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
Dr. Hall's idea of a Book of Industry might have emanated from the
heart of Mr. Carnegie. With the same benign detachment he seems to
have mused at his desk about the shoe industry and the people engaged
in it. It would not take more than a passing acquaintance with the
girls and men in shoe manufacturing towns to know that if there was
established a village library equipped with the history of shoes,
the aesthetics of shoes, shoe economics, shoe technology, and shoe
hygiene, not one of the girls or men who worked in the shoe factories
would darken its doors to read about shoes. They would not for this
simple reason; the workers' "individual and vocational interest" does
not exist. They would say that they already knew more than they cared
to about shoes. No literature could add culture or dignity to the
job of stitching vamps for all the working hours and days of a wage
earner's year, while there is no experience of cultural value in
the occupation, divided as the making of a shoe is into some ninety
operations, and distributed among ninety workers. Dr. Hall's
suggestion that a Shoe Book be written is a good suggestion but he
must supply a better basis for a reader's interest than industry has
given him, that is, industry as it is now administered. He cannot
impose culture or dignity through books on a trade which is
prostituted by business for profiteering. If the purpose of the Shoe
Book was to create the glamor that was intended around the present
day arrangement of making shoes, it would be a false contribution in
schoolroom equipment; it would be as pernicious as other literature
that introduced an artificial note into a real and living experience
like industry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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