Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

by Helen Marot

His assumption in defining the "greatest duty" is that the members of the state are free to evolve and will evolve a progressive ethical community. But after a child has passed through the hands of a competent teaching force which fits him successfully into a ready-made place, after he has accepted this ready-made place on the authority of modern technology and business, on the authority of the state and religion, that the place given him is his to fill; to fill in accordance with the standards determined by the schools and by industry—after all this, it is difficult to imagine what else a child could do but conform. He could do no more, thus trained, than go forward in the direction he is pushed and in the direction determined before he was born. This is not our idea of a progressive life.

It has been understood generally in America that Germany's preparation and classification of her future workers and their placement in industry, was more responsible than any other policy for Germany's place in the world market. British and American manufacturers before the war urged the emulation of German methods of education and a reorganization of school systems more in conformity with the German. The demand of the manufacturers for reorganization came at a time when intelligent educators in America were recognizing that some reorganization was necessary to bring the school experience of children into relation with their environment and with the actualities of life. The industrial education movement in this country was based on the German, and the German idea was the dominating one. The movement here has shown little-imagination as it adopted a system foreign to America, instead of initiating schemes which represented the aspirations of a free people.

Herman Schneider, of the University of Cincinnati, has made one of the most intelligent contributions in the adaptation of the German scheme of education. He divides trades into two classes, which he calls energizing and enervating. In those which are energizing there is an element of individual expression and opportunity for self-direction. The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic state of mind and body. His comment on the situation is: "We are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers. The physical workers are becoming more and more lethargic. The work itself is not character building; on the contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is hardly energizing mentally. The real menace lies in the fact that in a self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood."

Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the school, thus coördinating the worker's experience, with the assistance of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school. The arrangement also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop processes in the course of apprenticeship. The experience while it lasts may have educational value for the pupil. But in spite of what it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise which apprenticeship supposedly holds out. That is, the pupil, when he becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed off from the chance to develop and use the knowledge or training he received. If, as Dean Schneider asserts, "we are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers," and if "we cannot reverse our present economic order of things," then any apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most energizing of the trades leads the pupil nowhere in particular. Even the skilled trade of locomotive engineering, which Dean Schneider classes as the most highly energized of trades, does not escape. As a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers observes: "The big electrical engines which are being introduced in the railroad system are rapidly eliminating the factors of judgment on the part of the engineer and transforming that highly skilled trade into an automatic exercise."

The one-time value of a trade apprenticeship to a youth was that it furnished the background for mastery of machine processes; but apprenticeship under modern factory methods can do no more than make a youth a good servant to machines. The Schneider system fills, as well as can be filled, a scheme of apprenticeship in conformity with the prevailing shop organization and requirements, but it is not a fulfillment for youth; it is not educational. There is no progression from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in administration and reorganization of industry is cut off. The best of trades is a blind alley, educationally speaking.

However abortive such an effort as Dean Schneider's might be in giving workers opportunity to enrich their experience for their own reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid subject matter. This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth exploitation and not wealth creation. All of the industrial educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the adaptation of their experiments to that fact.

A staff of investigators, who made a year's survey of the industries of Cleveland with a view of determining what measures should be adopted by the school system of the city to prepare young people for wage earning occupation and to provide supplementary trade training for those already employed, concluded that the choice of occupations should be governed primarily by economic considerations; that even from the point of view of the school, educational factors could not take precedence over economic. They said: "The primary considerations in the intelligent selection of a vocation relate to wages, steadiness of employment, health risks, opportunity for advancement, apprenticeship conditions, union regulations and the number of chances there are for getting into it. These things are fundamental, and any one of them may well take precedence over the matter of whether the tastes of the future wage earner run to wood, brick, stone or steel."

This conclusion is fatalistic, but it is a brave one. It does not fall back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or physical science can enrich, under the circumstances, the worker's experience to any important extent. It accepts the bald truth that all the material classed as cultural will count for nothing of value in a factory worker's life in comparison with the highest possible wage in the most enervating of industries. It stresses this highly important factor, as it should, but merely as a physical necessity. There is vital education in the consciousness of self-support, in the consciousness that one is earning the living one gets. But under present conditions the educational experience of wage recompense is not so significant as it might be if it measured the value of the labor performed; if it paid the worker according to his needs, and if he gave in return for the wage according to his ability.

The Gary school system is a notable effort in public school education to fulfill children's desire for productive experience. It is in striking contrast to the German scheme as it is based on processes which have educational force and significance. In saying this I differentiate between training for industry and participation in the industrial activity which is an organic part of the life of the children and of the community. The children are an actual part of the repair and construction working force on Gary school buildings and on the equipment. As the children are involved in the upkeep of a school it becomes their school. They experience the responsibility of maintaining the school plant, not by some artificial scheme of participation, but by the actual application of trade standards and acquired technique to operations which have for them and those with whom they live important significance. They gain in their work a first hand knowledge of industrial processes and activity. In conjunction with skilled mechanics they work on the carpentry, the plumbing, the masonry, the installation of electricity used in the school building. They do the school printing and accounting.

The children's life in these schools is an experience in industry where there is nothing to hide, no trade secrets to keep back. The children have the full opportunity of seeing their work through to its completion and understanding its purpose and recognising its value and use. It provides more than any other school system a liberal field for productive endeavor. But the Gary schools are not industry; they are a world apart; they represent, as all schools are supposed to, moments sacred to education and growth. They are not subjected to the test of coördination in the world of industry. They give the children a respect for productive enterprise that should be invaluable later in effecting their resistance to the prostitution of their creative power. They do not give them experience in the administrative side of industry for which the children of high school age are ready and in need. But in an admirable way they subordinate training in technique to purpose and give the children the experience of exercising control over their own industrial activity. As an industrial experience for children of grammar school age, it is richer than any other school system which has been developed.