=New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry.=--When the
power-driven machine ushered in the new era in industry it lessened
both the prestige and the dignity of the individual worker in three
particulars. First, it destroyed the apprentice system and hence
reduced all workers to a level in the eyes of the employer of labor
and the general public. The apprentice system had used for educational
purposes the important period of adolescence between childhood and
youth. It had served with its ceremonial of entrance into the
journeyman's right and public recognition to give distinction to the
skilled workman, and it had made a nexus of social relationship, built
upon craftsmanship, between those of the same and those of varying
trades and occupations. In the second place, the handicraft system had
given a distinct political right and power to skilled workmen. The
craftsmen, and the burghers of cities who represented them, had to be
called upon by kings and nobles to give assent to wars and to furnish
the sinews of war after the Guilds had gained money-power. And there
has as yet developed in modern government no substitute for this older
and more direct political appeal to individuals, through their work,
to make the vote alluring to the imagination of modern laborers. In
the third place, the transition from the feudal law of personal
service from each class to each class above to the tax system of
modern times, whereby a citizen pays his dues to society in cash
instead of in such personal service, took place in the era of
handicraft and was so bound up with the apprentice system and the
Guild organization that the connection between labor and public right
and duty was obvious and definite. We feel that it is an advance in
political development when a man, and now a woman, also, gains the
franchise directly as a human being without regard to social station
or vocational approach to life. But when in any country the franchise
is on simply human grounds and the economic life is founded on class
distinctions, and class distinctions as wide and deep as those which
modern industry makes between employer and employed in the great
divisions of manufacture and the provision of raw material for that
manufacture, the human basis of the body politic is blurred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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