“By the excessive mental effort and physical energy it is sometimes possible to arouse the adults for the moment—but only for the moment. They have been too long victims of a deadly environment. Our hope lies with the children. Strange as it may seem, part of our plan gives the children opportunity to assist in education of their parents. It is altogether surprising to me to see how well this works out in practice.
“Each club has an ‘editor’ who reads a paper at each meeting night. This does not mean that the editor simply produces a ‘literary paper.’ As a matter of fact most of the editors take their work seriously. They make a good job of it. The papers in most instances are educational, instructive as well as newsy. Practically all of the clubs take their ‘paper’ to the local newspaper and have it printed therein. This makes for genuine propaganda. Besides this plan, with proper tutelage, helps to develop potential editors who may one day be recognized as factors in the newspaper field.
“All my work is based on the honest conviction that we can expect no help from the public schools or colleges. Of course the forces of competition have them absolutely under control. There can be no real help from the subsidized press of the present time. Even library lists are censored. Because of such conditions I believe that this is the way out. The plan works. That’s something. Other states are taking it up. Kansas, South Dakota and Georgia have already written for the plan with the intention of carrying it out.”
If this book were not already too long, I should like to take space to tell you about this kind of work. But all these schools and reform projects have their own literature, which they will send you for the asking. I want to add, by way of comforting some anxious souls, that I am not really a pessimistic and destructive person; I understand that there are many earnest workers in the schools, and that some of them manage by tact and force of personality to put liberal ideas into the heads of their students. I know that plutocratic influences are not entirely unopposed in America; I know that conditions portrayed in this book are less bad than they would be, if conscientious men and women were not risking their jobs every hour. My reason for writing this book is my belief that these people can do their work better, if they know exactly what they are opposing. I do not want liberal teachers to be in the position of Mr. M. C. Bettinger, who gave thirty-eight years of his life to the school system of Los Angeles, as teacher, assistant superintendent, and school board member, and then, after he had been kicked out in his old age, read “The Goose-step” and wrote me these pathetic words: “I may not be of much help to you, but you certainly have helped me. I know now what I have been trying to do, and what has been done to me.”
I close this chapter on workers’ education with a message from an abler writer than myself. In France the teachers are an organized and disciplined social force; and to their trade union convention came the greatest of living French prose masters, a sage and bel esprit whose high position in the world of letters has not held him from full sympathy with the revolutionary workers of the world. I quote four paragraphs from the message of Anatole France to the teachers of his country; and I mention, in case you want to read it all, that you can find it in the “Nation,” Vol. 109, or in the “Living Age,” Vol. 302.
Pardon me for returning to this; it is the great point upon which everything depends. It is for you, without hope of aid or support, or even of consent, to change primary education from the ground up, in order to make workers. There is place today in our society only for workers; the rest will be swept away in the storm. Make intelligent workers, instructed in the arts they practice, knowing what they owe to the national and to the human community.
Burn all the books which teach hatred. Exalt work and love. Let us develop reasonable men, capable of trampling under foot the vain splendor of barbaric glories, and of resisting the sanguinary ambitions of nationalisms and imperialisms which have crushed their fathers.
No more industrial rivalries, no more wars: work and peace. Whether we wish it or no, the hour is come when we must be citizens of the world or see all civilization perish. My friends, permit me to utter a most ardent wish, a wish which it is necessary for me to express too rapidly and incompletely, but whose primary idea seems to me calculated to appeal to all generous natures. I wish, I wish with all my heart, that a delegation of the teachers of all nations might soon join the Workers’ Internationale in order to prepare in common a universal form of education, and advise as to methods of sowing in young minds ideas from which would spring the peace of the world and the union of peoples.
Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.”