Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

by Helen Marot

The attention of the pupils will be directed to the factory and school buildings and the importance of making them a pleasant workplace and an acquisition to the neighborhood in which they are situated. The problem of noise from machinery and dirt and dust from fuel will be taken up as subjects demanding generous consideration.

Sixth: Literature and History. Authentic accounts and inspirational stores of industrial life, especially of the lumber, the woodworking, and the toy industry will be gathered by the pupils and the teachers. Special excursions, investigations, or general observations casually or unexpectedly made by the pupils and teachers will be turned to literary use or historical record. The pupils will be given full opportunity to write out statements of facts they have discovered or to write stories or plays or poetry which are inspired by the subject matter they have gathered. These literary productions will not be called for as exercises in the art of writing or of fact-recording, but as contributions toward the equipment of the school. The books which are collected as well as the original compositions will be submitted to critical analysis and accepted as accessions to the library if they come up to standards in authenticity and in literature. The teachers as well as the pupils will submit new books or other matter and before they are accepted, they will be subject to the same critical analysis as the material submitted by the children. This analysis will be the literary experience and training as it will be participated in by all the pupils who are interested in this expression of their work.

Not all of this school work is incident to the success of the shop, if we measure success by usual business standards. But it is all incident to the development of a creative impulse in the individual, and it is incident to the development of industry as a socially productive enterprise. The fact that the school and shop work represent the planning and the decisions, that they demand knowledge and experience, does not signify that the young people will assume to carry more responsibility than they are capable of, or that more will be expected of them than they are equal to. It does not mean that their insufficiency will not be recognized and admitted. On the contrary the accumulated knowledge and experience of the adult workers and the teachers will be appreciated by the pupils as they have the chance to make real and full evaluations. All the members of the staff will carry on the work in the shop as producers and learners and it is hoped they will carry on the work in the school in the same spirit. Young people will stand in the relation of partners as well as pupils to the adults associated with them. If the school and the workshop experience gives its pupils a regard for high accomplishment it will be unnecessary to stress the fact that as responsible members of the working staff the learners are not on a footing with the expert workers. The teachers or shop managers will help the younger members to gain the knowledge and facility which they have acquired as fellow members of an enterprise In which all have a common interest The participation of the young members in the enterprise will be great or small depending upon their achievement of standards. For instance, in the case of office work whether the individual children are entrusted with the correspondence, bookkeeping or banking, will depend upon whether or not they have achieved the adult standards in the shop for such business details. But standards in business accounting, in estimating costs, in planning operations, and in technique, will not be maintained as they usually are in industrial schools for the sake of the training, but for the purpose of carrying forward successfully the actual work with which the shop is concerned. While the educational experience is concerned in part with appreciation of workmanship, creative inspiration in modern industry will never be a common experience until the workers gain an understanding and recognise the significance of their special enterprise in relation to other industrial enterprises and to the business of wealth production as a whole.

If the school experience is educational, the interest of the pupils in subject matter will not end with the solution of their shop problems or with their experience in industry. The above outline of tentative school subjects representing as they do the solution of the problems of a specific industry signifies merely the starting point of an adventure for young people in the serious affairs of adult life. There will be a large margin for choice in the election of subjects in which individual children will care to specialize but these subjects will be related more or less directly to the industry. The pupils will doubtless be freer in the second year than in the first to choose where they want to specialize as they will have had time in which to establish their ground work.

But the election of studies in a two years' half-time course will not admit of flights very far afield of the subject in hand and of the problems originally set up. Those children who find that their participation in a productive enterprise is an enriching experience may elect to follow some special leads in science, in the past and present history of manufacture and commerce, in economics, in literature or in art. The intention of the school is to open up opportunities for such expansive expressions of the concrete experience as time and the capacity of the pupils admit, provided that the expression has its valid relation to the promotion or the enrichment of the enterprise of which they are responsible members.

Certain pupils, we will say, will elect to carry further than others the testing of fuel, of heating and ventilating. Others may be concerned with experiments in power. A subject possibly will become of such absorbing interest to a pupil that he will want to experiment with the one he elects for its own sake and without relation to the problems in the shop. His interest may carry him into pure science, unattached to any problem in hand. In such cases the pupil should be given a chance to test out his interest; he should be placed on probation in relation to his elected subject and if his interest holds and is sufficiently serious he will be advised to give up the school-shop work and follow the lead his interest has taken in some other place or school.

Indeed the value of the experiment will rest on discovering whether or not it holds the interest of the pupils, or how and where it diverts it. The experiment is launched on the assumption that the normal adolescent child is concerned with the responsibilities of adult life; especially it is assumed that he is concerned to function creatively, to associate with others in productive work, to help supply such fundamental needs as the housing, feeding and clothing and the pleasures of the world demand. It is assumed that the desire for experience in pure science, in art for art's sake, comes before as well as after this period when the need for social contact is, it is again assumed, the dominating emotion. We have no scientific proof that any of these things are true, but we have sufficient evidence to justify an experiment.

Whether or not it is possible for modern industry to offer young people a proper chance for making their social adjustments is also a question which I hope this experiment may help to answer. We can do no less than use the conditions of industry as they present themselves to us as our basis for a trial. I have started with the belief that possibly the division of labor and scientific methods of management if handled by the workers in conjunction with engineers and people of experience can be made the instruments of associated life. If there is ground for this assumption it will be important to induce the young people who enter the school and work shop to give their industrial experience a fair trial and to postpone the pursuit of pure science or art for its own sake.

The subject matter taken up in this school can be subjected to a formal school classification, under such regular academic headings as Mathematics, Science, Economics, Geography, History, Reading, Composition and Drawing. While these subjects will be experimentally rather than academically pursued, it will be a matter of small moment and short time for pupils to makeup deficiencies which the traditional school courses require. This is true because the pupils will have had first hand experience with the subject matter in which the ordinary school child is trained or hears about. The free pursuit of their studies will give them a familiarity and speaking acquaintance with the subject matter with which the traditional school is avowedly concerned but which it handles and guards as though it were the custodian of some precious, but insubstantial matter, belonging to a world somewhat attenuated.

It is the intention of this educational experiment to bring down the great enterprise of industry, so far as it is possible to its real character and to high accomplishment, and in so doing to give the young people the experience of the industrial adventure and full achievement, lest they become the subjects of those who control the movements of industry and determine the character of its advance. The practical test of the experiment briefly outlined would be: (1) Was the creative impulse aroused? (2) Were standards of workmanship discovered and sustained? (3) Was a broad as well as a working knowledge of subject matter acquired? (4) Did the children approach established methods in a spirit of hospitality and of inquiry as to their validity? (5) Did the problems create sufficient interest to arouse the desire and will to reject faulty methods, and introduce others of greater service? (6) Was the enterprise a productive one from the point of view of the market and an educational one from the point of view of growth?