We have as yet no deep philosophy of industry. For better or for worse work came into the world as a result of desire. Men did not desire work, but they desired that which could be obtained only by work. These desires multiplied and the modern industrial world is the result. When material objects alone were desired, the motive of work was relatively simple; but as we pass from the desire for goods to the desire for wealth, and to the desire for wealth as a means of gaining power and prestige, the industrial movement becomes more complex. We go on and on, producing ever greater wealth and generating more and more power, and we do this we say with no deep purpose and with no philosophy of life. For the justification of it all, if it be under our control at all, we can only say that through industry we realize an abundant and enriched life.
The good and evil of work put upon us some of the most perplexing of our problems. Industry, we say, is the way to the rich and the abundant life. It makes life more complex. The relations of life are multiplied by it. It represents and it achieves man's conquest over nature. It puts force into his hands. It has its ideal side and its romance. It gives scope to pure motives of creativeness. But the industrial life has also its dark side. It has created the city with all its good and its evil. It has created great nations, but see what the added populations consist of. It brings on the old age of nations. It stands for struggle that is often fruitless and unproductive. It engenders moods and arouses interests and powers that lead to warsand revolutions. It fosters sordid interests, and has made almost universal the necessity of an excess of toil in order barely to live. The great majority of workers do not live in their work, because they produce nothing that is in itself satisfying. The spirit remains outside their daily life. Life is divided into a period of toil without deep interest and motive, and play which may be only a narcotic to kill the sense of monotony and fatigue. Individuals have specialized at the expense of a whole life. Men have been exploited and used like material things. Bergson says that by industry man has increased his physical capacities, but now it is likely that his soul will become mechanized rather than that his soul will become great like his new body. Industry, worst of all, has become an end in itself, rather than a means to higher ends. To live, on the one hand, to gain wealth on the other, men give all there is in them to toil.
We saw all this before the war, but one important result of the war has been that we now see that this industrial life which has so rapidly created new institutions, and which grips the world almost like a physical law, is not in all its ways so fixed and inevitable as we had perhaps thought. In regard to the industrial life, more than in any other department of life, we see new and radical thought, and the possibility of conscious effects, although it must be admitted that some of the proposed changes may well cause apprehension.
We had hoped, even before the war, to see industry and art become gradually more closely related, and to see industry become more socialized. Its physical hardships were to some extent already being ameliorated. We hoped to separate the great industrial interests from politics, and to curb the powers industry has that make it a trouble producer in the world. But now, after the war, we see possibilities of more fundamental changes in the industrial order than these improvements implied. Our thoughts now touch uponthe whole theory of the industrial life. We see that by a coördinated effort and common understanding which it is no longer chimerical to hope for, the conditions of the industrial life might be very different. In the first place we are convinced that the world could produce vastly more and could use its products with far greater economy than now. We see that much greater return for less labor could be gained. Even the desires themselves upon which many of the evils of industrialism are based have shown themselves to be controllable. It is no longer idle to believe that the restraint and coöperation necessary to eliminate most of the poverty from the world are possible to be attained. The isolation of the individual worker, which has made his struggle so hard, seems about to be relieved to some extent at least. We even hope for permanently better relations between the capitalist and the laborer, and to see some of the evils of competition, even the industrial competition among nations, lessened.
Although the interest here is in the relations of industry to education, rather than in the practical changes pending in the industrial world, we must think of the two as related. Changes that take place in political and industrial conditions will be likely to be temporary and ineffectual unless they are supported by changes in the field of education. The reformer and the educator must work together.
Noyes says that the most fundamental change that has occurred during the war has been the world-wide assertion of public control of industry by the government. Perkins says that centralization is the order of the day, and that the government now properly takes on many functions that once belonged to the states, and that this process of centralization naturally extends to international relations. Smith speaks of the growing interdependence of government and industry which will especially give security to investment in productive enterprises. Hesse says thatthere must be national team work in all industries, and that in a democracy everything that autocracy can accomplish must be repeated, but upon a basis of voluntary coöperation. In France it has been proposed by Alfassa that there shall be established a department of national economy, to bring about a closer coöperation than there has been in the past among private interests, and to centralize industry. Wehle thinks that in America, even before the war, industrial concentration was leading to political concentration and that the states were losing their relative political importance. The grappling of states individually with large industrial problems is now, he says, at an end. Dillon has expressed the view that England ought to adopt industrial compulsion. Clementel, the French minister of commerce, thinks France ought to substitute for liberty without restraint in the industrial field, liberty organized and restricted.
There can be no doubt that the world is thoroughly awake to the need of more effectual coöperation in industry, and it is natural that the first thoughts should turn to government control as the simplest and readiest method of securing it. When we examine these suggestions about the coördination and centralization of industries it becomes evident that most writers have been strongly influenced by Germany's remarkable success, both in peace and war, under the system of governmental control of industries. The manner in which the German government turned all the country into one great industrial plant has appealed to the imagination, and many writers see in centralization under the control of government the means of curing most of the evils of industrialism. There are many proposals, all the way from the plan to introduce cabinet ministers with limited power to have oversight over industry to the total abolishment of the capitalistic system and all the rights of property. Many of course, while still believing in concentration and coöperation, cling to the system of private and individual ownership, and believe that the best results willbe obtained in the end without any radical change in the relations between government and industry, and without resorting to any socialistic reform.
Another phase of the problem of industry in which we may expect to see great changes in the future concerns the status of labor and its relation to capital. The rising of the laboring class is certainly the greatest internal result of the war. Here again the question is whether the changes will take place by coöperation or by compulsion—either on the part of government or of some organized class. Will labor and capital continue to be antagonistic, or will they find common interest; or will the only solution be again some radical change involving change of government or abrogation entirely of our present system of ownership? That the position of labor has become stronger as a result of the war no one can doubt. Perkins says we are just entering upon a period of copartnership, when the tool-user will be part tool-owner, and capital and labor will share more equally in the profits. Increase in wages will not be the remedy, but only profit sharing. Others think the same; they see that the laborer's discontent is not all a protest against his hard physical conditions. He wants more social equality, more equality of status in the industrial world. He objects not so much to what the capitalist has as to what he is.
There has no more illuminating document come out of the war than the report on reconstruction made by a subcommittee of the British Labor Party. This report calls for a universal minimum wage; complete state insurance of the workers against unemployment; democratic control of industries; thorough participation by the workers in such control on the basis of common ownership of the means of production; equitable sharing of the proceeds by all who engage in production; state ownership of the nation's land; immediate nationalization of railroads, mines, electric power, canals, harbors, roads and telegraph; continuedgovernmental control of shipping, woolen, leather, clothing, boots and shoes, milling, baking, butchering, and other industries; a system of taxation on incomes to pay off the national debt, without affecting the living of those who labor.
Although such a document as this could hardly up to the present time have been produced by American workmen, since here political doctrines of socialism have never obtained a strong hold upon the laboring classes, in England these radical demands are nothing surprising. They have the support at many points of so keen a thinker as Russell. Russell does not, it is true, believe that Marxian socialism is the solution of the problem of capital and labor, but he does believe in the state ownership of all land, that the state therefore should be the primary recipient of all rents, that a trade or industry must be recognized as a unity for the purposes of government, with some kind of home rule such as syndicalism aims at securing. Industrial democracy, as planned in the coöperative movement, or some form of syndicalism, appears to him to be the most promising line of advance.
That such demands and proposals as these are significant signs of the times can hardly be doubted. That from now the status of the workman will be changed and changed in directions more satisfactory to the workman we may accept as one of the chief results of the war. Politically the laborer is prepared to assert his independence. Both his social and his industrial status are likely to be improved. He will be better safeguarded against unemployment. Wages in the old form and the old tradition that the worker has no contract with his employer will, in all probability, be less generally acceptable. Work, if these new conditions are realized, will mean more to the worker. His own interests and the purposes of his work will be more harmoniously related. The individual made more secure in his work, protected more by law and participating more in theaffairs of business and government, will have a sense of playing a more dignified part in the social economy. Conceal as we may the inferiority of the laborer's position under the pretenses of democracy and liberty and equality, this inferiority of position exists and the inequality that prevails in democratic society is certainly one of the fertile sources of evil in the world to-day. We have still to see to what extent the workman, his lot ameliorated in many ways, and his position changed, will himself become a new and different man, and thus make the world itself a different place in which to live. All that is thus suggested we have a right at least to hope for now. If it is also worked for with intelligence and good will, why should it not come to pass?
The third idea which is beginning to make great changes in the whole field of the industrial life and throughout all the practical life is theidea of economy. This means that in many ways questions of the values, the purposes, and the ways and means of what is done in the world are being sharply examined. Labor has been uncritical of its purposes, and lavish and wasteful of its energies, however watchful it may have been of its rights. Production has been governed too much by desire, too little by careful consideration of need. Distribution has been carelessly conducted, allowing large losses of time and material. Consumption has been quite as careless as the rest, and has been thoroughly selfish as well. The war has changed many of our ideas. Thrift has become a word with a new meaning. We see what industry at its worst might do in the world, and on the other hand what wise control of all the motives and processes that enter into labor and all the economic life might accomplish.
Some of these changes are coming from readjustment in the coördination of industrial processes themselves. We hear much of standardization and stabilization. An economic technique and the control of fluctuating conditionsmight do much to increase the efficiency of industry in every way. This idea of the application of scientific procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual details of movement and the whole process of expenditure of energy, counting costs in terms of time and energy, in much the same way as all the items of value that enter into production are estimated. Some writers, for example Gilbreth, see in this movement a great advance. It is a way of giving equal opportunity to all. Economy becomes a factor in freedom, since it helps to eliminate the drudgery and depression of toil.
Plainly, then, economy or thrift has a much wider meaning than mere saving. It is many-sided, and the study of economy in the use of essentials is but a part of it. The war has, of course, emphasized this, and this idea of saving has served the purpose of awakening an interest in the whole theory and purpose of work. There is a better understanding of values, and of the difference between the essential and the unessential, and we see that not all labor that commands pay is useful labor. Many things that the public knew but little about before are becoming better understood. Industry, finance, business, taxes, transportation, have all to some extent become popular subjects. The present high cost of living raises questions in the theory of the economic aspect of life that have compelled the attention of the public. The theory of money, interest, savings, foreign investments, the place of gold in the world's economy is carried a step further and is popularly more extended. We hear all sorts of proposals about the production, the distribution and the consumption of goods, whichare intended to make living easier and less expensive. Increased production of staples and more direct route from producer to consumer are urged upon all, and the economists have many suggestions for increasing our prosperity: while financiers try to direct to the best purpose our investments at home and abroad. Fisher attacks the whole theory of costs at what he believes its root, suggesting a plan of "stabilizing the dollar itself" by using the index numbers of standard articles as units of value, and regulating the weight of gold in the dollar according to the fluctuations of these. All these plans, hasty and narrowly conceived as many of them seem to be, are of interest and have value, for they indicate a serious determination to solve the fundamental problems of the practical life.
Any educational theory that could hope to deal adequately with the needs and the impending changes in the industrial situation of to-day must take into consideration the basic facts both of the individual and the social life. Teaching of industry and all attempts to teach vocation must be seen by all now to be but a small part of education with reference to the industrial life. We must do much more fundamental things than these. We must plan far ahead and seek to lay a firm foundation for the idea of coöperation which appears to be the leading thought of industrialism to-day. Every individual, we should say, ought to be educated in the fundamentals of labor, so that he may understand for himself what labor means. Finally the idea of thrift in all its implications must be made a part of the educational program. All this may seem too ideal and impracticable to think of in connection with industrial education, but if we consider industry and industrialism as the center of our whole civilization, as it appears to be now, what less ideal educational foundation will be sufficient as preparation for and control of the industrial life? No teaching of trades, we assert, will be enough. We shall need to apply, in industrial education or in an educational plan that takesindustry into account, all the methods of teaching: those that employ industry itself, but also art, erudition, and play.
It is first with industrialism as a world condition that education is concerned. Industrialism has been, as all must recognize, too individualistic. It has motives and moods and products, and it grows in social conditions, that are full of danger for society. Industrialism lacks a soul, as Bergson would say. Yet it is a movement that sweeps on with almost irresistible force. Its most characteristic product is not what it turns out in shops, but city life itself. Many would agree with Russell in saying that all the great cities are centers of deterioration in the life of their nations. Education, then, must undertake to control industrialism. This does not mean, necessarily, that it must try to check it, but that the motives in individual and social life that produce industrialism must in some way be under the control of educational forces.
First of all it seems certain that no political arrangement, and no change taking place entirely within the industrial system itself, and no simple and direct educational procedure will give us control over the forces of industrialism. It is mainly by preventing the city spirit or mood from developing too fast and thus engulfing the children of the nation that we can introduce a conscious factor strong enough to hold industrial development within bounds. This means, we must earnestly demand, turning back the flow of life from country to city by educating all children in the environment of the country. This would have a double effect upon the industrialism of the day.It would break up the present inevitable inheritance by the city child of all the ideals and moods of the city, and it would give opportunity for training in the activities that are basic to all industry, which alone, in our view, can give to industry a solid and normal foundation.By such effects, in such a general way, upon the children of an industrial nation, we might reasonably hope to prevent the evil effects upon ournational life from the fatigue, the routine, and the deadening of the spirit which even under improved conditions cannot be overcome in an industrial life that is left to its monotonous grind and its morbid excitements and exaggerations.
Another work that education must in the end do for the industrial life is to infuse into it an ideal and a purpose. Industry is too individualistic, we say. It works for a living, for power, from necessity. It lacks through and through as yet the spirit of free and intelligent coöperation for common and remote ends. Coöperation in the industrial world, we have seen reason to believe, is likely to be the great word of the future. It is precisely the work of education to make the future of industry an expression of free activity, to make it democratic, and to such an extent, we might hope, that socialism, whether as a governmental interference or as a class system, would not be necessary—or possible. In trying to give industrialism an ideal, we must presumably go back to elemental mental processes. We must, in the beginning, present the world's work dramatically to the child. We must give work interest, and it is certainly one of the chief purposes of that nondescript subject we call geography thus to give the child a deep appreciation of the world as a world of men and women engaged in work. We must show industry as a world-wide purpose, not as something essentially individual and competitive. We must show it as an adventure on the part of man in which he goes forth to seek conquest over the physical world; we must think of it as a means to an end, of fulfilling purposes not all of which perhaps can as yet be foreseen, but which certainly can be no mere satisfaction of the individual's desires of the day. This is what we mean by putting a soul into industry. Soul means purpose—purpose which includes more than the desires of the individual, and in which the interests of the world as a whole are involved. Industry that has thus a purpose, andthat is imbued with a spirit of freedom takes its place among the psychic forces and becomes a part of the mechanism of mental evolution. It is this idealism of industry, toward the production of which we must turn every educational resource, that must offset its materialism. This is, in part, the work of the æsthetic experiences, the dramatic presentation of the day's work to the child; but art can of course work only upon the soil of experience; the child must see the world teeming with human activity, but he must observe it in a detached way, rather than as a participant in its realism and its dull and its unwholesome moods. Then we shall have a content upon which the æsthetic motives can work. In this idealized industrial experience, we try to make visible the real motives which in the future must dominate the world's work.
All this may seem too general and too ideal, but if we do not begin with broad plans, and if we do not take a far look ahead, we shall fail now at a vital point of the social development of man. The result at which we aim isthe socialisation of the motives of industry. We make work voluntary by bringing into it persuasively and insidiously deep motives and interests which represent social purposes and ideals. Given these motives and the beginning of a change from the relatively more individualistic to the relatively more social spirit in industry, the actual means of coöperation would not be far to seek. Work would become by its own inner development under such conditions, something different from an unwilling service of the individual, a compulsory service to family or state. Everything we can do to give to children and to all workers an intelligent appreciation of the social meaning and purpose of work is both industrial training and an education in basic social relations. This socialization of the moods of work and the founding of them upon the necessary experiences, is as important as anything education is at the present time called upon to do. Given this foundation,precisely the form industrial education, in the ordinary sense, shall take, seems to be of secondary importance.
Turning now to another phase of the industrial problem on its educational side, one cannot escape the conviction that the rising tide of the powers of labor presents urgent problems to the educator. The common man, as we call him, is to take a greater part in the affairs of business and state, and the education of the common man with reference to the especial capacity, as worker, in which he seeks this new position, becomes highly important. This education of the people with specific reference to work is of course something more than teaching vocation. Education, indeed, with any explicit attention to labor itself, whether in its industrial or its political implications, is but a part of the educational problem. All education for the democratic life is involved in it. The whole problem of specialization comes up, and indeed all questions of social education in one form or another.
Specialization, in particular, can no longer be treated with the indifference that has so far characterized our industrial education. The ideal of fitting the boy for work is as naïve in one way as that of our generalized education is in another.If the war has taught us anything beyond a doubt, it is that specialization must never be such a differentiation as shall infringe upon the common ground of human nature.We must take this into consideration in all our vocational training. We must preserve an identity in all the fundamental experiences. In a democracy this appears to be wholly necessary, and to outweigh all considerations of efficiency. The individual must be kept whole and generic, so that each individual is an epitome, so to speak, of the virtues and the ideals of the nation. The humanity of the man must be first, and his special function secondary. This does not imply that we must not give to all children individual and vocational training. All must be directed towards life work. We may even carry vocationaltraining further than it has been extended anywhere as yet, but we must see that industry occupies the right place in the school, and in all educational processes. It is neither the whole method and purpose of the school, nor something simply added to the curriculum. It is a phase of the life of the school, both in its active and its receptive states. The child must live in an atmosphere in which both present and future usefulness are assumed and provided for. The idea of a life of work must be made early an accepted plan of the child, and it must be one of the entirely general tasks of the school to see that the tendency of the child in the school is toward occupation. Occupation must in fact be made to grow naturally out of the life the child leads in the school.
All those disharmonies in our industrial countries such as the prevalent discord between working and capitalistic classes seem, we have said, to be social rather than economic in nature. Social education, then, is the main cure for them, if we wish to attack them at their root. The motives of pride and the sense of inferiority have to be dealt with in a practical manner. We sometimes quite overlook the importance of habitual moods or states of feeling in society and in the school. These moods are powers which motivate conduct. Any form of education in which the poorer and less favored are given an opportunity to acquire the experiences, and through these the moods, that especially distinguish the more favored class, strikes at the general disparity in society which takes form in such antagonisms as that between capital and labor. It is not difference in degree but difference in kind of experience that appears to separate the classes from one another. The difference seems to lie in those parts of life which are sometimes believed to be the unessentials and which indeed our whole educational policy assumes apparently to be trivial.The fundamental differences between the poor and the rich, the favored and the common people, is in the sphere of the æsthetic.Distinction of manner and an environment richin æsthetic qualities are the main advantages of the few, as compared with the many. Social experience is what is most needed by the many, but of course this experience can never be gained by making the educational institutions merely democratic, and especially social experience cannot be gained in a school in which all situations are studiously avoided in which really significant social relations are likely to be experienced. We gain no social experience in the naïve and the highly special activities of the school which for the most part is arranged in such a way as to exclude organized social relations. This is a process in which such leveling as there is tends to be downward, whereas what we need is for all the truly aristocratic elements in our national life to have an opportunity to propagate themselves and to extend to the many. Leaving aside the need of a differently organized social life in the school, we might say that there is hardly a greater need in democratic countries now than that of recruiting the rank and file of teachers from a socially superior class. These socially favored individuals have given themselves loyally to the service of country in a time of war, for two if no more of their deepest motives have been appealed to—the dramatic interest and the spirit ofnoblesse oblige. There are duties in times of peace which are quite as important, but which as yet appeal to no strong motive, and have not even been presented in the form of obligation. Once these common tasks were made to appear a part of the fulfillment of duty to country, the way to finding deep satisfaction in them might be opened. Social and dramatic elements would be introduced as a matter of course.
Another need throughout our whole effort to educate all in and for a life of work, one which has appealed to many writers in recent years, is the need of making all the experience of work more creative or more free and animated or joyous in mood.This means, again, that in all industrial education the mood must be social and theform æsthetic or dramatic.Social values must be felt through social activity, and the sense of worth in labor and of value of the product which is felt in the social mood must be enhanced by the dramatic form of the activity and the artistic quality of the product. This is also the condition for creative activity. Some writers apparently now see in this need of making the activity of all those who work more creative, more free and more joyous the crucial problem of education and of social adjustment. This is Russell's constant theme. Helen Marot in "Creative Industry" says that our problem is to develop an industrial system that shall stimulate and satisfy the native impulse for creative production. It is difficult to see how, by any other educational process than one which is essentially æsthetic and social, we can make much headway toward changing the conception of work from the now prevalent one of a means of making a living, more or less under compulsion, to that of a voluntary social act done both for its utility from the standpoint of the individual and also because of its social value, and performed to some extent, however humble the work, in the spirit of the creative artist.
For the adult generation that now works (and for how many generations to come we do not know), we cannot hope to make ideal conditions. Work will still be work, with its evil implications, as toil without complete inner satisfaction, and without sufficiently free motives. But the direction in which practical changes should be made seems clear. There must still be a lessening of the hours of routine labor, until there are perhaps no longer more than six or five devoted to vocation. The remainder of life is not for idleness but must be in part productive or the lessened hours of routine will not be possible. There must be possibility of both practical and recreational activities outside the regular day's work, as well as for educational work, all of these in part at least publicly provided for. This activity may serve many purposes and accomplish a varietyof results. As educational it ought to open up new opportunities; it must fulfill the desire for creative activity; it must be a socializing power; it must lead to an appreciation of the nature and value of skill and efficiency; it must introduce all to the higher world of art and the intellectual life. Above all it must impress deeply the truth that growth in the normal life is never ended.
The third phase of industrial education which is to be emphasized now is the teaching of what we have calledthrift. This idea of thrift, for pedagogical purposes, is equivalent to the broad principle that purposes in this world are achieved by the expenditure of force—by the control of energies which are not unlimited in amount as now controlled and which are subject to definite laws. Since objects which are to be secured by the expenditure of energy differ in value it is a part of this education in thrift, indeed an important and necessary part, to give to all such knowledge and powers of appreciation as will enable them to recognize that which is essential, and to give the essential and the unessential their proper places in the whole economy of life.
It will never be right of course to inspire a parsimonious spirit in regard either to goods or to energies. Life itself and all its energies must be given freely; material goods must not be evaluated too minutely. The miserly life is not what we wish to teach. Still there is a wise attitude toward all material things and toward all values which recognizes goods as means to ends, which places true values high and demands economy in the use of all things that must be conserved in order to attain them.
It must be a part of the work of physiology, which thus branches out into psychology, to teach to all the efficient use of human energies. These energies are the precious things in the world; they must be valued and respected as the source of all efficiency. The idea of economy of movement, from this standpoint, has an important place in allmotor or industrial or manual training. Processes must be regarded as definite series of acts in which we may approach perfection. Technique in motor operations is not to be regarded lightly as a mere finish applied to useful acts. It is the expression of an ideal of efficiency and economy. Children recognize the value of technique in games; its wider and more practical application needs to be impressed.
In the same way knowledge of the precise values and uses of material things ought to be imparted. The war has had the effect of showing all of us the values of materials and the relations of materials to one another. It has given us a sense of the great powers of natural wealth, and also of its limitations and the weak points that exist now in our economy. The war has proved to us how closely related the things we use lavishly and wastefully may be to the most ideal possessions. It has shown that the production, the distribution and the use of wealth of all kinds are parts of the accomplishment of the main purposes of life and that all these things belong to the sphere ofduty; and that no individual can escape obligations in regard to economy.
Education, therefore, must lay foundations both for an understanding of economy and for the practice of it. First of all, every individual, we may assume, ought to have some experience in the production of the elementary forms of material goods, and in the conversion of them into higher values and in their conservation. We looked carefully to some of these activities as a war measure. It is hardly less necessary in times of peace. We should teach these things, not simply because the practice of them is educational, but because the practice of them is useful, and is a necessary service, on the part of every individual, to the world. Adding to the world's store of goods and consciousness of the need of doing this directly or indirectly should be regarded as a fundamental duty and habit. Toestablish both the habit and the sense of duty, we may suppose, a stage is necessary in which the individual's contribution shall be direct and tangible. Hence the value of those educational activities that deal with foods and their conservation.
On a little higher plane, and in a little different way we can apply the same thoughts to the whole cycle of material things. The distribution of wealth is of course in part a technical and a theoretical problem. It is also a practical and a general one. All at least ought to be judges of the waste that now goes on in the industrial life because the "middleman" has occupied such a place of vantage in the economic order. In teaching occupation and in all preparation for vocation ought we not to take this into consideration? Occupations that are purely distributive and which involve a great waste of human energies and of materials have been unduly emphasized, at least by default of more positive preparation, by the school. Because they are easy and untechnical and have a little elegance about them, in some cases, they fit in very well with the generality and bookishness and detachment from real life that the school sometimes represents.
The occupations that are more creative, both in the field of material things and of ideas, have, relatively speaking, been neglected. Inventiveness especially seems to be a quality that we have supposed to be a gift of the gods, and we have given but little attention to producing it, or even giving it an opportunity to display itself. Have we not gained from the war new impressions both about the powers of the human mind in producing new thoughts and in controlling both material and psychic forces, and also about the necessity for developing originality and independence? Is it too much to expect now that greater ingenuity be displayed in education itself to the end of producing more originality? This is a hackneyed request to make of the school, but it seems certain that we do not succeed inobtaining through our educational processes the highest possible degree of productiveness of mind, as regards either quantity or quality. It is because indeed we seem to be very far from our limit in these respects, and because better results might perhaps so easily be gained that it seems necessary to make this plea so often. More activity, more art, greater enrichment of the mind, ought to have the desired result, especially if the environment of the school could be so changed that its moods would be more joyous and intense. These changes are at any rate demanded for so many other reasons that if they fail to make the intellect more productive, they will not be completely a failure.
Education in the use of wealth must now be regarded as a part ofmoraleducation. In America we have ignored the necessity of thrift, and the idea of thrift has certainly had no part in education. The proper use of everything we produce or own is a fundamental part of conduct, and it ought to be a persistent theme in education. We have now the interest and incentive that have come from the war, we say, for we have felt, if only remotely, what poverty means, and we have seen that no amount of natural wealth and no degree of civilization can wholly insure us against famine and disaster. We need throughout our national life now, again, something like the old New England conscience in the uses of things, applied in a different way, of course, and now made more effectual by our broader science. The encouragement of this spirit will perhaps make the difference in the end between having a world seriously engaged in progressive tasks with its material forces well in hand, and a world which in all its practical affairs, large and small, is operated according to the principle or the lack of principle of alaissez faireattitude throughout life. Saving in a good cause, and with a clear conscience and determined purpose, is one of the elements of the higher life and is far removed from miserliness. It is a principle ofadaptation of means to ends, and that any school whichtrains this power is reaching fundamental principles of the practical life needs hardly to be said.
The higher uses and appreciation of wealth which we are wont to call plain living and high thinking, the moral idea of philanthropy, the æsthetic values and hygienic implications of the right kind of simplicity must not be omitted from the educational idea of thrift. To impart something of the spirit of restraint and generosity, and to make the child feel what living simply, and with definite purpose, and making means serve one's real ends in life imply, to teach the joys of the higher uses of common things, is no mean achievement. But can we indeed do these things which after all have their main virtue in being general and social, and a part of a program? All we can say is that if we are to have a better order, and if we think education has any place in it, economy in its broadest sense, but economy also as applied to the details of daily life must also have a place in it. It is both fatuous and insincere to talk about good things to come, and not be willing to pay the price in labor and in sacrifice necessary to obtain them honestly. Especially when the price of these things is in itself no demand for the sacrificing of any real good, but quite to the contrary is a summons to a more joyous life, we should be glad to pay it.
The social problems of education that have arisen because of our new world relations and new internal conditions in our own country are of course only special phases of social education as a whole, and social education cannot indeed be separated sharply from other educational questions. There are, however, new demands and new evidences, and new points of view from which we see social education (or better, education in its social aspects), in a somewhat new and different light, as compared with our ideas of the school in the days before the war. We have discussed some of these social problems. Now we must consider them both in their general significance, and also in their more specifically pedagogical aspects.
There appear to be two things that social education needs especially to do now: create and sustain a firmer unity at home—a wider and deeper loyalty on the part of the individual to all the causes and to all the groups to which he is attached; and to make ourworld-consciousnessa more productive state of mind. It is perhaps because such educational proposals as these are generally left in the form of ideals and things hoped for in a distant future, and are not examined to see whether they may be made definite programs, and are legitimate demands to be made now, that we are likely to regard all suggestions of this nature as impracticable. And yet the production ofmoraleat home and a social consciousness adequate for our new relations abroad seems to be a proper demand to make even upon the school. In part, of course, and perhaps largely,the need is first of all for practical relations, but we must consider educationally also the fundamental and creative factors of the psychic process itself which must in the end sustain the relations that we have established at such cost and shall now begin to elaborate as practical functions.
The greatest work of social education to-day is to infuse into all the social relations a new and more ardent spirit. It is the elevation of the social moods to a more productive level, we might say, that is wanted. Æsthetic elements, imagination, and the harmonizing of individual and social motives are needed. War has shown us the possibilities of exalted social moods; what we ought to do now is to consider how we may make our morale of peace equal in efficiency and in power to our war morale. This is in great part a problem of social education.
Every nation has its own especial social problems which must become educational problems, and be dealt with in some way according to the methods available in schools. In England the social questions seem to be more in mind and to be better understood than here. They are more conscious there of social disharmony and of living a socially divided life than we are. They have seen at close range the dangers of class interests and individual interests. Individualism, class distinction and party politics and the independence of labor came near proving the ruin of England. The Bishop of Oxford has expressed himself as believing that the blank stupid conservatism of his country, as he calls it, is really broken and that a new sense of service is actually dawning in all directions. Trotter says (and he too is thinking of England) that a very small amount of conscious and authoritative direction, a little sacrifice of privilege, a slight relaxation in the vast inhumanity of the social machine might at the right moment have made a profound effect in the national spirit. Generalizing, and now thinking of social phenomena in terms of the psychology of the herd, he says that the trouble in modernsociety is that capacity for individual reaction—that is for making different reactions to the same stimulus—has far outstripped the capacity for intercommunication. Society has grown in complexity and strength, but it has also grown in disorder.
Such disharmony of the social life of course exists also in America. We have not the sharp division of classes and interests and the demonstrative and protesting individualism that are to be found in England (our individual rights are taken more for granted perhaps) but for that very reason, it may well be, our disharmonies are all the more dangerous and difficult to overcome. The tension of the individual and the social will (using MacCurdy's expression) is great. We are highly individualistic in our mode of life, as is shown both in domestic and in public affairs. Specialization and an intense interest in occupations that bring individual distinction and large financial returns have certainly taken precedence over the more fundamental and common activities and interests.
It is these fundamental and common activities and interests and sympathies that ought to be the chief concern of social education, or perhaps we had better say that all our educational processes ought so to be socialized as to broaden sympathies and make activities common. Education must constantly strive to make the common background of our national life more firm and strong. More important to-day than any further education in the direction of specialization of life in America is the securing of a strong cohesion throughout society by means of common interests and moods. It is true that specialization carried out in some ideal way may provide just the conditions needed for the best social order, but this can be only in so far as individuals become specialized within the whole of society, so to speak, in which individuals continue to have a common life. Individuals as wholes must not be differentiated and left to find their own means ofcoördination and association, or be brought together artificially by law or convention. Specialization must be made the reverse side, as it were, of a social process in which at every point coördination is also provided for. At the present time, it is the latter rather than the former that is of most importance to us.
Social education in a democratic country must always be a matter of the greatest concern. In autocratic societies the cohesive force exists in traditions or can at any moment be generated executively. The autocratic country can be held together in spite of social antagonism. In a democracy this cannot be. We voluntarily accept some degree of incoördination and confusion for the sake of our ideals of freedom. We do not wish cohesion based upon any form of pessimism or fear—fear of enemies without or of powers within. To secure unity in our own national life we must work for it incessantly, and we ought to be willing to, for unity means so much to us. It is not cohesion at any price that we want, but voluntary and natural union, and to secure that we should not hesitate to make our educational institutions broad enough to include the education of the most fundamental relations of the individual to society. We want neither a "healthy egoism" nor a morbid self-denying spirit that is only a step removed from slavery—neither instinctive independence nor an artificial and enforced social organization. We must not be deceived either by a vague and false idea of liberty or by the equally vicious ideal of militarism with its superficiality of social relations and its pedagogical simplicity. Both these ideas represent social life on a low plane. Healthy individualism, even with its strong sense of tolerance and comradeship and its respect for law and order, is not the kind of social ideal that we should now cultivate, for it is too primitive a state to fit into our already complex social life, or to be a basis for the firm solidarity we need for the future. As for militarism, it may become a mereshell, giving the appearance of social unity when its bonds are mere shreds and the last drop of moral vitality has gone out of it.
Our need and problem are plain enough. We wish to develop social cohesion and unity upon a natural and permanent basis of social feeling expressed in, and in turn produced by, social organization, voluntarily entered into for practical and for ideal purposes. Such solidarity can neither be made nor unmade by external forces. We must form and sustain it by creating internal bonds. We live, in any great society, always over smoldering fires, however highly civilized the society, and we are always threatened with the eruption of volcanic forces. It is fatuous to ignore this, and to make a fool's paradise of our democracy. Our problem is to produce such a social life as shall keep us safe through all dangers—dangers from enemies without, and within, and underneath. A democracy, or indeed any society after all and at its best, contains the makings of the crowd and the mob. Organized as it is, it is always an order made of material units whichmayenter into disorder. Society is based upon social consciousness, upon the consciousness of kind, but it also hascollective force. The crowd and the collective force are always contained in society. However far human nature is removed from its primitive form, the social order is always fragile. Mental operations that are not intelligent and are not emotional in the ordinary sense, but which consist, so to speak, of common factors among primitive feelings, may gain and for a time hold the ascendancy. Eruptions in the social consciousness are of the nature of morbid phenomena, and are rare and exceptional expressions of the collective life, but we are never free entirely from the menace of them. Social order, we say, is always fragile. We must not overlook that fact. It is this characteristic of the social life, the potentiality of mob spirit and the forces of primitiveanger and fear, that lead some writers to think, wrongly we believe, that this is the psychological basis of wars in general. War comes out of the order of society. The higher ecstatic states and the ideals of man enter into them. These things we speak of are of the nature of disorder, or are only the order of pure momentum. But whatever the truth may be about the relation of instinct to war and however remote the dangers to ourselves from the forces which in society make for disorder, it is the work of social education to control, transform and utilize all social and collective forces, the primitive emotions and instincts, the moods of intoxication and all the higher ecstasies of the social life, and it is only, we suppose, by thus consciously and with premeditation controlling these forces that in any real sense we can "make democracy safe for the world."
It is the idea of society coördinated by intelligence and by common interests and moods that we must always hold before us. Trotter says that civilization has never brought a well-coördinated society, and that a gregarious unit consciously directed would be a new type of biological organism. If this be so, the time seems peculiarly ripe to make advance toward this better social solidarity. Both the promise and the need seem greatest in the great English speaking countries now. There is waiting, we may truly think, a larger sphere of life for all democratic countries. If it be conscious direction alone that can bring about the change, education has a long and a hard task before it, to make the democratic peoples capable of such conscious direction. This must come in part by the development of the idea of leadership, and by the production of all the conditions that make leadership possible. In part it must come by the clear perception of definite tasks to be performed by nations and by all organizations within nations—tasks which have all grown out of the relations existing withinsociety. In part it means cultivating intelligent appreciation of social values, and developing in every possible way all the social powers.
What we appear to need most in our social education just now is a conception of what the individual is and what the social life is in terms of the desires and the functions they embody. These are the raw materials with which we work. We should then treat all our social problems in a somewhat different way from that in which they are mainly dealt with now. We should try especially to make harmony in society not by maneuvering so that we might have peace and good feeling for their own sakes, but by coordinating the functions which are expressed in the life of the individual and in all social relations. That is precisely what is not being done now, in our present stage of society, either in the life of the individual, or in the wider life of society. People live without deep continuity in their lives, and we are not conscious enough of the ideal relationships individuals should have with one another, in order to make the social life productive. In a word we do not sufficiently take account of the purposes to be achieved, but are too conscious of states of feeling. We do not yet appear to see all the possibilities contained in the social life, what voluntary unions are necessary, and what kind of community life must be developed before we can have a really democratic order.
We must not be content, certainly, with a merely superficial and external solidarity or the purely practical gregariousness of the shops or the artificial forms of the conventional social life. Society must more and more accomplish results by the social life. Coordination in the performance of a few obvious functions, and enthusiasm for a few partisan causes, will not be enough. Nor will such order as militarism represents suffice. Is it not plain, indeed, that democracy must rest upon deeper and far more complex coördinations than we have now, and that socialfeelings or moods must be made more creative? It is the desire to accomplish ends through social organization, rather than the desire to possess and enjoy, that must be made to dominate it. To effect such changes in the social life must be in great part the work of education.
Social education in our present time and conditions might very well be considered in terms of the antinomies which exist in society. These antinomies represent the obstacles to national unity. They stand for inhibitions which are expressed in feelings that are wholly unproductive. Each one of them is a measure of so much waste, so much failure and lack of momentum, so much disorder and disorganization. A program of social education, we say, might be based upon a consideration of these antinomies. It would consider mainly how the waste and obstruction of these conflicting purposes of the social life might be overcome by giving desires more harmonious and more positive direction. A complete account of social education from this standpoint would need to take notice of many disharmonies now very evident in our life as a nation. Among them would be found sectional antagonisms, party opposition, frictions of social classes and industrial classes, religious differences, disharmony between the sexes, racial antipathies. Some of these we have already touched upon briefly. Some others seem to require further mention in the present connection.
The lack of understanding and sympathy between lower and upper classes in society plays a larger part in democratic America than we are usually inclined to admit. There are divided interests, divergent mores, lack of unity and coördination in some of the most urgent duties because of the antagonism of classes and the lack of understanding, on the part of one, of the ways of another. Especially in civic life the unproductiveness of the situation is very apparent. What money and advantage on one side combined with willing hands on the other might do is left undone.
In part this antagonism of classes is merely the result of difference in manners. There are manners and forms that constitute a common bond among the members of a class everywhere. Ought we not to take advantage of this example and use the suggestion it offers for bridging over the differences that we complain of? We have seen during the war, also, how well common tasks can unite all classes. Does not our educational institution afford us opportunity to continue this advantage, and make common service lead more directly to understanding and appreciation, not for the sake of the sympathy alone, but because of all the practical consequences and the opportunities for the future that are thus opened up? We assume that social feeling may be created through social organization. Mabie says that America is distinguished by its capacities for forming helpful organizations. We must make the most of this habit, which presumably is derived from the neighborliness and comradeship of our original colonial life. We need many group causes, not artificially planned as trellises upon which to grow social feelings, but, first of all certainly, in order to accomplish those things that can be done effectively only socially.
The secret of harmony among classes is presumably not to allow any class to have vital interests which are exclusively its own, since to have an exclusive vital interest means of course to live defensively or to carry on offensive strategy. The chief interest of the great working class at the present time is plainly to secure a living, and it is the sense of isolation in this struggle which in part at least is the cause of many unfavorable conditions in our present social order. Ought not education to prepare the way for a different attitude in which all should become vitally interested in the economic problems of all? This does not mean an education directed toward enlarging the spirit of philanthropy; it means mainly organization to serve common purposes.
These social problems are very numerous. They areboth national and local. Any city which will undertake to solve in its civic relations this problem of securing greater social unity in social causes will provide an object lesson which will be of the greatest value. It is in these local groups perhaps that some of the best experimental social work may be done. Here the educational and the political modes of attack can best be coördinated, results can be made most tangible, and the primitive and simple forms of solidarity most nearly realized. It is indeed by going back to these simpler forms of social life and seeking means of coordinating the group in fundamental activities that the greatest headway will be made in the solution of wider social problems.
Another of the disharmonies which social education must from now on undertake to control is the disharmony and the inequality of the sexes, not so much as this appears in the domestic life as in the broader relations of the social life. Brinton says that the ethnic psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by Steinthal, that the position of women is the cardinal point of all social relations. Every one, of course, now recognizes the fact that the position of women is to-day in a transitional and experimental stage. Conflicting motives are at work, and on the part of neither sex do the highest motives seem to prevail, nor is there a full realization anywhere of the values that are at stake. Men are thinking of the question of the position of women too much from the standpoint of expediency, and are scrutinizing too closely the immediate future. Women perhaps are thinking too much just now of theirrights. There is a decadent form of chivalry or at least a sexuality that perpetuates conventions and interests that on the whole seem to interfere with progress. Jealousy and in general the tense emotional relations between the sexes obscure larger issues. Thus misunderstanding or antagonism, or at least disharmony, prevails in relations in which there should be perfect harmony of ideals and purposes, and productiveactivities of the highest nature. The education of women, whether for the domestic life or for the life outside the home is plainly but a part of the educational problem. The sexes have different desires, and it is precisely the work of harmonizing these desires, and regulating and coordinating activities and functions, that is the most important part of social education in regard to the sexes.
It is not at all difficult to see what the basic need is. It is not so easy to find practical means of applying the remedy in the form of education, because the whole system of living of the sexes must in some way be affected. The generalized principle on the practical side seems clear. All classes or groups in society must learn to think and to act not in terms of and with reference to the desires of their class alone, but with regard to wider tasks and values that are not fully realized by the most natural and the conventional activities of the class. The question is not one of making a moral change—converting individuals or classes from a spirit of selfishness to that of altruism. What we need is an educational process and a social life in which the nature of the individual and of the class is revealed as social, as best represented and satisfied in situations in which both the individual and the wider social idea work together.
Practically, we should say, the problem of education of the sexes with reference to one another and to a wider social life consists first of all in actually educating them together not merely in juxtaposition but in relations of a practical character. The relations of the sexes have evidently been mainly domestic and emotional, or in cases where they are practical the position of women has been little better than servitude. Of social coördination there has been little.Education of the sexes through situations in which the special abilities of each sex are brought into action, doing for the wider social life what the natural and instinctive differentiation of activities has accomplished in its way for the domestic life seems to be the main principle now to beemployed in the education of the sexes. Women must be made to see that the ideal of independence which is uppermost at the present time is only the mark of a transitional stage, and that coördination in which of course competition of various kinds cannot be entirely eliminated will be the final adjustment. We should have no fear of placing the sexes, in their educational situations, in positions where competition is necessary, since through competition fundamental desires may be brought to the surface and regulated. Provided we admit at all that a new social adjustment is needed between the sexes, we can hardly fail to see that it is primarily in a practical life lived together that both education for the new order will best be conducted and the new order itself realized.
The details of method of what we have called social education for democracy we can only suggest here and of course in a very imperfect and tentative way. All aspects of education and every department of the school are involved; and every available method employed in education must in some way be turned to the purpose of developing social relations. In a very general way we think of these specific processes of the school as methods of learning, methods of art, and methods of activity, although of course in reality there can be no such sharp separation of them as this might imply.
There must be some place in the school now for a subject which in a general way might be designated as social history. We must teach the whole story of the social life of our country in such a way as to reveal the motives of classes, parties, sections, and of all organizations, institutions and principles. Such teaching should have the effect of bringing to light the causes of the disharmonies of society, and it should also be a means of conveying the feelings and moods as well as the ideas that govern the conduct of all groups that make up our national life. We must teachsympatheticallywhat the desires and intentions of all are, on the assumptionthat behind all conduct there are natural causes and essentially sound instincts. By showing the desires of groups in their relation to one another, their disharmony and their possible harmony, we indicate what society as a functioning whole may be, and we may say that it is the chief end to be gained by the intellectual treatment of the social life to make clear what the ideal of social unity for practical life is, and what the main obstacles are that now stand in the way of it. By this social history we do not mean, moreover, something abstruse and academic suited for the college alone. Wherever the social antagonism is experienced, at whatever age, there is the opportunity to begin to set the mind at work about it, and to prevent the formation of prejudice and resentment. These states of mind begin very early indeed, and they are hard to eradicate.
A very large part in the work of social education is played by methods of education that we may call æsthetic. This must mean not only the inclusion of the methods of art in presenting facts, but we must bring to bear all kinds of æsthetic influences upon the social life. Social life in which there is introduced the dramatic moment is one of the main objectives of all education. It is in the recreational life that some of the best conditions for the realization of social moods in dramatic or æsthetic form are obtained. In the recreational experience the social states must be made productive of social harmony, as they themselves tend to be. In these experiences the conflicting motives of the individual and society, and of individual with individual, and the opposing desires of the individual are harmonized by means of ideal experiences in which the desires are exploited. Since we here touch upon the whole theory of the æsthetic in its practical application, we cannot be very explicit and clear, but the main service of the æsthetic social life experienced typically in the form of recreational activities, ought to be plain. Recreation is a means of giving thecommon experience so much needed in democratic countries like our own—common feelings, common activities and interests. This store of common life, containing exalted social feelings, expressed in play and art—languages which all nationalities can understand—must constantly be increased. All institutions that control the leisure hours of the people must be made educational as means of raising the social life to a higher level and making it more harmonious and productive of common interests. It is indeed one of the functions of the recreational activities and institutions to create and sustain public morale.
In the recreational experiences under control of the school we have the opportunity to educate the deepest and most powerful of motives. Play and art we should suppose, therefore, ought to have a greater part and more serious recognition in the school. We cannot of course accomplish much merely by crowding more arts and plays and games into the curriculum. It is something larger and more transforming that is wanted. We need to make the school take a greater place in the life of the child; it must reach a deeper level of human nature, in which the motives of play and art lie, and there must be a broader exposure of all young life to those influences of the social life everywhere which contain our highest social ideals. The place of art and to some extent of play as the methods and the spirit of the school is to convey persuasively to the child this larger and better life in which we expect him to take part.
Neither erudition nor art nor both together can, of course, fulfill all the requirements for a social education suited to our present needs. It is presumably in the social life itself, in the form of a practical activity, that social education will in great part be gained. This educational social life, which is also practical, will, however, be one in which every opportunity is taken to show the social life in its historicalperspective, and to make clear its purposes and meaning; and in which sympathetic moods and intense social states are realized by conducting this social life, so far as possible, so that it will be subjected to the influences of what we may call in a broad wayart.