APPENDIX

APPENDIXTHE TRAINING FOR THE NEW DEMOCRACY

THE training for the new democracy must be from the cradle—through nursery, school and play, and on and on through every activity of our life. Citizenship is not to be learned in good government classes or current events courses or lessons in civics. It is to be acquired only through those modes of living and acting which shall teach us how to grow the social consciousness. This should be the object of all day school education, of all night school education, of all our supervised recreation, of all our family life, of our club life, of our civic life.

When we change our ideas of the relation of the individual to society, our whole system of education changes. What we want to teach is interdependence, that efficiency waits on discipline, that discipline is obedience to the whole of which I am a part. Discipline has been a word long connected with school life—when we know how to teachsocialdiscipline, then we shall know how to “teach school.”

The object of education is to fit children into the life of the community.[146]Every coöperative method conceivable, therefore, must be used in our schools for this end. It is at school that children should begin to learn group initiative, group responsibility—in other words social functioning. The group process must be learnt by practice. We should therefore teach subjects which require a working together, we should have group recitations, group investigations, and a gradual plan of self-government. Every child must be shown his place in the life that builds and his relation to all others who are building. All the little daily and hourly experiences ofhis interrelations must be constantly interpreted to him. Individual competition must, of course, disappear. All must see that the test of success is ability to work with others, not to surpass others.

Group work is, indeed, being introduced into our more progressive schools. Manual training, especially when the object made is large enough to require the work of two or more, cooking classes, school papers, printing classes etc., give opportunity for organization into groups with the essential advantage of the group: coördinated effort.

Moreover, we should have, and are beginning to have, group recitations. A recitation should not be to test the pupil but to create something. Every pupil should be made to feel that his point of view is slightly different from any one’s else, and that, therefore, he has something to contribute. He is not to “recite” something which the teacher knows already; he is to contribute not only to the ideas of his fellow-pupils but also to those of his teacher. And this is not impossible even for the youngest. Once when I was in Paris I made the acquaintance of little Michael, a charming English boy of five, who upon being taken to the Louvre by his mother and asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa, replied, with a most pathetic expression, “I don’t think she looks as if she liked little boys.” That was certainly a contribution to Mona Lisa criticism.

But after the child has been taught in his group recitation to contribute his own point of view, he must immediately be shown that he cannot over-insist upon it; he must be taught that it is only a part of the truth, that he should be eager for all the other points of view, that all together they can find a point of view which no one could work out alone. In other words we can teach collective thinking through group recitations.

A group recitation may give each pupil the feeling that a whole is being created: (1) by different points of view being brought out and discussed, and (2) by every one contributing something different: one will do some extra reading, one will bring clippings from newspapers and periodicals, one will takehis camera to the Art Museum and take pictures of the casts. Thus we get life, and the lesson of life, into that hour. Thus may we learn the obligation and the joy of “belonging,” not only when our school goes to play some other school, but in every recitation hour of the day. The old idea was that no one should help another in a recitation; the new idea is that every one is to help every one else. The kind of competition you have in a group recitation is whether you have added as much as any one else. You now feel responsible not only for your contribution but that the recitation as a whole should be a worthy thing. Such an aim will overcome much of the present class-room indifference.

Many more of the regular school activities could be arranged on a group basis than is now thought possible—investigation for instance. This is a big word, but the youngest children sent out to the woods in spring are being taught “original research.”

Again, every good teacher teaches her pupils to “assemble” his different thoughts, shows them that a single thought is not useful, but only as it is connected with others. The modern teacher is like the modern curator who thinks the group significance of a particular classification more important than the significance of each isolated piece. The modern teacher does not wish his pupils’ minds to be like an old-fashioned museum—a hodge-podge of isolated facts—but a useful workshop.

Again, to learn genuine discussion should be considered an essential part of our education. Every child must be trained to meet the clash of difference—difference of opinion, difference of interest—which life brings. In some universities professors are putting aside one hour a week for a discussion hour. This should be done in all colleges and schools, and then it should be seen to that it is genuine discussion that takes place in that hour.

Moreover, in many schools supervised playground and gymnasium activities are being established, athletic clubs encouraged, choruses and dramatic leagues developed, not only because of their value from the health or art point of view, but because they teach the social lesson.

The question of self-government in the schools is too complicated a subject and has met with too many difficulties, notwithstanding its brilliant successes, to take up here, but undoubtedly some amount of self-control can be given to certain groups, and in the upper grades to whole schools, and when this can be done no training for democracy is equal to the practice of democracy.

The aim is to create such a mental atmosphere for children that it is natural for them to wish to take their part, to make them understand that citizenship is not obeying the laws nor voting, nor even being President,[147]but that all the visions of their highest moments, all the aspirations of their spiritual nature can be satisfied through their common life, that only thus do we get “practical politics.”

In our industrial schools it is obviously easier to carry further the teaching of coördinated effort than in the regular day schools.

Our evening schools must adopt the methods of the more progressive day schools, and must, as they are doing in many cases, add to the usual activities of evening schools.

The most conscious and deliberate preparation for citizenship is given by the “School Centres” now being established all over the United States. The School Centre movement is a movement to mould the future, to direct evolution instead of trusting to evolution. The subject of this book has been the necessity for community organization, but the ability to meet this necessity implies that we know how to do that most difficult thing in the world—work with other people: that we are ready to sacrifice individual interests to the general good, that we have a fully developed sense of responsibility, that we are trained in initiative and action. But this is not true. If the School Centres are to fill an important place in neighborhood life, they must not only give an opportunity for the development of neighborhood consciousness and neighborhood organization, but they must train up young people to be ready for neighborhood organization. We who believein the School Centre as one of the most effective means we have for reconstructing city life believe that the School Centre can furnish this training. We hear everywhere of the corruption of American municipal politics, but why should the next generation do any better than the present unless we are training our young men and women to a proper understanding of the meaning of good citizenship and the sense of their own responsibility? The need of democracy to-day is a trained citizenship. We must deliberately train for citizenship as for music, art or trade. The School Centres are, in fact, both the prophecy of the new democracy and a method of its fulfilment. They provide an opportunity for its expression, and at the same time give to men and women the opportunity for the training needed to bring it to its highest expression.

The training in the School Centres consists of: group-activities, various forms of civic clubs and classes, and practice in self-government.

First, we have in the Centres those activities which require working together, such as dramatic and choral clubs, orchestras and bands, civic and debating clubs, folk-dancing and team-games. We want choral unions and orchestras, to be sure, because they will enrich the community life at the same time that they emphasize the neighborhood bond, we want civic and debating clubs because we all need enlightenment on the subjects taken up in these clubs, but the primary reason for choosing such activities is that they are group activities where each learns to identify himself with a social whole. This is the first lesson for all practical life. Take two young men in business. One says of his firm, “Theyare doing so and so”: his attitude is that the business is a complete whole, without him, to which he may indeed be ministering in some degree. Another young man who has been a few weeks with an old-established firm says “Wehave done so and so for years,” “Ourpolicy is so and so.” You perhaps smile but you know that he possesses one of the chief requirements for rising.

In our group the centre of consciousness is transferred from our private to our associate life. Thus through our groupactivities does neighborhood life become a preparation for neighborhood life; thus does it prepare us for the pouring out of strength and strain and effort in the common cause.

Then the consciousness of the solidarity of the group leads directly to a sense of responsibility, responsibility in a group and for a group. Sooner or later every one in a democracy must ask himself, what am I worth to society? Our effort in the Centres is to help the birth of that moment. This is the social lesson: for people to understand that their every act, their work, their home-life, the kind of recreation they demand, the kind of newspapers they read, the bearing of their children, the bringing up of their children—that all these so-called private acts create the city in which they live. It is not just when we vote, or meet together in political groups, or when we take part in some charitable or philanthropic or social scheme, that we are performing our duty to society. Every single act of our life should be looked at as a social act.

Moreover, we learn responsibility for our group as well as to our group. We used to think, “I must do right no matter what anyone else does.” Now we know how little that exhausts our duty; we must feel an equally keen responsibility for our whole group.

These then are the lessons which we hope group activities will teach—solidarity, responsibility and initiative,—how to take one’s place worthily in a self-directed, self-governing community.

In the first year of one of our Boston Centres, the people of a certain nationality asked if they might meet regularly at the Centre. At their first meeting, however, they broke up without accomplishing anything, without even deciding to meet again, simply because those present had never learned how to do things with other people. Each man seemed a little island by himself. They explained to me the fact that they made no plans for further meeting by saying that they found they did not know parliamentary law, and some of them must learn parliamentary law before they could organize. I did not feel, however, that that was the real reason. I was sure it was because they had never been accustomed to dothings in groups—they had probably never belonged to a basket-ball team or a dramatic club—and we have to learn the trick of association as we have to learn anything else.

But the Centres prepare for citizenship not only by group activities but also by direct civic teaching. This takes the form not only of lectures, classes in citizenship, but also of societies like the “junior city councils” or the “legislatures” where municipal and state questions are discussed, and young men’s and young women’s civic clubs. And it must be remembered that the chief value of these clubs is not the information acquired, not even the interest aroused, but the lesson learned of genuine discussion with all the advantages therefrom.[148]

But I have written as if it were our young people who were to be educated by the group activities of the Centres, as if the young people were to have the training for democracy and the older people the exercise of democracy. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. The training for democracy can never cease while we exercise democracy. We older ones need it exactly as much as the younger ones. That education is a continuous process is a truism. It does not end with graduation day; it does not end when “life” begins. Life and education must never be separated. We must have more life in our universities, more education in our life. Chesterton says of H. G. Wells, “One can lie awake nights and hear him grow.” That it might be said of all of us! We need education all the time and we all need education. The “ignorant vote” does not (or should not) mean the vote of the ignorant, we get an ignorant vote very often from educated people; an ignorant vote means ignorance of some particular subject.

A successful business man said to me the other day, “I graduated from college with honors, but all I learned there has done me little good directly. What I got out of college was an attitude towards life: that life was a matter of constantly learning, that my education had begun and was going on as long as I lived.” Then he went on to say, “This is the attitude I want somehow to get into my factory. Boys andgirls come to me with the idea, ‘School is over, learning is behind me, now work begins.’ This is all wrong. I am now planning a school in connection with my factory, not primarily on account of what they will learn in the school, but in order to make them see that their life of steady learning is just beginning and that their whole career depends on their getting this attitude.” Now this is what we want the Centres to do for people: to help them acquire the attitude of learning, to make them see that education is for life, that it is as valuable for adults as for young people.

We have many forms of adult education: extension courses, continuation and night schools, correspondence schools, courses in settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations etc. And yet all these take a very small per cent of our adult population. Where are people to get this necessary education? Our present form of industry does not give enough. Tending a machine all day is not conducive to thought;[149]a man thus employed gets to rely entirely on his foreman. The man who lets his foreman do his thinking for him all day tends to need a political boss at night. We must somehow counteract the paralyzing effect of the methods of modern industry. In the School Centre we have an opportunity for adult education in the only forms in which many people, tired out with the day’s work, can take it: discussion, recreation, group activities and self-governing clubs. The enormous value of that rapidly spreading movement, the forum movement, and its connection with the School Centres, there is space here only to mention.

Many people, however, even if not the majority, are eager and hungry for what one man spoke to me of as “real education.” University extension work is spreading rapidly and in many cases adapting itself marvellously to local needs; a much closer connection could be made between the opportunities of the university and the training of the citizen for his proposed increased activity in the state by having university extension work a recognized part of the School Centre, so that every one, the farmer or the humblest workman, mightknow that even although he cannot give all his time to college life, he may have the advantage of its training. In the School Centre should be opportunity for the study of social and economic conditions, the work of constitutional conventions, the European situation and our relation to it, the South American situation and our relation to it, etc. etc.

Moreover, we must remember when we say we all need more education, that even if we could be “entirely” educated, so to speak, at any one minute, the next minute life would have set new lessons for us. The world is learning all the time about health, food values, care of children etc. All that science discovers must be spread. Adult education means largely the assimilation of new ideas; from this point of view no one can deny its necessity.

I have said that the Centres prepare for citizenship through group activities, through civic clubs and classes and through actual practice in self-government. The Centres may be a real training in self-government, a real opportunity for the development of those qualities upon which genuine self-direction depends, by every club or group being self-governed, and the whole Centre self-directed and self-controlled by means of delegates elected from each club meeting regularly in a Central Council. If we want a nation which shall be really self-governed not just nominally self-governed, we must train up our young people in the ways of self-direction.

Moreover, the development of responsibility and self-direction will be the most effective means of raising standards. We are hearing a great deal just now of regulated recreation, regulated dance halls etc. We must give regulation a secondary place. There is something better than this which ought to be the aim of all recreation leaders, that is, to educate our young people to want higher standards by interpreting their own experience to them and by getting them to think in terms of cause and effect. You can force a moral code on people from above yet this will change them very little, but by a system of self-governing clubs with leaders who know how to lead, we can make real progress in educating people to higher standards. This is true of athletic games as well as of dances.We find, indeed, that it is true of all parts of our Centre work. Through the stormy paths of club election of officers, I have seen leaders often guide their young men to an understanding of honest politics. It is usually easier, it is true, to doforpeople, it is easier to “regulate” their lives, but it is not the way to bring the results we wish. We need education, not regulation.

Self-government in the Centres then means not only the election of officers and the making of a constitution, but a real management of club and Centre affairs, the opportunity to take initiative, to make choices and decisions, to take responsibility. The test of our success in the Centres will always be how far we are developing the self-shaping instinct. But we must remember that we have not given self-government by allowing the members of a club to record their votes. Many people think a neighborhood association or club is self-governing if a question is put to them and every one votes upon it. But if a club is to be really self-governed it must first learn collective thinking. This is not a process which can be hurried, it will take time and that time must not be grudged. Collective thinking must be reverenced as an act of creation. The time spent in evolving the group spirit is time spent in creating the dynamic force of our civilization.

Moreover each Centre should be begun, directed and supported (as far as possible) by the adult people of a community acting together for that end. A Centre should not be an undertaking begun by the School Committee and run by the School Committee, but each Centre should be organized by local initiative, to serve local needs, through methods chosen by the people of a district to suit that particular district. The ideal School Centre is a Community Centre. A group of citizens asks for the use of a schoolhouse after school hours, with heat, light, janitor, and a director to make the necessary connection between the local undertaking and the city department. Then that group of citizens is responsible for the Centre: for things worth while being done in the schoolhouse, and for the support of the activities undertaken. By the time such a School Centre is organized by such an association ofcitizens, neighbors will have become acquainted with one another in a more vital way than before, and they will have begun to learn how to think and to act together as a neighborhood unit.

We are coming to a more general realization of this. In the municipal buildings in the parks of Chicago, the people are not given free lectures, free moving pictures, free music, free dances etc.; they are invited to develop their own activities. To the Recreation Centres of New York, operated by the Board of Education, are being added the Community Centres controlled by local boards of neighbors. In Boston we have under the School Committee a department of “The Extended Use of School Buildings,” and the aim is to get the people of each district to plan, carry out and supervise what civic, educational and recreational activities they wish in the schoolhouses.

A Chicago minister said the other day that the south side of Chicago was the only part of the city where interest in civic problems and community welfare could be aroused, and this he said was because of the South Park’s work in field houses, clubrooms and gymnasiums for the last ten or twelve years.

When the chairman of the Agricultural Council of Defense of Virginia asked a citizen of a certain county what he thought the prospects were of being able to rouse the people in his county in regard to an increased food production, the prompt reply was, “On the north side of the county we shall have no trouble because we have several Community Leagues there, but on the south side it will be a hard job.”

The School or Community Centre is the real continuation school of America, the true university of true democracy.

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1.See William McDougall, Social Psychology.

2.Probably by no means a group, but tending in some instances in that direction, as in the discussion or conference dinners now so common.

3.The old definition of the word social has been a tremendous drag on politics. Social policies are not policies for the good of the people but policies created by the people, etc. etc. We read in the work of a continental sociologist, “When a social will is born in the brain of a man,” but a social will never is born in the brain of a man.

4.This is essentially the process by which sovereignty is created. Therefore chaptersII-VIon The Group Process are the basis of the conception of sovereignty given inPart IIIand of the relation of that conception to the politics of reconstruction.

5.This is the heart of the latest ethical teaching based on the most progressive psychology: between two apparently conflicting courses of action,aandb,ais not to be followed andbsuppressed, norbfollowed andasuppressed, nor must a compromise between the two be sought, but the process must always be one of integration. Our progress is measured by our ability to proceed from integration to integration.

6.This statement may be misunderstood unless there is borne in mind at the same time: (1) the necessity for the keenest individual thinking as the basis of group thinking, and (2) that every man should maintain his point of view until it has found its place in the group thought, that is, until he has been neither overruled nor absorbed but integrated.

7.We must not of course confuse the type of unifying spoken of here (an integration), which is a psychological process, with the “reconciliation of opposites,” which is a logical process.

8.I am sometimes told that mine is a counsel of perfection only to be realized in the millenium, but we cannot take even the first step until we have chosen our path.

9.The break in the English Cabinet in 1915, which led to the coalition Cabinet, came when both Kitchener and Churchill tried to substitute individual for group action.

10.Free speech is not an “individual” right; society needs every man’s difference.

11.It has been overemphasized in two ways: first, many of the writers on imitation ignore the fact that the other law of association, that of interpenetrating, is also in operation in our social life, as well as the fact that it has always been the fundamental law of existence; secondly, they speak as if it werenecessaryfor human beings to be under the law of imitation, not that it is merely a stage in our development.

12.This is the alpha and omega of philosophical teaching: Heraclitus said, “Nature desires eagerly opposites and out of them it completes its harmony, not out of similars.” And James, twenty-four hundred years later, has given his testimony that the process of life is to “compenetrate.”

13.Also the group-units of early societies are studied to the exclusion of group-units within modern complex society.

14.Even some of our most advanced thinking, which repudiates the like-minded theory and takes pains to prove that imitation is not an instinct, nevertheless falls into some of the errors implicit in the imitation theory.

15.When we come inPart IIIto consider the group process in relation to certain political methods now being proposed, we shall find that part of the present disagreement of opinion is verbal. I therefore give here a list of words which can be used to describe the genuine social process and a list which gives exactly the wrong idea of it. Good words: integrate, interpenetrate, interpermeate, compenetrate, compound, harmonize, correlate, coördinate, interweave, reciprocally relate or adapt or adjust, etc. Bad words: fuse, melt, amalgamate, assimilate, weld, dissolve, absorb, reconcile (if used in Hegelian sense), etc.

16.This does not, however, put us with those biologists who make conscience a “gregarious instinct” and—would seem to be willing to keep it there. This is the insidious herd fallacy which crops up constantly in every kind of place. We may to-day partake largely of the nature of the herd, our conscience may be to some extent a herd conscience, but such is not the end of man for it is not the true nature of man—man does not find his expression in the herd.

17.To a misunderstanding of this point are due some of the fallacies of the political pluralists (seech. XXXII).

18.See p.45.

19.This view of purpose is not necessarily antagonistic to the “interest” school of sociology, but we may perhaps look forward to a new and deeper analysis of self-interest. And the view here put forward is not incompatible with the “objective” theory of association (seech. XXIX) nor with the teleological school of jurisprudence (seech. XV), it merely emphasizes another point of view—a point of view which tends to synthesize the “subjective” and “objective” theories of law. But those jurists who say that a group is governed by its purpose and leave the matter there are making a thing-in-itself of the purpose; we are governed by the purpose, yes, but we are all the time evolving the purpose. Modern jurists wish a dynamic theory of law—only such a conception of purpose as is revealed by group psychology will give value to a teleological school of jurisprudence.

20.In a relation even of two I am not faithful to the other person but to my conception of the relation in the whole. Loyalty is always to the group idea not to the group-personnel. This must change our idea of patriotism.

21.Seech. XV, “From Contract to Community.”

22.This is the principle of the vote in a democracy (seech. XXI). This must not, however, be confused with the old Hegelianism (seech. XXIXon “Sovereignty”).

23.In art this is what impressionism has meant. In the era before impressionism art was in a static phase, that is, artists were working at fixed relations. The “balance” of modern artists does not suggest fixedness, but relation subject directly to the laws of the whole.

24.I speak of it as later because the biological analogy was different from the organism of mediæval doctrine.

25.Seech. XXX, “Political Pluralism and Functionalism.”

26.See p.66.

27.Seech. XXI. I have been told that the distinction between the organic and the psychic theory of society is merely academic. But no one should frame amendments on the initiative and referendum without this distinction; no one without it can judge wisely the various schemes now being proposed for occupational representation—something every one of us will have soon to do.

28.It must be remembered, however, that these welfare arrangements are often accompanied by truly social motives, and experiments looking towards a more democratic organization of industries.

29.A good example of the crowd fallacy is the syndicalist theory that the vote should be taken in a meeting of strikers not by ballot but by acclamation or show of hands. The idea is that in an open meeting enthusiasm passes from one to another and that, therefore, you can thus get the collective will which you could not get by every man voting one by one.

30.It is unfortunate to be obliged to treat this important point with such brevity.

31.The expressions “mutual aid” and “animal coöperation” have, however, a slightly misleading connotation; mutual adaptation, coördinated activities, come nearer the truth. It is confusing to take the words and phrases we use of men in the conscious stage and transfer them to the world of animals in the unconscious stage.

32.It is because of this profound truth that we must always respect conservatism.

33.The claim of the individual to a larger share in government and to a share in the control of industry will be taken up in later chapters.

34.“Ce que Nait” is the title of a volume of poems by Arcos, and that which is being born through all the activity of our common life is God. It is of the “naissance” and “croissance” of God that Arcos loves to sing.

35.I have said that we gain creative power through the group. Those who feel enthralled by material conditions, and to whom it seems an irony to be told that they are “creators,” will demand something more specific. Concrete methods of group organization are given inPart III.

36.It is interesting to notice that Miss Lathrop’s whole conception of the Children’s Bureau is that it is to fit children into the life of the community.

37.SeeAppendix.

38.The new farm industrial system which is to replace Sing Sing is founded largely on the community idea.

39.France, Norway, Switzerland. In Norway it is said that more then three-quarters of the cases which come before the conciliation courts are settled without law suits.

40.“Experiences in Coöperative Competition,” by W. V. Spaulding.

41.The great value of Robert Valentine’s work consisted in his recognition of this fact.

42.I am speaking in general. It is true that the history of cases settled by arbitration reveals many in which the “umpire” has insisted that negotiations continue until the real coincident interest of both sides should be discovered.

43.It has long been known in England and America but recently it has been spreading rapidly.

44.Recently abandoned.

45.The three firms which have carried co-management furthest are the Printz-Biederman Co. of Cleveland, the Wm. Filene’s Sons Co. of Boston and the U. S. Cartridge Co. of Lowell. See Report of Committee on Vocational Guidance, Fourth Annual Convention of National Association of Corporation Schools, by Henry C. Metcalf.

46.We have a number of minor instances of the recognition of the group principle in industry. An interesting example is the shop piece-work in the Cadbury works, where the wages are calculated on the output of a whole work-room, and thus every one in the room has to suffer for the laziness of one. (See “Experiments in Industrial Organization,” by Edward Cadbury.)

47.I have not spoken of the coöperative buying and selling movement because by the name alone it is obvious how well it illustrates my point, and also because it is so well known to every one.Another evidence of the spreading of the community idea is the wide acceptance of the right of the community to value created by the community.

47.I have not spoken of the coöperative buying and selling movement because by the name alone it is obvious how well it illustrates my point, and also because it is so well known to every one.

Another evidence of the spreading of the community idea is the wide acceptance of the right of the community to value created by the community.

48.Col. Law Rev. 8, 610.

49.Pound, Outlines of Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 20. The influence of sociology on law has here been very marked. For further discussion of a teleological jurisprudence, seech. XXIX.

50.Duguit,L’État, Le Droit Objectif et La Loi Positive, 398–409, from Jellinek,System der subjektiren öffentlichen Rechte, 193.

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