III
But it cannot be too frequently emphasised that we are not to accept the present subordination of social life to the exigencies of the machine industry. That the machine industry is here to stay need not be argued; and we may dismiss as impracticable the suggestion of a return to the handicraft system. The machine industry must be retained for the production of utilities where no question of beauty or ornament arises; and it should be so ordered as to reduce the purely mechanical operations entailed in the manufacture of the staple commodities to a minimum. Consequently care should always be had to prevent an exaggerated emphasis upon the place of the machine industry in education. It is not to be pretended that mechanical processes can ever in themselves minister substantially to the joy of life. The best that can be said is that their present disadvantages can be materially reduced; but not even the sense of partnership and democratic control, the shortening of hours and the addition of intellectual interest, taken all together, can turn factory life into “a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.”
Some emphasis has already been laid upon the difference between productive and creative activity. Creation is not merely production, but reproduction, that is to say, the activity in which we express ourselves for the joy of the thing itself. The present writer was brought up in a slate-quarrying town in North Wales. The workers spent their time in mining and dressing roofing-slates—an industry which involves no special skill save only in the department of slate-splitting. This is handwork and no satisfactory mechanical substitute for it has yet been contrived; and there is much emulation among the workers in this process. Apart from this there is nothing note-worthy about the industry except the very considerable extent of partnership which prevails (or used to prevail) in the work itself and of fellowship in the dressing shops. But after the day’s work was done there was a somewhat remarkable activity of another kind. Sometimes a worker would take a piece of raw slate home with him and spend his spare time in turning it into candlesticks or some other article by means of a lathe or by direct manual work. The result from an artistic standpoint was doubtless very crude; but it was interesting and instructive to observe the almost instinctive way in which men, released from necessary toil, turned to the production of things of beauty. This free self-expression took other forms in other men. Welsh quarrymen have always been well-known for their literary tastes; and the town contained a considerable number of quite capable writers of both prose and verse in the Welsh language. Others there were—and these were a large number—whose dispositions were musical; and since the purchase of musical instruments was as a rule beyond these men’s pockets, they devoted themselves to vocal music. The congregational singing in the churches was famous throughout the country; and while there were many individual vocalists and composers of considerable merit, the development of choral singing reached an extremely high point. It was an intensely religious community and was full of religious activities of many kinds. It was perfectly plain that the real business and joy of life lay not in the production of roofing-slates but in the exercises of creative self-expression to which the men appeared to turn naturally and instinctively when the business of making a livelihood was over.
This is a parable for the educator. While the business of producing the necessities of life should be so conceived and ordered as to make participation in it as much a pleasure as a duty, it is not to be gainsaid that the joy and the ultimate wealth of life lies in the free and self-directed activity of self-expression whether by the individual himself or in some free concert with his neighbours. Education for life will necessarily take account of this circumstance—not only because it provides a means of personal satisfaction but also because it might, and properly developed would, become the chief and the most characteristic contribution of the individual to the life and growth of the community. The school must therefore provide opportunity of independent personal self-expression—in every manner of medium—in order that the peculiar creative aptitude of each child may be discovered and encouraged. Whether it be wood-carving or verse-writing, pattern-designing or violin-playing, any education that pretends to fit a child for a vital social service must make room for it.
It is in this region that we are to look for the differentiation of future social function according to particular aptitudes. To-day, education reproduces the traditional social schism between the privileged and the disinherited classes. On the one hand, we have schools and universities which aim to provide a culture appropriate to those who have to assume the business of leadership and government in the community; on the other we have a popular education which appears in the main to aim at providing a docile mass amenable to leadership and government. There is virtually no attempt to sift out of the mass those who have aptitudes for special social tasks or genius for any form of artistic production. Its methods—mitigated only by the vagaries of the personal equation—are calculated to turn out human products having the uniformity of a sheet of postage stamps. This method can have no result but that of producing and perpetuating a general spiritual poverty. In a democratic community it should be intolerable that schools for children should exist other than the common school. The common school being what it is, it is not surprising that there should be a demand for schools that give a better chance to the human material of boys and girls. This, however, tends to stereotype a class-distinction; and for that reason to limit the field in which the talent for public leadership and artistic and political genius might be discovered. In the common school there should be provision and encouragement for the exercise of free and original self-expression in every possible way so that each child may be enabled to discover its own peculiar vocation in the commonwealth. Not every child will reveal a faculty for creative self-expression of a high order; but every child should have the chance of doing so. And it is the only safe assumption on which to proceed that every child has in it the latent capacity for making a unique and original personal contribution to the total life and wealth and beauty of the community. The common school should become the mine out of which we dig the raw material of our poets, whether minor or major, our singers, our sculptors, our fabricators of beautiful garments, our painters of pictures, our orators, our thinkers and our house-decorators; and there is an untold wealth of this raw material which is lost to society all the time under the conditions of our present preoccupation with the making of money. It would be stupid to suppose that every child can become a great artist; but some kind of artist in some kind of medium every child should have the opportunity of becoming, on the assumption that here—in this region of creative self-expression—lies the richest contribution he can make to the common life.