Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for EducatorsMarot, Helen
Science
Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators
Marot, Helen
Business and education -- United States; Technical education -- United States; Working class -- Education -- United States
Although political socialism may be the economic sequel of private
capital there is no foundation for the belief that it will of itself
induce creative effort or stimulate creative impulse. The faith back
of the socialist movement that desirable attributes like the creative
impulse, which men potentially possess, will begin to operate
automatically and universally as soon as there is sufficient
leisure and food for general consumption, is blind and historically
unwarranted. The signs are that a socialist state would lean
exclusively on the consumption desire for production results, just as
the present system of business now does. Neither fat incomes nor large
leisure have furnished the world with its people of genius. In spite
of the inhibiting influence of exploitation, they have come, what
there are of them, out of intensive application to some matter
of moment. Possibly they would come, and more of them, from the
work-a-day world under socialism with the inhibiting influence of
organized exploitation removed, but more of them would not insure a
democracy in industry or elsewhere. Nothing insures that short of
a strong emotional impulse, a real intellectual interest in the
adventure of productive enterprise.
The creative desire is an incident or a sort of by-product of the
economics of socialism as it is of classical economics; neither
one nor the other depends on its cultivation. Either is capable of
achieving mass production, but neither insures a democratic control of
industry, neither provides for growth, for education in the productive
process. A democracy of industry requires a people's sustained
interest in the productive enterprise; their interest in the
development of technology, the development of markets, and the release
of man's productive energy.
It happens that in machine production and in the division of labor
there are emotional and intellectual possibilities which were
non-existent in the earlier and simpler methods of production. As
power latent in inorganic matter has been freed and applied to common
needs, an environment has been evolved, filled with situations
incomparably more dramatic than the provincial affairs of detached
people and communities. Although this technological subject matter,
rich in opportunities for associated adventure and infinite discovery,
is not a part of common experience, it exists, and if called out from
its isolation for purposes of common experimentation, it is fit matter
for making science a vital experience in the productive life of the
worker.
Industry under the direction of business will not open up the
adventure with its stimulating factors to its subservient labor force,
unless it happens that the present methods fail, in time, to carry
forward industrial enterprise on a profit-making basis; or unless
labor develops the power which springs from desire for creative
experience, to undertake the direction and control of industry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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