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Page 40
It is much easier to go over the old paths of education with "manual
training" thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler to appeal to the old
ambitions of "getting on in life," or of "preparing for a profession,"
or "for a commercial career," than to work out new methods on democratic
lines. These schools gradually drop back into the conventional courses,
modified in some slight degree, while the adaptation to workingmen's
needs is never made, nor, indeed, vigorously attempted. In the meantime,
the manufacturers continually protest that engineers, especially trained
for devising machines, are not satisfactory. Three generations of
workers have invented, but we are told that invention no longer goes on
in the workshop, even when it is artificially stimulated by the offer of
prizes, and that the inventions of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century have by no means fulfilled the promise of the earlier
three-quarters.
Every foreman in a large factory has had experience with two classes of
men: first with those who become rigid and tolerate no change in their
work, partly because they make more money "working by the piece," when
they stick to that work which they have learned to do rapidly, and
partly because the entire muscular and nervous system has become by
daily use adapted to particular motions and resents change. Secondly,
there are the men who float in and out of the factory, in a constantly
changing stream. They "quit work" for the slightest reason or none at
all, and never become skilled at anything. Some of them are men of low
intelligence, but many of them are merely too nervous and restless, too
impatient, too easily "driven to drink," to be of any use in a modern
factory. They are the men for whom the demanded adaptation is
impossible.
The individual from whom the industrial order demands ever larger
drafts of time and energy, should be nourished and enriched from social
sources, in proportion as he is drained. He, more than other men, needs
the conception of historic continuity in order to reveal to him the
purpose and utility of his work, and he can only be stimulated and
dignified as he obtains a conception of his proper relation to society.
Scholarship is evidently unable to do this for him; for, unfortunately,
the same tendency to division of labor has also produced
over-specialization in scholarship, with the sad result that when the
scholar attempts to minister to a worker, he gives him the result of
more specialization rather than an offset from it. He cannot bring
healing and solace because he himself is suffering from the same
disease. There is indeed a deplorable lack of perception and adaptation
on the part of educators all along the line.
It will certainly be embarrassing to have our age written down
triumphant in the matter of inventions, in that our factories were
filled with intricate machines, the result of advancing mathematical and
mechanical knowledge in relation to manufacturing processes, but
defeated in that it lost its head over the achievement and forgot the
men. The accusation would stand, that the age failed to perform a like
service in the extension of history and art to the factory employees who
ran the machines; that the machine tenders, heavy and almost dehumanized
by monotonous toil, walked about in the same streets with us, and sat in
the same cars; but that we were absolutely indifferent and made no
genuine effort to supply to them the artist's perception or student's
insight, which alone could fuse them into social consciousness. It would
further stand that the scholars among us continued with yet more
research, that the educators were concerned only with the young and the
promising, and the philanthropists with the criminals and helpless.
There is a pitiful failure to recognize the situation in which the
majority of working people are placed, a tendency to ignore their real
experiences and needs, and, most stupid of all, we leave quite untouched
affections and memories which would afford a tremendous dynamic if they
were utilized.
We constantly hear it said in educational circles, that a child learns
only by "doing," and that education must proceed "through the eyes and
hands to the brain"; and yet for the vast number of people all around us
who do not need to have activities artificially provided, and who use
their hands and eyes all the time, we do not seem able to reverse the
process. We quote the dictum, "What is learned in the schoolroom must be
applied in the workshop," and yet the skill and handicraft constantly
used in the workshop have no relevance or meaning given to them by the
school; and when we do try to help the workingman in an educational way,
we completely ignore his everyday occupation. Yet the task is merely one
of adaptation. It is to take actual conditions and to make them the
basis for a large and generous method of education, to perform a
difficult idealization doubtless, but not an impossible one.
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