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Page 39
Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools and
institutions of learning most accessible to working people. First among
them is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism of
type-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce and
methods of distribution. Commodities are treated as exports and
imports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, of
course, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturing
processes to which they have been subjected. These schools do not in the
least minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is in
the shop and not in the office. We assume that all men are searching for
"puddings and power," to use Carlyle's phrase, and furnish only the
schools which help them to those ends.
The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academic
course in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learning
too much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits in
earning money. He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits,
nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for those
of his friends who have not risen in life. "It is as though nets were
laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or
other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught
and held from substantial service to their fellows." The academic
teaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extension
lectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, and
concerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences.
The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of
a hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental
exertion. There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist in
attending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessed
of a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fuses
into availability or realization.
Among the many disappointments which the settlement experiment has
brought to its promoters, perhaps none is keener than the fact that they
have as yet failed to work out methods of education, specialized and
adapted to the needs of adult working people in contra-distinction to
those employed in schools and colleges, or those used in teaching
children. There are many excellent reasons and explanations for this
failure. In the first place, the residents themselves are for the most
part imbued with academic methods and ideals, which it is most difficult
to modify. To quote from a late settlement report, "The most vaunted
educational work in settlements amounts often to the stimulation
mentally of a select few who are, in a sense, of the academic type of
mind, and who easily and quickly respond to the academic methods
employed." These classes may be valuable, but they leave quite untouched
the great mass of the factory population, the ordinary workingman of the
ordinary workingman's street, whose attitude is best described as that
of "acquiescence," who lives through the aimless passage of the years
without incentive "to imagine, to design, or to aspire." These men are
totally untouched by all the educational and philanthropic machinery
which is designed for the young and the helpless who live on the same
streets with them. They do not often drink to excess, they regularly
give all their wages to their wives, they have a vague pride in their
superior children; but they grow prematurely old and stiff in all their
muscles, and become more and more taciturn, their entire energies
consumed in "holding a job."
Various attempts have been made to break through the inadequate
educational facilities supplied by commercialism and scholarship, both
of which have followed their own ideals and have failed to look at the
situation as it actually presents itself. The most noteworthy attempt
has been the movement toward industrial education, the agitation for
which has been ably seconded by manufacturers of a practical type, who
have from time to time founded and endowed technical schools, designed
for workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitably
reflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferring
a few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and a
few less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but did
not aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work which
the permanent specialization of the division of labor demands.
The Peter Coopers and other good men honestly believed that if
intelligence could be added to industry, each workingman who faithfully
attended these schools could walk into increased skill and wages, and in
time even become an employer himself. Such schools are useful beyond
doubt; but so far as educating workingmen is concerned or in any measure
satisfying the democratic ideal, they plainly beg the question.
Almost every large city has two or three polytechnic institutions
founded by rich men, anxious to help "poor boys." These have been
captured by conventional educators for the purpose of fitting young men
for the colleges and universities. They have compromised by merely
adding to the usual academic course manual work, applied mathematics,
mechanical drawing and engineering. Two schools in Chicago, plainly
founded for the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration of this
tendency and result. On the other hand, so far as schools of this type
have been captured by commercialism, they turn out trained engineers,
professional chemists, and electricians. They are polytechnics of a high
order, but do not even pretend to admit the workingman with his meagre
intellectual equipment. They graduate machine builders, but not educated
machine tenders. Even the textile schools are largely seized by young
men who expect to be superintendents of factories, designers, or
manufacturers themselves, and the textile worker who actually "holds the
thread" is seldom seen in them; indeed, in one of the largest schools
women are not allowed, in spite of the fact that spinning and weaving
have traditionally been woman's work, and that thousands of women are
at present employed in the textile mills.
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