So here is the perfection of plutocratic education. You may learn from it what Big Business is going to do to all our children; in fact, you have already learned it—turn back to Chapter XXI, and read about Margaret Haley’s deputation of nine school teachers who came to Detroit to study the “platoon system” as there applied. I am told by an educator whom I trust that this system is fundamentally good; I am here discussing only what is found in the great metropolis of automobiles, the headquarters of all standardization. I remind you of its deputy superintendent, in charge of this Fordization of infancy, who tells us how “society” is certain to require more and more propaganda from the schools, and this is the system which makes it possible. Ask yourself, before it is too late, whether you are satisfied with your destiny, to breed human units to be turned into factory operatives and cannon fodder for the masters of the new American Empire.
CHAPTER XXXIX
BEETS AND CELERY
We go from city to city, and I wonder, will you grow tired of reading the same things over and over? Perhaps we shall be wise to agree on a few formulas, so that you may get a situation in a phrase. Let us agree upon “salary campaign,” to mean that the teachers took up the fight to get an increase in wages—and didn’t get very much. Also the phrase “union smashing,” to mean that the teachers formed an organization, and were forced to quit it or to quit the schools. Also the phrase “schools overcrowded”—meaning that the children of the poor are jammed into old, unsanitary buildings, while the city is erecting palatial high schools, with all the luxuries for the children of the rich. Also let us recall the familiar “Propaganda” and “Repression,” which tell us that business men come to the schools to sing the praises of business, while teachers are reprimanded for the slightest hint of a liberal idea. All these things are a part of the school system in the metropolis of automobiles. As one teacher phrased it to me: “We know that the old watchful eye is on us!”
I have before me a copy of a publication called the “Industrial Barometer,” Detroit, Michigan, September, 1923. It is the organ of the Employers’ Association, and is full of bitter, sneering arguments against labor unions and public ownership—proving that public ownership of railroads leads inevitably and “by easy steps” to public ownership of babies! A copy of this publication is sent free of charge to every school teacher in Detroit, and when the teachers read it through they find the menace which is meant for them: “The spread of radical and iconoclastic theories in colleges calls for a closer inspection of persons and things herein than heretofore.” (This of course is intended as a lesson in economics, not in English!)
I got an interesting light on Detroit education from a group of Socialist children. Needless to say, these children were not having a happy time in the schools; they were forced to listen all day long to attacks upon their faith—and this regardless of what might be the supposed subject of instruction. One teacher discussed the wickedness of teachers forming unions, and pictured their plight when ordered on strike: “And we’d be clubbed over the head if we refused!” A teacher of economics explained all poverty as due to the extravagance of the poor; she talked for half an hour about a case she had known, a poor woman who bought a mahogany furniture set costing six hundred dollars, and including three plate glass mirrors! You understand, it is not permitted the children of Detroit to argue with their educators; as one child said to me: “We almost die with rage!”
Sometimes these children would be pained to note that teachers of a liberal bent of mind would make some statement, and then be seized with fear, and apologize and explain that they didn’t really mean it. One teacher explained that she was using a very reactionary text-book, because she had to. “And,” added the child, “that teacher is not teaching any more.” The child understood exactly why, having often observed the principal standing behind a half-opened door, listening to what was going on in the class!
The Socialist children brought me their text-books, to show what they had to endure. For example, that work on English literature written by the principal of the Northern High School of Detroit, Edwin L. Miller. This local celebrity tells the children of his city that George Bernard Shaw “persistently obtrudes upon the public the absurd proposition that all property should be held in common.” I hereby publicly offer to Mr. Miller or his publishers, the Lippincotts, the entire income which I may derive from this book if they will point out to me a single passage from the writings of George Bernard Shaw in which this proposition is advanced. Will Mr. Miller or his publishers let me hear from them? They will not!
Also “The Elements of Political Economy,” by Professor J. Laurence Laughlin, prize reactionary of the University of Standard Oil. This eminent economist tells the school children of Detroit that “Socialistic teaching strikes at the root of individuality and independent character.” I have known some thousands of Socialists in my lifetime, and I venture the estimate that nine out of ten of them possess more individuality and independent character than a kept college professor of the Rockefellers. This professor is so rabid in defense of his masters that he even finds it necessary to underscore the phrases in his text-books: “The great difficulty with these schemes,” etc. He reveals himself so ignorant of Socialism that he cannot even spell correctly the names of its leaders; he gives three names, Proudhon, Karl Marx, and Lassalle, and misspells two of them!
Or consider this sentence: “If men constantly hear it said that they are oppressed and down-trodden, deprived of their own, ground down by the rich, and that the State will set all things right for them in due time, what other effect can that teaching have on the character and energy of the ignorant than the complete destruction of all self-help?” I take the liberty of answering this rhetorical question: such teaching can have the effect of making the ignorant realize that for the mass of the proletariat under the capitalist system individual effort is a pitiful delusion and snare, and that the one hope for the workers lies in class-conscious collective action. And when the ignorant have learned that lesson, they will be wiser than a professor who teaches economics under a Rockefeller subsidy, and produces poison text-books to be published by Mr. Barnes of the American Book Company, and sold to the schools of Detroit by the convicted henchman of Mr. Barnes’ brother-in-law, and purchased for the city of Detroit by the brother of this convicted henchman!
I got another interesting sidelight on the schools of this metropolis of automobiles by talking with a group of citizens interested in the prevention of child labor. Because the workers of Detroit are taught by poison text-books to rely upon self-help instead of solidarity, they are so poor that they are unable to keep their children in school. The big business men of Detroit are charmed with this condition, not merely because it enables them to avoid paying taxes to build new schools in the slums, but also because it provides them with an abundant supply of child labor for their industries. In the effort to abolish such labor, the reformers of Michigan obtained passage of a law allowing poverty-stricken parents a sum equal to what the children might earn if they worked; also, they obtained a mother’s pension law, for the support of those children whose fathers are killed in the automobile factories. But what is the use of such excellent laws when there is no budget provided to pay the money? In the county in which the state capital is located some mothers are getting as little as fifty cents a week for the support of their children!