XIII. Learning to Work

HERE, then, is the situation as it stands. Our education is out of relation to the time in which we live. It is breaking down under the pressure of economic forces which demands that it turn out people who do not have to be re-educated by modern industry. It cannot remain as it is. It will either be made the instrument of a democratic culture which accepts the present but foresees the future; or it will fall into the hands of those who are planning to make it a training school for wage-slaves. Here is the latter program, as described by the superintendent of schools in a great American city:

“Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led us to experiment with industrial education in the grades.... Our controlling idea was that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of industrial life should be grouped in prevocational schools in[Pg 84] which they would receive, in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such instruction and training in constructive activities as would develop aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the opportunity to rotate term by term through various shops is afforded in seven schools to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the 7th, 8th and 9th years.”

Between these two programs you must choose. Either efficient democratic education, or efficient capitalistic education.

“But,” asks some one, “what is there to choose between them? Democratic education and capitalistic education both seem to me to consist in turning the school into a workshop.”

Not at all! The democratic plan is rather to turn the workshop into a school. That may seem like a large order, but I may as well confess to you at once that the democratic scheme proposes ultimately to bring the whole of industry within the scope of the educational system: nothing less! But the benevolent assimilation of industry by education in the interest of human progress and happiness, is one thing; and the swallowing of the public school system by industry in the interest of the employing class, is quite another.

For the present, however, democratic education[Pg 85] merely brings the workshop into the school, so that the processes of industry may be the more readily mastered; while capitalist education merely sends the school-child into its workshops, in order that he may become more effectively exploitable. The difference should be sufficiently obvious: in the school-workshops of capitalism the child is taught how to work for somebody else, how to conduct mechanical operations in an industrial process over which he has no control; in the democratic workshops of the school he learns to use those processes to serve his own creative wishes. In the one he is taught to be a wage-slave—and bear in mind that this refers to the children of the poor—for the rich have their own private schools for their own children. In the other, the child learns to be a free man.

That is just what irritates the capitalist reformers of our public school system. Since the children of the poor are going to be factory hands, what is the use of their having learned to be free men? They might as well have learned Greek and Latin, for all the use it is going to be to them!

And that is why you must exercise your choice. The merits are not quite all on one side of the question. There are disadvantages in the democratic[Pg 86] plan of education. These disadvantages have nowhere been made more clear than by H. G. Wells in his fantastic scientific parable, “The First Men in the Moon.” You will remember that his explorers visited the Moon in a queer sort of air-craft, and found there a people with institutions quite unlike our own. They too, however, had classes, and they had solved the problem of the education of these classes in a forthright manner which is utterly unlike our timid human compromises. One of the visitors from Earth thus describes the Lunar System:

“In the Moon ... every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. ‘Why should he?’ Phi-oo would ask. If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be a mathematician, his teachers and trainers set out at once to that end. They check the incipient disposition to other pursuits, they encourage his mathematical bias with a perfect physiological skill. His brain grows, or at least the mathematical faculties of his brain grow, and the rest of him only so much as is necessary to sustain this essential part of him. At last, save for rest[Pg 87] and food, his one delight lies in the exercise and display of his faculty, his one interest in its application, his sole society with other specialists in his own line. His brain grows continually larger, at least so far as the portions engaging in mathematics are concerned; they bulge ever larger and seem to suck all life and vigour from the rest of his frame; his limbs shrivel, his heart and digestive organs diminish, his insect face is hidden under its bulging contours. His voice becomes a mere stridulation for the stating of formulae; he seems dead to all but properly enunciated problems.... And so he attains his end....

“The bulk of these insects, however, ... are, I gather, of the operative [working] class. ‘Machine hands,’ indeed, some of these are in actual nature—it is no figure of speech; the single tentacle of the mooncalf-herdsman is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages to these important parts ... others again have flat feet for treadles, with ankylosed joints; and others—who I have been told are glass-blowers—seem mere lung-bellows. But every one of these common Selenites I have seen at work is exquisitely adapted to the social need it meets....

[Pg 88]“The making of these various sorts of operatives must be a very curious and interesting process.... Quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the fore limbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injections, while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo, unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly[Pg 89] method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them.”

The Lunar system has indeed much to be said for it; and the capitalist plan of wage-slave education has at least the merit of being a definite step in that direction.