Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

by Helen Marot

I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious attempt at such coördination. It is not. The conscious purpose is the direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and to increase labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest, not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as men unequipped with the administrative power—as men without will.

There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in the United States. The German workers depended on their political representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.

If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize what it means for the people of a nation to let the title to their lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the protection they have been given and for the regulation of their affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of their assumed independence.

How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their destiny is affected by it is illustrated better by their educational system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative protective practices or policy.

George Kerschensteiner, the director of the Munich schools, in his book on "The Idea of the Industrial School," tells us that the Purposes <and Duties of the schools are to realize the ideal ethical community, and that this realization is possible in so far as the educational provisions are made from the standpoint of the ethical concept of each state. In America we do not think of the state as the embodiment of our ethical concepts. The state, as we know it, is one of the several instruments for realizing ends, ethical as well as material. The state is supposed to serve the common ends of all people. A state may be used, we are all aware, as an instrument, either by Prussian junkers or American business men; either may capture a state to serve their ends. But as a state serves special individuals it belies its professed reason for existence, and in America is in danger of falling from grace, so far, that is, as the common people are concerned. But when a state stands in the minds of a people as the embodiment of their ideals as it has in Germany, it must for its own purpose spend time and substance in purchasing the people's confidence. In assuming the place of guardian it must of necessity minister to the physical needs of the people. If it retains the people's confidence in its guardianship, it is incumbent on it to pursue this policy. It is incumbent on such a state to mould the people's ideas of what their needs are. The schools obviously offer the most hopeful media for the accomplishment of that result, and they have been used in Germany more effectively in this way than the schools of any other country. The German school system follows hard and fast preconceptions of aims and ends, and because of this it was possible for Germany to put over its own particular sort of efficiency.

As a first requisite of efficiency, Germany classifies its people, gives them a place in the scheme of things, and holds them there. By circumscribing within definite limitations the experience of individuals it produces specialists at the sacrifice of a larger human development. The classification of the people and the training of them naturally for the German purpose falls to the schools. The sorting out of individuals begins at the early age of ten in the elementary schools, when each child's social and economic position is practically determined. It is decided then whether he shall be one of the great army of wage workers or whether he shall fall into some one of the several social classes and vocations which stand apart from the common mass of wage earners. The children in the German schools, who are selected at the age of ten for a more promising future than the trades hold out, have more leeway in the making of their decision. But even these children from the American point of view are summarily disposed of and fatally consigned.

The telling off of children at the age of ten and assigning them to a place in the social scheme for life is not American in spirit, nor does it conform to our habits and institutions. But, it is complained, the American habit of taking chances is not efficient. The habit of letting children escape into life with their place unsettled creates confusion and makes calculations in serious things like industry difficult. Therefore, unfaithful to the development of our own concepts of life we are expected to emulate Germany and to determine the destiny of the child. Germany undertakes to eliminate the chances of the individual and the taking of chances by the state, while the American ideal is to leave its people free to make the most of each new exigency that life turns up.

At the age of fourteen it is decided in Germany what industry or trade the children shall enter, that is, the children who at ten are told off to industry. After they enter their trade, their special education for their job is looked after in the continuation schools as well as in the shop. Their attendance at the continuation schools is compulsory. This compulsory attendance does not only insure supplementary training for a particular job, but holds the children to the industry which was chosen for them. That is, a boy is compelled, if he works in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the continuation school for waiters, until he is eighteen. He may not go to a continuation school for butchers if he decided at the end of a year or so in his first job that he would rather be a butcher, or that he would rather do anything than wait.

The continuation schools protect German manufacture and the national industrial efficiency against indulgence in such vagaries. A butcher would prefer to engage lads who have had experience in butcher shops and butcher continuation classes. Avenues of escape from jobs just because they are uncongenial are thus quite effectively closed together with, the chance to experiment with life—the chance which Americans take for granted. But it is just this element of waywardness and the opportunity America leaves open for its indulgence among working people that makes labor from the standpoint of American manufacture so inefficient. For want of opportunity to put individuality to some account we frequently fall back on waywardness in an awkward and futile protest against domination.

While the German scheme of placing its workers is efficient in its own way, so also is the training for each particular trade. A child is trained first to be skillful and second, to quote Mr. Kerchensteiner, "to be willing to carry out some function in the state … so that he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state." "Having accomplished this," he says "the next duty of the schools is to accustom the individual to look at his vocation as a duty which he must carry out not merely in the interest of his own material and moral welfare but also in the interest of the state." From this, he says, follows the next and "greatest educational duty of the public school. The school must develop in its pupils the desire and strength … through their vocation, to contribute their share so that the development of the state to which they belong, may progress in the direction of the ideal of the community."