Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

by Helen Marot

Such experiments educators and engineers would enter together and together enjoy in reality the development of creative effort, which is their profession. Such productive educational experiments in the absence of profiteering would give meaning to the early years of industrial life which now lead the children nowhere. They would give the young people, as the experiments come up to the test, the spirit for the adventure of industrial life, the courage and desire for solving the pressing issues of their time.

If the claim made by employers were true, that from 95 to 99 per cent of the working force is without productive impulse, that this condition of development represents, as they say it does, the "native limitation" of the men who work, industry as a progressive enterprise is doomed and high hopes for civilization are without foundation.

If the position of employers is true and the limitations of individuals are as final as they have determined, there is nothing to do except perfect the mechanical responses of men. This preëminently would be the business of employers and not of education which is concerned with the growth of the individual. On such a basis, it is inconceivable that educators would concern themselves with preparing people for industry. If, however, these limitations are not native, but are due to some incompatibility between the institution of industry and the interest of the labor force, then the limitations of workers and of industry are a matter of paramount importance in the field of education.

As I have said before there is a common supposition among people who are not employers of labor, that such features of industry as the mechanical devices of modern technology and the division of labor in factory organization, are in their nature opposed to the expansive development of the people involved; that these features of apparent intrinsic importance to mass production, are antagonistic to individual growth and to the interest of workers in productive effort.

Without question, it is the business of educators to determine whether such features of industry as machinery and the division of labor are fundamentally opposed to growth or whether they are opposed only in the way in which they have been put to use and directed. We can discover whether or not these features are opposed only as the people concerned have the chance to master them and undertake, through their experience, to turn them to account.

Because industry has been impersonalized and the mechanics of associated effort in industry worked out in such large measure, it is to-day possible to conceive of spiritual as well as physical association in productive enterprise. A difficulty in the way of this conception, aside from the business complex, is our habit of thinking exclusively of creative effort as an individual expression. In describing the individual expression we would say that a man may create a machine but that when men jointly produce one they work. The creative act is in the conception of the machine in conjunction with its construction, and the conception, after our habit of thinking, is an individual and isolated achievement. As a matter of fact it frequently is. A man may create a machine if he conceives it and constructs it or if he conceives and directs its construction. Those he directs, those who do the work of construction alone, do not participate in the creative act, as the creative act is the concentrated intellectual and emotional expression and effort to produce an article or idea. The creative impulse is concerned with the transforming of a concept or some material into an expanded concept or a new object. The creative impulse itself finds its satisfaction in the process of completion and loses its force when the concept or object is produced. The use of the concept or object created is not a characteristic of the creative but of the social impulse. A man who is interested in the use or application of a product, the value it has for others, possesses the social impulse as well as the creative. One impulse is intensive and the other extensive.

But the creative effort is not necessarily an individual matter. It may be possible for a group of people to associate cordially and freely together with a single creative purpose and endeavor. It may be possible for each worker to experience the joy of creative work as he takes part with others in the planning of the work along with the labor of fabrication. It is a creative experience or dull labor as his association with others in the solution of the problem is freely pursued and genuine, or as it is forced and perfunctory.

My justification for making this assertion will be recognized by every one who has had the opportunity to attend shop meetings of a newly organized trade union. These meetings are unique as they disclose the force in a productive group, and the value of giving the individuals engaged in routine work the opportunity to pool their common experience and pass judgment on methods of work. Whatever decisions these workers come to, none are fully realized or freely pursued under conditions which industry imposes. But in the course of shop meeting discussions, it becomes clear to an observer that methods of work is as absorbing a topic as the relation of the work to the wage. The routine which is the apparent result of the division of labor, becomes under discussion a matter of technical import. The workers' knowledge of labor saving devices and their resources for inventing new ones are as expert as is the business man's knowledge of how labor cost can be saved. This matter under discussion is of high interest and concern. There is an integrity in the concern which evidently springs from experience and the suppressed interest in perfecting methods and the inter-relation of the workers in a shop. The vitality and intelligence of these machine tenders may well inspire the agitator who addresses their meetings to curse a system which withholds full knowledge of the workshop and blocks the opportunity for eager workers to try out new schemes born of intensive experience and failure to function in the fullness of their capacity.

Industry offers opportunities for creative experience which is social in its processes as well as in its destination. The imaginative end of production does not terminate with the possession of an article; it does not center in the product or in the skill of this or that man, but in the development of commerce and technological processes and the evolution of world acquaintanceship and understanding. Modern machinery, the division of labor, the banking system, methods of communication, make possible real association. But they are real and possible only as the processes are open for the common participation, understanding and judgment of those engaged in industrial enterprise; they are real and possible as the animus of industry changes from exploitation to a common and associated desire to create; they are real and possible as the individual character of industry gives way before the evolution of social effort.

We speak of interdependence in industrial enterprise as though it were some new thing. The early interdependence had its roots in the common knowledge and use of an inherited technology, where property was common in the common use of it. Interdependence due to modern technology has increased, and the interdependence which characterizes our own time is economic. The tools of industry as well as the natural resources are owned, and only by application to the owner can a man live or labor. However disastrous that ownership has been to past generations, it has bound men together in their use of what we ironically call labor saving devices; devices which have not saved labor in the interest of labor.