The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

Perhaps you are satisfied with this country, and my proposals for changing it do not appeal to you; but even so, that does not alter the fact that the changes are under way. Our country is in the rapids, along with all the rest of the world. Modern capitalist society is rushing to a swift and terrifying breakdown; and this not because of crimes or evil designs of any man or class of men, but because of economic forces inherent in it, and beyond the power of our feeble social will to change.

Under the scheme of modern industry enormous quantities of goods can be produced, but they cannot be distributed, because of what I call “the iron ring” which binds the profit system. The great mass of the people, being upon a competitive wage, do not get money enough to purchase all that they produce; hence comes over-production, periodic crises, “hard times” and unemployment. Out of this is born the labor movement—and this again not due to wickedness of individual agitators, but to irresistible economic force. Under the capitalist method of production the great mass of the workers are under a pressure which I call “the economic screw.” Their ultimate fate is extinction, and they organize to save themselves; the first to go down are the unorganized—including that white-collared proletariat to which the educators are so proud to belong.

Because no capitalist country can consume its own wealth, every capitalist country has to seek foreign markets, and in that search it conflicts with the other capitalist countries. Out of that rivalry grows war: incessant world-wide war is the abyss into which our present society is doomed to be hurled. We have seen the collapse come to Russia; as I write this book it is coming to Germany—and before I write many more books we shall see it come to the Central European countries, then to France and Italy, then to England and Japan, and—last of all, perhaps, but none the less inevitably—to America.

You will recall one of our famous school orators, recently president of the National Education Association, defining to the world-educators in San Francisco the function of teachers—to see to it that to the next war “we shall not send a soldier who cannot write his name.” Such is the capitalist concept of education and the duty of the educator. Is it yours? You may answer that it is not; but take note of this fact—what you answer makes not the slightest difference. That is what you are doing, and it is what you will continue to do, under the present class control of industry; training boys to be loyal servants of the plutocracy, to manufacture new and more terrifying engines of destruction, and to go out and die horrible deaths whenever the plutocracy, in its lust for foreign markets, has brought about such a condition of jealousy and hate that the people can be stampeded into a war for the defense of liberty, or democracy, or whatever the rascal politicians and rascal kept editors choose to call it. That is the future of our children, and that is the rôle which you, the educators, are commanded to play—which you do play hour by hour, and with the perfectly explicit understanding that the penalty of refusal is to lose your status among the white-collared class, the so-called “ladies and gentlemen,” and to be beaten down to the status of grimy hands and overalls and celluloid collars.

What can you do about this? The first thing you can do is to understand it; to get those books and magazines and newspapers which your masters are moving heaven and earth to keep away from you, and in which you may find explained the economics of the class struggle, and the forces which are dragging mankind into the pit.

When you have acquired this knowledge, you will realize once for all that you can place no hope in the exploiting class. Individual employers may be kindly and liberal; but with very few exceptions they are bound in the psychology of their occupation, and the great mass of them are like every other ruling class in history, drunk with power, and bent upon their own aggrandizement. In this present world situation they find themselves confronted with two possible alternatives—world conquest and class rule for themselves, or abdication and class suicide. In no country are they going to choose the latter alternative; so you, the educators under the capitalist regime, are going to fulfill your destiny as cultivators of cannon-fodder.

The middle class, in which you aspire to remain, is being ground between the upper and nether mill-stones. You have seen the value of the rouble and the mark wiped out; you see the franc started on the toboggan, and some day you will watch the pound and the dollar travel the same road. More and more the outlines of the world struggle become clear—on the one side the plutocracy, and on the other the workers. It is the workers, and they alone, who can deliver us from slaughter; they alone have the numbers, the potential power, and they alone have the ethics—being producers, not gamblers and speculators and wasters. The future world of co-operation and brotherhood is theirs to make, and all they lack is ripened understanding and vision of the better life.

Twenty years ago, when I first came into the Socialist movement, I had the beautiful fond idea that the intellectuals would furnish that new psychology. Twenty years of watching the brain-workers climb out upon the faces of the poor, and take their comfortable stations as retainers of privilege, have brought me to realize that the workers must save themselves; they must supply not merely the numbers, the industrial power, but also the idealism, the moral power. When I appeal to educators, I am not indulging in youthful utopianism; the salary struggles of the past six or eight years have brought vividly home to the rank and file of teachers the fact that they too are workers, and that, far from being superior to the proletariat, they are actually less paid and less respected than carpenters and masons and machinists, who are organized and able to protect themselves in the wage market. I am not for a moment overlooking the fact that educators are idealists and social ministrants; but I assert that they are also members of the intellectual proletariat, having nothing but their brain power to sell, and I appeal to them to realize their status, and to act upon the realities and not the fairy tales of the capitalist world. The educator is a worker, a useful worker, and the educator’s place is by the side of all his brothers of that class. “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to gain.”

INDEX

Roman numerals refer to chapters, Arabic numerals to pages. Names of colleges and schools are in italics.