The tenets upon which capitalism is founded have already been abandoned in part by their sponsors as unworkable. But at best they represent a standard of social morality that is essentially destructive of social well-being.
The human race has no guarantee of the success of any experiment, and recent experiences with the war, and with the present post-war plight of Europe suggest that the capitalist experiment will fail disastrously unless some extraordinarily successful efforts are made to put things to rights.
Society experiments, trying first one means of advancement and then another. A certain number of these new ventures, which prove to be of social advantage, are adopted and incorporated into the social structure. The vast majority are rejected as inadequate to meet the social need. Capitalism is apparently in this latter class.
Experiment is the necessary road to new experience, and the cost of experiment is written in the immense wastes that it involves. Experience gained through experiment is sometimes very costly. It is never cheap.
Frequently these costs, measured in terms of misery, are so great as to overbalance the advantages gained through the experiment. If, therefore, there were another way to gain knowledge except through the processes of experiment, it would result in an immense saving for mankind.
There is a way, other than experiment, in which knowledge may be gained. Instead of relying on experiment (direct experience) for the spreading of knowledge, it is possible to utilize the indirect channel called education. If this method is followed, and the results of the race experiment and experience are made available to the young of each generation, the need for experiment will be limited to a narrow field, since most of the necessary knowledge will be communicated through education.
The individual need not repeat all of the experiments of his ancestors with animal breeding, harvesting, weaving, smelting, writing, house-building, etc. One by one these arts and crafts were built up—each generation adding its quota to the total of knowledge. These results of past experience, which were first passed from hand to hand, then from mouth to mouth, and finally written down, and which have been handed from generation to generation through the processes of education, are among the most important of all social assets.
The farther the race goes in its accumulation of knowledge, the more important does education become, since there is more to transmit from one generation to the next. Among primitive people the educational process is completed at a very early age. With the emergence of arts and crafts, the apprenticeship to life becomes longer. At the present time, the individual may continue his education as long as he is capable of acquiring new ideas. Under the present society, therefore, the educational processes are the chief reliance for the transmission of new ideas.