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
However abortive such an effort as Dean Schneider's might be in
giving workers opportunity to enrich their experience for their own
reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better
training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid
subject matter. This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it
should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting
character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth
exploitation and not wealth creation. All of the industrial
educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the
adaptation of their experiments to that fact.
A staff of investigators, who made a year's survey of the industries
of Cleveland with a view of determining what measures should be
adopted by the school system of the city to prepare young people for
wage earning occupation and to provide supplementary trade training
for those already employed, concluded that the choice of occupations
should be governed primarily by economic considerations; that even
from the point of view of the school, educational factors could not
take precedence over economic. They said: "The primary considerations
in the intelligent selection of a vocation relate to wages,
steadiness of employment, health risks, opportunity for advancement,
apprenticeship conditions, union regulations and the number of chances
there are for getting into it. These things are fundamental, and any
one of them may well take precedence over the matter of whether the
tastes of the future wage earner run to wood, brick, stone or steel."
This conclusion is fatalistic, but it is a brave one. It does not fall
back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of
history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor
hope that they make up for the content which is not there; it does
not foster the assumption that training in technique of industry or
physical science can enrich, under the circumstances, the worker's
experience to any important extent. It accepts the bald truth that all
the material classed as cultural will count for nothing of value in a
factory worker's life in comparison with the highest possible wage in
the most enervating of industries. It stresses this highly important
factor, as it should, but merely as a physical necessity. There
is vital education in the consciousness of self-support, in the
consciousness that one is earning the living one gets. But under
present conditions the educational experience of wage recompense is
not so significant as it might be if it measured the value of the
labor performed; if it paid the worker according to his needs, and if
he gave in return for the wage according to his ability.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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