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Page 41
We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize life
through his vocation. We easily recognize the historic association in
regard to ancient buildings. We say that "generation after generation
have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them,
until they have become the property of all." And yet this is even more
true of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held in
human hands. A machine really represents the "seasoned life of man"
preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancient
building does. At present, workmen are brought in contact with the
machinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set of
industrial implements had been newly created. They handle the machinery
day by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth. Few
of the men who perform the mechanical work in the great factories have
any comprehension of the fact that the inventions upon which the factory
depends, the instruments which they use, have been slowly worked out,
each generation using the gifts of the last and transmitting the
inheritance until it has become a social possession. This can only be
understood by a man who has obtained some idea of social progress. We
are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of
labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby,
and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product
long enough to really focus it upon the producer. Theoretically, "the
division of labor" makes men more interdependent and human by drawing
them together into a unity of purpose. "If a number of people decide to
build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, and another breaks
them, they are quite inevitably united by their interest in the road.
But this naturally presupposes that they know where the road is going
to, that they have some curiosity and interest about it, and perhaps a
chance to travel upon it." If the division of labor robs them of
interest in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact of interdependence
amounts to nothing.
The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievance
beyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know what
it is all about. We may well regret the passing of the time when the
variety of work performed in the unspecialized workshop naturally
stimulated the intelligence of the workingmen and brought them into
contact both with the raw material and the finished product. But the
problem of education, as any advanced educator will tell us, is to
supply the essentials of experience by a short cut, as it were. If the
shop constantly tends to make the workman a specialist, then the problem
of the educator in regard to him is quite clear: it is to give him what
may be an offset from the over-specialization of his daily work, to
supply him with general information and to insist that he shall be a
cultivated member of society with a consciousness of his industrial and
social value.
As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting to
make his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is a
workingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaning
into his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results.
Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when they attempt educational
institutions in connection with their factories, are prone to follow
conventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find,
indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of
the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The
latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the
specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtues
pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was
perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues
of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly
organized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If a
workingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must see
industry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that will
include not only himself and his immediate family and community, but the
industrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterity
of hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machinery
and subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the more
necessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should get
a sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine with
a material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totally
unrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing what
becomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course,
unquestionably deadening to his intellectual and moral life. To make
the moral connection it would be necessary to give him a social
consciousness of the value of his work, and at least a sense of
participation and a certain joy in its ultimate use; to make the
intellectual connection it would be essential to create in him some
historic conception of the development of industry and the relation of
his individual work to it.
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