XXIIIORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION
At a recent labor conference in New York City, May, 1916, called to present a program for the local public schools,Mr.Gompers expressed himself as open-minded towards the Gary plan which is about to be extended to thirty-five more New York schools. This open-mindedness ofMr.Gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city, who have apparently tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of the elementary schools. But organized labor has better business than opposing educational reform, andMr.Gompers’s remarks, made with full responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan spirit of the conference, suggest that the responsible leaders of labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important movement.
Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the institutions and movements of the world about them. Labor above all classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial processes and occupations. The education that labor desires is one which will give, particularly to those who engage in industrial callings, the desire and ability to share in social control, and to become masters of their industrial fate.
Now organized labor must be rapidly coming to see that this demand will never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school. A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure class can neverbe made into a pre-vocational school that will give power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. An elementary school which gives its children no more than narrow drill in the three R’s plus a little remote and unreal text-book information in history and geography, with what little half-hearted music and drawing and nature-study can be squeezed in, will never provide the foundation that the trained worker will need. No system of trade-training or vocational education superimposed upon such an elementary school will remedy the evils. Children who have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in book-work will have acquired attitudes that are likely to be carried over into vocational work. Except for the few, industrial training will seem sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no interests and powers developed in earlier years. Pre-vocational education must mean something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school for work. Such training, if it is to mean anything, must be woven in as an organic part of the school course. The entire elementary school could bea general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school, where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use. The school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work, and aimless experiment into purposeful construction.
Most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon him. There is danger in current educational experiments that we become too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses, without at the same time transforming the school so that the new work is organically assimilated. Labor cannot be content with the school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of vocational courses merely in the upper grades.Such a postponement means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on to industrial work. It broadens the gulf between labor and leisure rather than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to protest against these “pre-vocational courses,” “junior high school plans,” as they are variously called. A school which consists merely of six years of bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers. It would produce mechanical drudges. It would almost guarantee that industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which organized labor so much fears.
In advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in New York have been very badly advised. The program of “immediate demands,” put forth underMr.Gompers’s nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor, is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is exactly the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the public expense. In whose interestdoes labor demand the “immediate elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary schools?” To eliminate organized play, auditorium dramatics, shopwork, gardening, dancing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children out of school, or to train them into mere appendages to machines. What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! And to ram home to the public a sense of its straitened vision, this conference records its “emphatic protest against any further extension of the Gary plan.”
Now opposition to the Gary plan may be auseful attitude for the lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes, but we cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements in the labor movement. For what the Gary plan does is exactly to make possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its own expressed educational ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexibility which adapts the school to the needs of every child, the interweaving work, study and play, transform the traditional school into a kind of child-community, where children throughout the course are laying the rudiments of their vocations. They have a chance from the early years, by trial and error, by experiment and realization, to find out what they can do and what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as the home, shop and school teacher educated the children of earlier American days. No formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does. In a sense, industrial education may begin in the Gary school as soon as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or laboratoriesas helper or observer. All the activities may be tested in the same way. The school is thoroughly democratic because the opportunities, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal terms to all the children. For labor to oppose the Gary plan means that labor is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most opportunity for an enriched education for its children.
Mr.Gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of the educational promise of the Gary school. If organized labor were to put itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it would have at once an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement. It would be well if the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who manipulate education for political purposes. The time has come for a bold and progressive stand.