Part 4

Thank you for being so explicit. Mr. Jones next. Mr. Jones, you have just heard Mr. Smith’s splendid testimonial to the value of a college education--how it has unlocked for him the ages’ accumulated wealth of literature, of science, of art--how it has put him in vivid touch with the world in which he lives--how it has made him realize his own powers, and given him a serene confidence in his ability to use them wisely--how fully it has equipped him to live in this complex and difficult age--in a word, how it has helped him to become all that a twentieth century American citizen should be! Have you, Mr. Jones, anything to add to his account of these benefits?

MR. JONES: “Your coarse sarcasm, if aimed at me, is misdirected. I never went to college. I didn’t want to tend furnaces, so when I finished high school I got a job. But there’s something to this gentleman’s sons’ stuff. I had four years’ start of Smith, but I feel that he’s got a certain advantage over me just because he _is_ a college man. Now why is that, I’d like to know? I could have gone to college too, if I had cared enough about it. But studying didn’t interest me. I was bored with high school.”

Exactly, Mr. Jones. And some hundreds of thousands of others were also so bored with high school that even the prestige which a college education confers, could not tempt them to further meaningless efforts. You have explained a large part of the breakdown of our public school system. In theory--but Mr. Robinson wishes to speak.

MR. ROBINSON: “Theory--theory--theory! I think it’s about time a few facts were injected into this alleged discussion! The fact I’m interested in is just this: I quit school when I was twelve years old. I had just finished grammar school. I _couldn’t_ go to high school. I _had_ to go to work. What have your theories of education got to do with me?”

Everything, Mr. Robinson! You smashed one theory to pieces, you were about to be condemned to a peculiar kind of slavery by another theory, and you were rescued after a fashion by a third theory. You are, to begin with, the rock upon which the good ship Education foundered. As I was about to say when I was interrupted: the grandiose ideal of a gentleman’s sons’ education for every American boy failed--because there were some millions of American boys like you who _could not_ go to college, and some hundreds of thousands of others like Mr. Jones here, who _would not_--who did not feel that it was worth the necessary effort. And these vast hordes of you going out into the world at the age of twelve to sixteen with only the precarious beginning of a leisure class culture, became the educational problem which the last generation has been trying to solve.

X. Employer vs. Trade Unionist

It was the American Business Man who proposed the first “practical” reform; and if you have any doubt of the validity of the Caste theory, note what happened. The American Business Man knew that these millions of youths were going to enter his shops and factories; they were not going to be members of a leisure class, they were going to be wage-slaves; and so he proposed to educate them to be efficient wage-slaves.

And he might have succeeded in imposing his capitalistic version of the Caste theory of education upon our public schools, had it not been for the trade unions, who perceived in these capitalist plans a means of breaking down their own apprentice system. “What! turn the schools into training-schools for strikebreakers? No!” they said--and they bitterly opposed every attempt to introduce industrial training into the schools, and mustered to their aid the old notions of the Magic of Books. “Let the children have an _education_”--meaning book-learning; “it will be time enough for them to learn to _work_ when they leave school,” was the general verdict. And so in this clash of economic interests, one theory warred with another, and the theory of Education as a mysterious communion with the Magic of Books happily won.

Happily--for though the controversy had its unfortunate results, in the fixing of a prejudice in the minds of the working people against industrial education, we should not fail to realize that in that controversy the trade unions were right. We do not want to educate the children of the poor in this twentieth century to be a human sub-species; it would be better to give them fragments of a leisure class education than fix them into the wage-slave mould; it would be better that they learned Greek and Latin (or, for that matter, Sanscrit!) than merely a trade. It would be better to turn them out as they came in, helpless and ignorant, than to make them into efficient machines.

But such a choice is not necessary. It is possible to have an education which produces human beings who are neither out of touch with their age nor hopelessly confined within it--a generation which will be the masters and not the slaves of its environment.

The outlines of such an educational system were already being drawn, in theory and even experimentally in fact. But these radical proposals threatened to cost more money than governments are accustomed to expend on peaceful and constructive enterprises. Yet something had to be done in response to a popular sense of the imperfections of our system.

Something was done accordingly.

XI. The Goose-Step

Bear in mind that the necessities of the case required something which would not cost any money, which would leave the system really intact, and yet which would impress beholders with the fact of Progress.

The device which answered to this description was copied from Prussia and informed with the essence of the Prussian spirit--a quasi-military Uniformity. There is nothing, indeed, so impressive to the observer as the sight of everybody doing exactly the same thing at the same time. And when that thing is totally unnecessary and very difficult, the effect is to stun the mind into a bewildered admiration. Hence the preposterously military aspect of the schools of yesterday--the marching in line out to recess and back again. Hence the drillmaster airs of the teaching force--as, for instance, the New York teacher who boasted, “I said to my pupils, ‘All who live on Blank street raise their hands,’ and then I turned to talk to the superintendent, forgetting to say ‘Hands down’--and five minutes later, when I looked around, those Blank street children still had their hands up. That’s what I call discipline!” And hence the reprimand to the other New York teacher because, when she came back from a visit to Italy, she told the geography class about her journey and passed around picture postcards, instead of hearing the children recite the appointed Lesson from the appointed Book at the appointed Hour. Think how it sounds for a city superintendent to be able to pull out his watch and say to a visitor: “At this moment every sixth grade pupil, in every school in the whole city, is opening his geography!” That is System, and it must not be deranged in order to _interest_ a mere roomful of children in the realities of geography for half an hour!

I experienced some of the benefits of the Goose-Step System myself, back in Illinois--and I know just how a child feels about it. He feels just as you would feel if at the conclusion of a theatrical performance you were commanded to “Rise! Turn! Pass!” He feels humiliated and ridiculous. He feels that he is being made a fool of. The Goose-Step System is not intended to make its little victims feel happy; it is only intended to impress beholders with the fact of Progress.

_And this kind of Systematization, this fake reform, has been the only serious contribution to American educational practice in the public schools during the life of the generation to which you and I belong--until within the last few years._

Fortunately, another crisis arose. In every large city the attendance at the public schools outgrew the school capacities, and it became necessary to put many children on a “half-time” basis. And this scandal demanded relief. It still demands relief. And at present we are faced with a choice between two methods of relief.

One method is familiar--to turn the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops and factories. It is the system now approved by the educational authorities of most of the large cities, including New York. The other is a sane and democratic proposal for education on scientific principles, for the benefit of the child and of the race.

XII. The Gary Plan

It was in the nature of a happy accident that this sane and democratic proposal came before the public as a practical alternative to the scheme of turning the grammar schools into adjuncts of capitalist shops and factories.

It happened that a man named Wirt solved in the schools of Gary, Indiana, the problem of accommodating two pupils with a desk built for one. He did this by the simple means of abolishing the private and exclusive character of the desks. By having one-half the pupils come a little later and leave a little later than the other half, and use the desks which the others had just vacated for the gymnasium or workshop or assembly room, it was found that there were desks enough for all. And because this plan made it unnecessary to spend some millions of dollars on new school-buildings, he was invited to come to New York and put his plan in practice there.

If that had been all there was to the Gary system, it might have been adopted peacefully enough. But the Gary system was a real and hence a revolutionary kind of education, and so it met with immediate and bitter hostility.

It made the child and his needs the center of the whole process of education. It undertook to give him a chance to learn how to live. It made the school to a large extent a replica of the world outside. It gave him machinery and gardens and printing presses to play with and learn from. And right there it aroused the suspicions of working class parents, who were afraid their children were not going to get enough Book-learning. It demanded something of teachers besides routine and discipline and stoic patience; and though they came with experience to be its most enthusiastic advocates, they were in prospect roused to angry opposition. It abolished the semi-sacerdotal dignities of the school-building, and thus offended a deep-lying superstitious reverence in a public which regarded education as something set apart from life. It clashed with the bureaucratic fads of the higher educational authorities, and provoked them to financial sabotage. And finally it was dragged into politics, where as the pet project of an administration of bureaucratic reform officials it was held up to popular scorn.

But the ideal of education which was implicit in the Gary plan is still up for judgment.

XIII. Learning to Work

Here, then, is the situation as it stands. Our education is out of relation to the time in which we live. It is breaking down under the pressure of economic forces which demands that it turn out people who do not have to be _re-educated_ by modern industry. It cannot remain as it is. It will either be made the instrument of a democratic culture which accepts the present but foresees the future; or it will fall into the hands of those who are planning to make it a training school for wage-slaves. Here is the latter program, as described by the superintendent of schools in a great American city:

“Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led us to experiment with industrial education in the grades.... Our controlling idea was that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of industrial life should be grouped in prevocational schools in which they would receive, in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such instruction and training in constructive activities as would develop aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the opportunity to _rotate term by term through various shops_ is afforded in seven schools to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the 7th, 8th and 9th years.”

Between these two programs you must choose. Either efficient democratic education, or efficient capitalistic education.

“But,” asks some one, “what is there to choose between them? Democratic education and capitalistic education both seem to me to consist in turning the school into a workshop.”

Not at all! The democratic plan is rather to turn the workshop into a school. That may seem like a large order, but I may as well confess to you at once that the democratic scheme proposes ultimately to bring the whole of industry within the scope of the educational system: nothing less! But the benevolent assimilation of industry by education in the interest of human progress and happiness, is one thing; and the swallowing of the public school system by industry in the interest of the employing class, is quite another.

For the present, however, democratic education merely brings the workshop into the school, so that the processes of industry may be the more readily mastered; while capitalist education merely sends the school-child into its workshops, in order that he may become more effectively exploitable. The difference should be sufficiently obvious: in the school-workshops of capitalism the child is taught how to work for somebody else, how to conduct mechanical operations in an industrial process over which he has no control; in the democratic workshops of the school he learns to use those processes to serve his own creative wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave--and bear in mind that this refers to the children of the poor--for the rich have their own private schools for their own children. In the other, the child learns to be a free man.

That is just what irritates the capitalist reformers of our public school system. Since the children of the poor are going to be factory hands, what is the use of their having learned to be free men? They might as well have learned Greek and Latin, for all the use it is going to be to them!

And that is why you must exercise your choice. The merits are not quite all on one side of the question. There are disadvantages in the democratic plan of education. These disadvantages have nowhere been made more clear than by H. G. Wells in his fantastic scientific parable, “The First Men in the Moon.” You will remember that his explorers visited the Moon in a queer sort of air-craft, and found there a people with institutions quite unlike our own. They too, however, had classes, and they had solved the problem of the education of these classes in a forthright manner which is utterly unlike our timid human compromises. One of the visitors from Earth thus describes the Lunar System:

“In the Moon ... every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end. They check the incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage his mathematical bias with a perfect physiological skill. His brain grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential part of him. At last, save for rest and food, his one delight lies in the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line. His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame; his limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere stridulation for the stating of formulae; he seems dead to all but properly enunciated problems.... And so he attains his end....

“The bulk of these insects, however, ... are, I gather, of the operative [working] class. ‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature--it is no figure of speech; the single tentacle of the mooncalf-herdsman is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages to these important parts ... others again have flat feet for treadles, with ankylosed joints; and others--who I have been told are glass-blowers--seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need it meets....

“The making of these various sorts of operatives must be a very curious and interesting process.... Quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the fore limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injections, while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them.”

The Lunar system has indeed much to be said for it; and the capitalist plan of wage-slave education has at least the merit of being a definite step in that direction.

XIV. Learning to Play

“But in either case,” exclaims an indignant mother, “the child ceases to be a child--under either the democratic or the capitalistic plan--”

No, madam! The object of a genuine democratic education is to enable him to remain always a child.

“Then,” says another interlocutor, “I must have misunderstood you. I thought you conceived of education as _growing-up_.”

Growing up, yes--out of the helplessness, the fear, the misery of childhood, which come only from weakness and ignorance: growing up into knowledge and power.

“But putting aside forever his toys and games,” protests the mother. “Forgetting how to play!”

No, madam. Learning rather to take realities for his toys, and entering blithely into the fascinating and delightful game of life. Forget how to play? That is what he is condemned to now. It is a pity. And that is precisely what we want to change.

“By setting him to work?”

What! are we to quibble over words? Tell me, then, what is the difference between work and play?

Or rather, to shorten the argument, let me tell you. Play is effort which embodies one’s own creative wishes, one’s own dreams. Work is any kind of effort which fails to embody such wishes and such dreams.... When you were first married, and began to keep house--under difficulties, it may be--was that work or play, madam? Do not be afraid of being sentimental--we are among friends. Is it not true that at first, while it was a part of the dream of companionship, while it seemed to you to be making that dream come true, it was play--no matter how much effort it took? And is it not true that when it came to seem to you merely something that had to be done, it was work, no matter how easily performed?--And you, my friend, who built a little house in the country with your own hands for pleasure, and worked far beyond union hours in doing it--was not that play?

It was _your own house_, you say. Just so; and it is the child’s own house, that cave in the woods which he toils so cheerfully to create. And it was their own house, the cathedral which the artisans and craftsmen of the middle ages created so joyously--the realization of a collective wish to which the creative fancy of every worker might make its private contribution.

You know, do you not, why we cannot build cathedrals now? Because craftsmen are no longer children at play--that is to say, no longer free men. They toil at something which is no affair of theirs, because they must. They have become the more or less unwilling slaves of a system of machine production, which they have not yet gained the knowledge and power to take and use to serve their own creative dreams.

But men do not like to work; they like to play. They want to be the masters and not the slaves of the machine-system. That is why they have struggled so fiercely to climb out of the class of slaves into the class of masters; it has been that hope which has sustained them in what would otherwise have seemed an intolerable condition. And that is why, as such a hope goes glimmering, they join together to wrest from their employers some control over the conditions under which they work; and also why their employers so often prefer to lose money in strikes rather than concede such control--for the sense of mastery is dearer even than profits. That is, incidentally, why so many workers prefer a white collar job to a decent union wage--because it permits them to fancy themselves a part of the master class. And finally, that is why the industrial system is now at the point of breakdown--because a class of workers who have no sense of mastery over their jobs cannot and will not take enough interest in their work to meet the new and stupendous demands upon production. When pressure is put upon them, they revolt--and hell is raised, but not the production-rate.