at least on
the commercial side.
It is easy to indict the educator, to say that he has gotten entangled
in his own material, and has fallen a victim to his own methods; but
granting this, what has the artist done about it--he who is supposed to
have a more intimate insight into the needs of his contemporaries, and
to minister to them as none other can?
It is quite true that a few writers are insisting that the growing
desire for labor, on the part of many people of leisure, has its
counterpart in the increasing desire for general knowledge on the part
of many laborers. They point to the fact that the same duality of
conscience which seems to stifle the noblest effort in the individual
because his intellectual conception and his achievement are so difficult
to bring together, is found on a large scale in society itself, when we
have the separation of the people who think from those who work. And
yet, since Ruskin ceased, no one has really formulated this in a
convincing form. And even Ruskin's famous dictum, that labor without art
brutalizes, has always been interpreted as if art could only be a sense
of beauty or joy in one's own work, and not a sense of companionship
with all other workers. The situation demands the consciousness of
participation and well-being which comes to the individual when he is
able to see himself "in connection and cooperation with the whole"; it
needs the solace of collective art inherent in collective labor.
As the poet bathes the outer world for us in the hues of human feeling,
so the workman needs some one to bathe his surroundings with a human
significance--some one who shall teach him to find that which will give
a potency to his life. His education, however simple, should tend to
make him widely at home in the world, and to give him a sense of
simplicity and peace in the midst of the triviality and noise to which
he is constantly subjected. He, like other men, can learn to be content
to see but a part, although it must be a part of something.
It is because of a lack of democracy that we do not really incorporate
him in the hopes and advantages of society, and give him the place which
is his by simple right. We have learned to say that the good must be
extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one
person or any one class; but we have not yet learned to add to that
statement, that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we
cannot even be sure that it is worth having. In spite of many attempts
we do not really act upon either statement.