: Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators by Marot Helen - Technical education United States; Working class Education United States; Business and education United States

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CHAPTER

CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY

INTRODUCTION

A friend of mine in describing the Russian people as he observed them in their present revolution said it was possible for them to accept new ideas because they were uneducated; they did not, he said, labor under the difficulty common among educated people of having to get rid of old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mind to say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind is filled with ideas which are institutional. The ideas which come out of formal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas which have been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are, as they have proved their worth in service. But as they represent authority, they pass into a people's mind with the full weight of an accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books are not responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every established institution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rules of action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them. The movement for industrial education in the United States is an illustration of this.

The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or colleges but from industry. The institution of industry, rather than the institution of education, dominates thought in industrial education courses. It is the institution of industry as it has affected the life of every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thought in conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No established system of education or none proposed is more circumscribed by institutionalized thought than the vocational and industrial school movement.

Educators have opposed the desire of business to attach the schools to the industrial enterprise. They have rightly opposed it because industry under the influence of business prostitutes effort. Nevertheless, hand in hand with industry, the schools must function; unattached to the human hive they are denied participation in life. Promoters of industrial education are hung up between this fact of prostituted industry and their desire to establish the children's connection with life. They have tried to meet opposing interests; they have not recognized all the facts because the facts were conflicting, and their minds as well as their interests, institutionally speaking, were committed to both.

This was the impasse we had apparently reached when the war occurred; it is where we still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war will end and we shall be called then to face a period of reconstruction. The reconstruction will center around industry. The efficiency with which a worker serves industry will be the test of his patriotic fervor, as his service in the army is made the test during this time of war. All institutions will be examined and called upon to reorganize in such ways as will contribute to the enterprise of raising industrial processes to the standard of greatest efficiency.

The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was one of refined brutality. During the progress of the war, the significance of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms. It is the industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human development that has made her victories possible. It is that efficiency which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive for over three and a half years. Germany's military strategy is, in the main, her industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in turning technology to the account of an imperial purpose.

But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to emulate the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength. While it is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace to the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the significance of the methods is but vaguely realized. It is probable that after the war it will be said that it was not the German methods which were objectionable, but that it was their use in an international policy. Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope we shall discover how intrinsically false those methods are; and how untrue to the growth process is the sort of efficiency Germany has developed. I hope also that we shall realise that a policy of paternalism has no place in the institutional life of our own country. Before the war these German methods bore the character of high success, and they had a large following in this country. There are indeed many thousands of men and women in the United States, who, while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war against Germany still support industrial and political policies and dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian. The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German paternalism is the token of an enslaved people.

The German educational system as much if not more than its other imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his early years, like a predestined fact.

American business men before the war appreciated the educational system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of their own. But the situation was embarrassing as these business men were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest. Their embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially, they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted as a national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology in both England and America.

First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the sort of education that America wants.

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