CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
CREATIVE IMPULSE 
 IN INDUSTRY 
 
 A Proposition for Educators 
 
 BY 
 HELEN MAROT 
 
 ACTHOB OF "AMERICA!! LABOB UHrKHrt" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 681 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
COPYEIGHT, 1918, 
 BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 First printing September, 1918 
 
 Second printing. . .December, 1918 
 Third printing August, 1919 
 
 MAIN LIBRARY 
 
 Printed In the United States of America 
 
TO 
 CAROLINE PRATT 
 
 WHOSE APPRECIATION OP EDUCATIONAL FACTORS IN THE PLAT 
 WORLD OF CHILDREN, INTENSIFIED FOR THE AUTHOR THE SIGNIFI- 
 CANCE OF THE GROWTH PROCESSES IN INDUSTRIAL AND ADULT LIFE. 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 THE Bureau of Educational Experiments is a 
 group of men and women who are trying to face 
 the modern problems of education in a scientific 
 spirit. They are conducting and helping others 
 to conduct experiments which hold promise of 
 finding out more about children as well as how 
 to set up school environments which shall pro- 
 vide for the children's growth. From these ex- 
 periments they hope eventually may evolve a 
 laboratory school. 
 
 Among their surveys the past year, one by 
 Helen Marot has resulted in this timely and sig- 
 nificant book. The experiment which is out- 
 lined at the close seems to the Bureau to be of 
 real moment, one of which both education and 
 industry should take heed. They earnestly hope 
 it may be tried immediately. In that event, the 
 Bureau hopes to work with Miss Marot in bring- 
 ing her experiment to completion. 
 
 THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS, 
 16 West Eighth Street, 
 New York City. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT . . 1 
 
 II. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE 
 
 AMERICAN WAY 29 
 
 III. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE 
 
 GERMAN WAY 68 
 
 IV. EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY AND ASSOCIATED 
 
 ENTERPRISE . 108 
 
CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 A FRIEND of mine in describing the Russian 
 people as lie observed them in their present 
 revolution said it was possible for them to ac- 
 cept new ideas because they were uneducated ; 
 they did not, he said, labor under the difficulty 
 common among educated people of having to 
 get rid of old ideas before they took on new 
 ones. I think what he had in mind to say was 
 that it is difficult to accept new ideas when 
 your mind is filled with ideas which are insti- 
 tutional. The ideas which come out of formal 
 education, out of the schools, out of books, 
 are ideas which have been stamped as the true 
 and important ones ; many of them are, as they 
 have proved their worth in service. But as 
 they represent authority, they pass into a 
 people's mind with the full weight of an ac- 
 cepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the 
 books are not responsible primarily for the 
 fixed ideas; every established institution con- 
 tributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs 
 
 xiii 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 and rules of action. The schools and colleges 
 circulate and interpret them. The movement 
 for industrial education in the United States 
 is an illustration of this. 
 
 The ideas which we find there have not 
 sprung from schools or colleges but from in- 
 dustry. The institution of industry, rather than 
 the institution of education, dominates thought 
 in industrial education courses. It is the in- 
 stitution of industry as it has affected the life 
 of every man, woman and child, which has in- 
 hibited educational thought in conjunction with 
 schemes for industrial schools. No established 
 system of education or none proposed is more 
 circumscribed by institutionalized thought than 
 the vocational and industrial school movement. 
 
 Educators have opposed the desire of busi- 
 ness to attach the schools to the industrial enter- 
 prise. They have rightly opposed it because in- 
 dustry under the influence of business prosti- 
 tutes effort. Nevertheless, hand in hand with 
 industry, the schools must function ; unattached 
 to the human hive they are denied participa- 
 tion in life. Promoters of industrial education 
 are hung up between this fact of prostituted 
 industry and their desire to establish the chil- 
 dren's connection with life. They have tried to 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 meet opposing interests; they have not recog- 
 nized all the facts because the facts were con- 
 flicting, and their minds as well as their in- 
 terests, institutionally speaking, were committed 
 to both. 
 
 This was the impasse we had apparently 
 reached when the war occurred ; it is where we 
 still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war 
 will 'end and we shall be called then to face a 
 period of reconstruction. The reconstruction 
 will center around industry. The efficiency 
 with which a worker serves industry will be 
 the test of his patriotic fervor, as his service 
 in the army is made the test during this time 
 of war. All institutions will be examined and 
 called upon to reorganize in such ways as will 
 contribute to the enterprise of raising indus- 
 trial processes to the standard of greatest ef- 
 ficiency. 
 
 The standard of mechanical efficiency as it 
 was set by Germany was one of refined brutal- 
 ity. During the progress of the war, the sig- 
 nificance of that standard is being grafted into 
 the consciousness of the common people of 
 those nations which have opposed Germany in 
 arms. It is the industrial efficiency of Germany, 
 uninhibited by a sense of human development 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 that has made her victories possible. It is that 
 efficiency which has kept a large part of the 
 world on the defensive for over three and a half 
 years. Germany's military strategy is, in the 
 main, her industrial strategy; it represents her 
 efficiency in turning technology to the account 
 of an imperial purpose. 
 
 But those organizations of manufacturers and 
 business politicians who believe that the same 
 schemes of efficiency will function in America 
 will call upon the people after the war, it is 
 safe to predict, to emulate the methods which 
 have given Germany its untoward strength. 
 While it is these methods which have made 
 much hated Germany a menace to the world and 
 while the menace is felt by our own people, the 
 significance of the methods is but vaguely real- 
 ized. It is probable that after the war it will be 
 said that it was not the German methods which 
 were objectionable, but that it was their use in 
 an international policy. Before the time for re- 
 construction comes, I hope we shall discover 
 how intrinsically false those methods are ; and 
 how untrue to the growth process is the sort of 
 efficiency Germany has developed. I hope also 
 that we shall realize that a policy of paternalism 
 has no place in the institutional life of our own 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 country. Before the war these German methods 
 bore the character of high success, and they had 
 a large following in this country. There are in- 
 deed many thousands of men and women in the 
 United States, who, while giving all they most 
 care for, for the prosecution of the war against 
 Germany still support industrial and political 
 policies and dogmas which are in spirit essen- 
 tially Prussian. The professional Reformer 
 here in America is not even yet fully conscious 
 that German paternalism (a phase of German 
 efficiency) is the token of an enslaved people. 
 
 The German educational system as much if 
 not more than its other imperial schemes has 
 been instrumental in developing the German 
 brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in 
 Germany of its technological processes is made 
 possible as the youth of the country has been 
 consecrated and sacrificed to the development 
 of this perfection in the early years of school 
 training. Parents contribute their children 
 freely to an educational system which fits them 
 into an industrial institution which has an im- 
 perial destiny to fulfill. Each person's place 
 in the life of the nation is made for him during 
 his early years, like a predestined fact. 
 
 American business men before the war ap- 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 predated the educational system which made 
 people over into workers without will or pur- 
 pose of their own. But the situation was em- 
 barrassing as these business men were not in a 
 position to insist that the schools, supported by 
 the people, should prepare the children to serve 
 industry for the sake of the state, while indus- 
 try was pursued solely for private interest. 
 Their embarrassment, however, will be less 
 acute under the conditions of industrial recon- 
 struction which will follow the war. Then as 
 patriots, under the necessity of competing with 
 Germany industrially, they will feel free to urge 
 that the German scheme of industrial education, 
 possibly under another name, be extended here 
 and adopted as a national policy. In other 
 words as Germany has evolved its methods of 
 attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools 
 have played the leading part in the attainment, 
 the German system of industrial education, pri- 
 vate business may argue, should be given for 
 patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United 
 States. If the German system were introduced 
 here, of course it is not certain that it could 
 deliver wage workers more ready and servile, 
 less single-purposed in their industrial activity 
 than they are now. It was in Germany a com- 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 paratively simple matter for the schools to make 
 over the children into effective and efficient 
 servants, for, as Professor Veblen explains, the 
 psychology of the German people was still feu- 
 dal when the modern system of industry, with 
 its own characteristic enslavement, was im- 
 posed, ready-made, upon them; the German 
 people unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experi- 
 enced the liberating effects of the political phil- 
 osophy which developed along with modern 
 technology in both England and America.* 
 
 First, then, it is not certain that the system 
 of German industrial education would succeed ; 
 and, second, if it did succeed it is not the sort 
 of education that America wants. 
 
 America wants industrial efficiency, it must 
 have efficient workers if it holds its place among 
 nations, and American people will prove their 
 efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capa- 
 ble of using the heritage which industrial evo- 
 lution has given the world. But what shall we 
 use this efficiency for? For the sake of the 
 heritage? For the sake of business? For the 
 sake of Empire? 
 
 Business knows very clearly why it wants 
 
 *Thorstcin Veblen Imperial Germany and the Indugtrial 
 Revolution. 
 
xx INTRODUCTION 
 
 it, but as a rule most of us are not clearly con- 
 scious that we need, for the sake of our expan- 
 sive existence, to be industrially efficient. We 
 are not even conscious that industry is the great 
 field for adventure and growth, because we use 
 that field not for the creative but for the exploi- 
 tive purpose. 
 
 It is the present duty of American educators 
 to realize these two points : that industry is the 
 great field for adventure and growth; that as 
 it is used now the opportunities for growth 
 are inhibited in the only field where productive 
 experience can be a common one. Shortly it 
 will be the mission of educators to show that by 
 opening up the field for creative purpose, fer- 
 vor for industrial enterprise and good work- 
 manship may be realized ; that only as the con- 
 tent of industry in its administration as well 
 as in the technique of its processes is opened up 
 for experiment and first-hand experience, will 
 a universal impulse for work be awakened. It 
 is for educators, together with engineers and 
 architects, to demonstrate to the world that 
 while the idea of service to a political state may 
 have the power to accomplish large results, all 
 productive force is artificially sustained which 
 is not dependent on men's desire to do creative 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 work. A state as we have seen, may invoke the 
 idea of service. It might represent the produc- 
 tive interests of a community if those interests 
 sprang from the expansive experience of a peo- 
 ple in their creative adventures. 
 
 In the reconstructive period educators may 
 have their opportunity to extend the concept 
 that the creative process is the educative proc- 
 ess, or as Professor Dewey states it, the educa- 
 tive process is the process of growth. The re- 
 construction period will be a time of formative 
 thought; institutions will be attacked and on 
 the defensive ; and out of the great need of the 
 nations there may come change. Educators will 
 find their opportunity as they discover condi- 
 tions under which the great enterprise of in- 
 dustry may be educational and as they repudiate 
 or oppose institutions which exclude educational 
 factors. 
 
 It is for educators to realize first of all that 
 there can be no social progress while there is 
 antagonism between growth in wealth (which 
 is industry) and growth in individuals (which 
 is education) ; that the fundamental antagon- 
 isms which are apparent in the current arrange- 
 ment are not between industry and education 
 but between education and business. They must 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION 
 
 know that as business regulates and controls 
 industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other 
 purposes than production of goods, it thwarts 
 the development of individual lives and the 
 evolution of society ; that it values a worker not 
 for his potential productivity but for his imme- 
 diate contribution to the annual stock dividend ; 
 or if, as in Germany where his productive po- 
 tentiality is valued in terms of longer time, it 
 is for the imperial intention of the state and not 
 for the growth of the individual or the progress 
 of civilization. 
 
CREATIVE IMPULSE IN 
 INDUSTRY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT 
 
 As a human experience, the act of creating, 
 the process of fabricating wealth, has been at 
 different times as worthy of celebration as the 
 possession of it. Before business enterprise and 
 machine production discredited handwork, art 
 for art's sake, work for the love of work, were 
 conceivable human emotions. But to-day, a Ce- 
 zanne who paints pictures and leaves them in 
 the field to perish is considered by the general 
 run of people, in communities inured to mod- 
 ern industrial enterprise, as being not quite 
 right in his head. Their estimate is of course 
 more or less true. But such valuations are 
 made without the help of creative inspiration, 
 although the functioning of a product has its 
 
? : qBEATfvE^IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 creative significance. ^The creative significance 
 of a product in use, as well as an appreciation of 
 the act of creating, would be evident if modern 
 production of wealth, under the influence of 
 business enterprise and machine technology, 
 had not fairly well extinguished the apprecia- 
 tion and the joy of creative experience in coun- 
 tries where people have fallen under its in- 
 fluence so completely as in our own.J 
 
 It is usual in economic considerations to credit 
 the period of craftsmanship as a time in the 
 evolution of wealth production that was rich in 
 creative effort and opportunity for the individ- 
 ual worker. The craftsmanship period is val- 
 ued in retrospect for its educative influence. 
 There was opportunity then as there is not 
 now for the worker to gain the valuable experi- 
 ence of initiating an idea and carrying the pro- 
 duction of an article to its completion for use 
 and sale in the market; there was the oppor- 
 tunity then also as there is not now, for the 
 worker to gain a high degree of technique and a 
 valuation of his workmanship. It is character- 
 istic of workmanship that its primary consider- 
 ation is serviceability or utility. The creative 
 impulse and the creative effort may or may not 
 express workmanship or take it into account 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 3 
 
 Workmanship in its consideration of service- 
 ability oftentimes arrives at beauty and classic 
 production, when creative impulse without the 
 spirit of workmanship fails. The craftsman- 
 ship period deserves rank, but the high rank 
 which is given it is due in part to its historical 
 relation to the factory era which followed and 
 crushed it. While craftsmanship represented 
 expansive development in workmanship, it is 
 not generally recognized that the Guild organ- 
 ization of the crafts developed modern busi- 
 ness enterprise.* Business is concerned wholly 
 with utility, and not like workmanship, with 
 standards of production, except as those stand- 
 ards contain an increment of value in profits 
 to the owners of wealth. It was during the 
 Guild period that business came to value work- 
 manship because it contained that increment. 
 In spite of business interest, however, the 
 standard of workmanship was set by skilled 
 craftsmen, and their standards represented in 
 a marked degree the market value of the goods 
 produced by them. 
 
 While the exploitation of the skill of the 
 workman in the interest of the owners of raw 
 materials and manufactured goods, had its de- 
 
 Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 211-212. 
 
4 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 pressing and corrupting influence on creative 
 effort, the creative impulse found a stimulus in 
 the respect a community still paid the skill and 
 ability of the worker. It was not until machine 
 standards superseded craft standards and dis- 
 credited them that the processes of production, 
 the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of 
 workmanship and their educational value for 
 V the worker. The discredits were psychological 
 and economic; they revolutionized the intellec- 
 tual and moral concepts of men in relation to 
 their work and the production of wealth. 
 
 As machine production superseded crafts- 
 manship the basis of fixing the price of an ar- 
 ticle shifted from values fixed by the standards 
 of workers to standards of machines, Professor 
 Veblen says to standards of salesmen. It is 
 along these lines that mechanical science ap- 
 plied to the production of wealth, has eliminated 
 the personality of the workers. A worker is nc 
 longer reflected in goods on sale ; his personal- 
 ity has passed into the machine which has met 
 the requirements of mass production. 
 
 The logical development of factory organ- 
 ization has been the complete coordination 
 of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical 
 power and devices. The most important auxil- 
 
PEODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 5 
 
 iary factor is human labor. A worker is a per- 
 fected factory attachment as he surrenders him- 
 self to the time and the rhythm of the machine 
 and its functioning ; as he supplements without 
 loss whatever human faculties the machine 
 lacks, whatever imperfection hampers the ma- 
 chine in the satisfaction of its needs. If it lacks 
 eyes, he sees for it ; he walks for it, if it is with- 
 out legs ; and he pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs 
 arms. All of these things are done by the fac- 
 tory worker at the pace set by the machine and 
 under its direction and command. A worker's 
 indulgence in his personal desires or impulses 
 hinders the machine and lowers his attachment 
 value. 
 
 This division of the workers into eyes, arms, 
 fingers, legs, the plucking out of some one of 
 his faculties and discarding the rest of the man 
 as valueless, has seemed to be an organic re- 
 quirement of machine evolution. So commend- 
 able the scheme has been to business enterprise 
 that this division of labor has been carried from 
 the machine shop and the factory to the scien- 
 tific laboratories where experiment and dis- 
 covery in new processes of technology are de- 
 veloped, and where, it is popularly supposed, a 
 high order of intelligence is required. The 
 
6 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 organization of technological laboratories, like 
 the organization of construction shops to which 
 they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking 
 up of a problem which is before the laboratory 
 for its solution. The chemists, physicists, ma- 
 chinists and draftsmen are isolated as they 
 work out their assigned tasks without specific 
 knowledge of what the general problem is and 
 how it is being attacked. Small technological 
 laboratories are still in existence where the 
 general problem in hand is presented as a whole 
 to the whole engineering staff, and is left to 
 them as a group for independent and associated 
 experimentation. But even in such cases the 
 technological content does not necessarily sup- 
 ply the impulse to solve the problem or secure 
 a free and voluntary participation in its solu- 
 tion. Those who are interested in its solution 
 are inspired by its economic value for them. 
 In all technological laboratories, either where 
 the problem is broken up and its parts distrib- 
 uted among the employees of the laboratory, or 
 where it is given to them as a whole for solu- 
 tion, it is given not as a sequence in the creative 
 purpose of the individuals who are at work on 
 it, nor is its final solution necessarily deter- 
 mined by its use and wont in a community. 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 7 
 
 Problems brought to the laboratory are tainted 
 with the motive of industry which is not crea- 
 tive, but exploitive. 
 
 The tenure of each man employed in produc- 
 tion is finally determined not by any creative in- 
 terest of his own or of his employer but by 
 whether in the last analysis, he conforms bet- 
 ter than another man to the exigencies of prof- 
 its. If profits and creative purpose happen to 
 be one and the same thing, his place in an in- 
 dustrial establishment has some bearing on his 
 intrinsic worth. Under such circumstances his 
 interest in the creative purpose of the establish- 
 ment would have a foundation, and he himself 
 could value better than he otherwise would his 
 own part in the enterprise. 
 
 The economic organization of modern society 
 though built on the common people's produc- 
 tive energy has discounted their creative poten- 
 tiality. We hold to the theory that men are 
 equal in their opportunity to capture and own 
 wealth; that their ability in that respect is 
 proof of their ability to create it; a proof of 
 their inherent capacity. It is a proof, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, of their ability to compete in the 
 general scheme of capture; their ability to ex- 
 ploit wealth successfully. While the prevailing 
 
8 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 economic theory of production takes for granted 
 men's creative potentiality there is no provision 
 in our industrial institution for the common run 
 of men to function creatively. There is no at- 
 tempt in the general scheme for trueing-up or 
 estimating the creative ability of workers. In 
 the market, where the value of goods is deter- 
 mined, a machine tender has a better chance 
 than a craftsman. The popular belief is that 
 the ability of workers has native limitations, 
 that these limitations are absolute and that they 
 are fixed at or before birth. This belief is a 
 tenet among those who hold positions of indus- 
 trial mastery. Managers of industry for in- 
 stance who control a situation and create an 
 environment, demand that those who serve them 
 meet the requirements which they have fixed. 
 They do not recognize that industrial ability 
 depends largely on the opportunity which an in- 
 dividual has had to make adjustments to his 
 surroundings and on his opportunity to master 
 them through experiment. A factory employee 
 is required to do a piece of work; and he does 
 it, not because he is interested in the process 
 or the object, but because his employer wants 
 it done. 
 In Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic countries, 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 9 
 
 where people have fallen most completely under 
 the influence of machine production and busi- 
 ness enterprise, and where they have lost by 
 the way their conception of their creative po- 
 tentiality, work is universally conceived as 
 something which people endure for the sake of 
 being "paid off." Being paid off, it seems 
 abundantly clear, is the only reason a sane man 
 can have for working. After he is paid off the 
 assumption is his pfpsure will begin. A popu- 
 lar idea of play isflhe absence of work, the 
 consumption of wealth, being entertained. Be- 
 ing entertained indeed is as near as most adult 
 men in these countries come to play. Their 
 Sundays and holidays are depressing occasions, 
 shadowed by a forlorn expectancy of something 
 which never comes off. w 
 
 The capacity of the French people for enjoy- 
 ing their holidays is much the same as their 
 capacity for enjoying their work. This, no 
 doubt, is a matter of native habituation. But 
 however they came by it, it has had its part in 
 determining the industrial conditions of France. 
 The love of the people for making things has 
 resisted in a remarkable way the domination 
 of machine industry and modern factory or- 
 ganization. The French work shop, averaging 
 
10 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 six persons, is as characteristic of France as 
 the huge factory organization with the most 
 modern mechanical equipment is characteristic 
 of American industry. As the workers in these 
 shops participate more intimately in the fabri- 
 cation of goods they come more nearly to a real 
 participation in productive enterprise. This 
 close contact with the actual processes of pro- 
 duction gives the workers a sense of power. A 
 sense of their relation to the processes and their 
 ability to control them engenders courage. In- 
 deed it is the absence of fear, rather than the 
 absence of work, that determines the capacity 
 of men for play. 
 
 It was not accidental that the movement of 
 the French workers for emancipation empha- 
 sized a desire for control of industry. The syn- 
 dicalism of France has expressed the workers' 
 interest in production as the labor movements 
 of other countries have laid stress exclusively 
 on its economic value to them. The syndical- 
 ists' theory takes for granted the readiness of 
 workers to assume responsibility for produc- 
 tion, while the trade unionists of England, Ger- 
 many and the United States ask for a voice 
 in determining not their productive but their 
 financial relation to it. 
 
PRODUCTION CEEATIVE EFFORT 11 
 
 It is the habit of these other peoples to credit 
 the lack of interest in work to physical hard- 
 ships which the wage system has imposed. But 
 the wage system from the point of view of 
 material welfare has borne no less heavily on 
 the French than on other workers. It is also 
 difficult to prove that the physical hardships 
 of modern methods of production are greater 
 than the hardships of earlier methods. The 
 truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation 
 of labor are new factors; they have both, 
 through long centuries, repressed in varying 
 degree the inspirational and intellectual in- 
 terest of workers in productive effort. It is 
 not the economic burdens which followed the 
 introduction of machinery and the division of 
 labor that distinguish these new factors in in- 
 dustry, but the discredit which they throw 
 around man's labor power. They have carried 
 the discredit of labor in its social position fur- 
 ther than it had been carried, but this is merely 
 a by-product of the discredit they cast on the 
 skill and intellectual power which is latent in 
 the working class. In this connection the sig- 
 nificant truth for civilization is that while ex- 
 ploitation of labor and physical hardships in- 
 duce the antagonism between labor and capital, 
 
12 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 modern factory organization destroys creative 
 desire and individual initiative as it excludes 
 the workers from participation in creative ex- 
 perience. 
 
 The new discoveries in inorganic power and 
 their application to industrial enterprise are 
 possibly more far reaching in their effect on the 
 adjustment and relationships of men than they 
 have been at any other time in the last century 
 and a half. Whatever the world owes to these 
 discoveries and their applications it cannot af- 
 ford to lose sight of a fact of great social sig- 
 nificance, which is, that people have accepted 
 mechanical achievements, not as labor saving 
 devices but as substitutes for human initiative 
 and effort. They have not, indeed, saved labor 
 to the advantage of labor itself, and they have 
 inhibited interest in production. Outside of 
 business enterprise and diplomacy the politi- 
 cal extension of business mechanical devices 
 have lost the surprise reaction and resentment 
 which they originally set up. As a competitor 
 with human labor they have established them- 
 selves as its fit survivor. The prophesy of Theo- 
 phrastus Such seems to have been already ful- 
 filled, and any new machine added to those al- 
 ready in power in the Parliament of Machines 
 
PRODUCTION CEEATIVE EFFORT 13 
 
 can scarcely add to the worker's sense of his 
 own impotency. The business valuations which 
 were evolved out of craftsmanship and which 
 were further developed under the influence of 
 the technology of the last century and a half, 
 emphasized the value of material force, and re- 
 pressed spiritual evaluations, such as the crea- 
 tive impulse in human beings. v 
 
 Modern industrial institutions are developed \\ 
 by an exclusive cultivation of people's needs \\ 
 and the desire to possess. They are developed 
 independently, as we have seen, of any need or 
 desire to create. The desire to possess is re- 
 sponsible for the production of a mass of goods 
 unprecedented and inconceivable a century and 
 a half ago. The actual production of all of these 
 goods is unrelated to the motive of men's par- 
 ticipation in their production; the actual pro- 
 duction in relation to the motive is an incident. 
 The sole reason for the participation in the 
 productive effort is not the desire for creative 
 experience or the satisfaction of the creative 
 impulse; it is not an interest in supplying the 
 needs of a community or in the enrichment of 
 life; it is to acquire out of the store of goods 
 all that can be acquired for personal possession 
 or consumption. There is no more fundamental 
 
14 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 need than the need to consume ; but for the com- 
 mon run of men as a motive in the creation of 
 wealth, it is shorn of adventure, of imagination 
 and of joy. 
 
 The ownership of many things, which mass 
 production has made possible, the intensive 
 cultivation of the desire to own, has added an- 
 other element to the corruption of workmanship 
 and the depreciation of its value. Access to a 
 mass of goods made cheap by machinery has 
 had its contributing influence in the people's 
 depreciation of their own creative efforts. As 
 people become inured to machine standards, 
 they lose their sense of art values along with 
 their joy in creative effort, their self regard as 
 working men and their personal equation in in- 
 dustrial life. 
 
 Where the motive of individuals who engage 
 in industry is the desire to possess, the rational 
 method of gaining possession is not by the ar- 
 duous way of work but of capture. The scheme 
 of capture is a scheme whereby you may get 
 something for (doing) nothing; nothing as- 
 nearly as possible in the way of fabrication of 
 goods ; something for the manipulation of men ; 
 something for the development of technology 
 and mechanical science; and high regard for 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 15 
 
 the manipulation of money. "Doing nothing" 
 does not mean that manual workers, managers 
 of productive enterprises, speculators in the 
 natural resources of wealth production and 
 manufactured goods, as well as financiers, are 
 not busy people, or that their activity does not 
 result in accomplishment. They are indeed the 
 busy people and their accomplishment is the 
 world's wealth. Nevertheless the intention of 
 all and the spirit of the scheme is to do as near 
 nothing as possible in exchange for the highest 
 return. The whole industrial arrangement is \ 
 carried on without the force of productive m- f 
 tention; it is carried forward against a disin^ 
 clination to produce. 
 
 I have said that industry was shorn of ad- 
 venture for the common man. Adventure in 
 industrial enterprise is the business man's 
 great monopoly. His impetus is not due to his 
 desire to create wealth but to exploit it, and 
 he secures its creation by "paying men off." 
 Commonly he is peevishly expectant that those 
 he pays off will have a creative intention toward 
 the work he pays them to do, although in the 
 scheme of industry which he supports the op- 
 portunity provided for such intention is neg- 
 ligible. An efficiency engineer estimated that 
 
16 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 there is a loss in wealth of some fifty per cent, 
 due to the inability of the business man to ap- 
 praise the creative possibilities in industry. 
 
 When exploitation of wealth is referred to, 
 those who own it are generally meant. But 
 exploitation of wealth is the intention of the 
 worker as well as of the business man. To get, 
 as I have said, something for (doing) nothing 
 is the dominating motif in the industrial world. 
 It is supposed to reflect the self-interest of in- 
 dividuals, to reflect, that is, their economic 
 needs. 
 
 This motive of circumscribed self-interest 
 during an era of political and industrial ex- 
 pansion has been adopted by philosophers as 
 the guide as well as a clue to conduct; it was 
 hailed by them as a sufficient and complete mo- 
 tivation for wealth creation; they used it as a 
 basis of a theory for race progress resting 
 solely on the efforts of men to satisfy their 
 material needs through their ability to capture 
 goods. This motive together with the possi- 
 bilities which machine production opened up for 
 wealth exploitation, gave birth to the dismal 
 science of Political Economy; it suggested the 
 materialistic interpretation of history, and 
 brought to earth Utopian schemes of brother- 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 17 
 
 hood. Political science is dismal because it is 
 an interpretation of dismal institutions. It may 
 be ungenerous to speak slightingly of institu- 
 tions which have yielded such great wealth, 
 which have transformed inert matter into pro- 
 ductive power and brought in consequence the 
 whole world into acquaintanceship and rivalry. 
 It would be ungenerous if it were not for a fact 
 which has become poignant, that the exploita- 
 tion of wealth and undigested relationships are 
 to-day the outstanding menace to civilization. 
 The present world conflict has made it clear 
 that relationships cannot remain undigested; 
 that they are not in their nature passive. They 
 are either integrating in their force or disin- 
 tegrating. Socialism has undertaken for two 
 generations to prove that exploitation carries 
 with it its own seeds of destruction. The posi- 
 tion of the socialists is passing out of theory 
 and propaganda through the hands of diploma- 
 tists, into statutes. Both the socialists and 
 their successors would eradicate exploitation by 
 repressing it. The socialists would repress it 
 by shifting ownership of wealth from individ- 
 uals to the state, while the diplomatists, through 
 the same agency, would regulate those who own 
 it. 
 
18 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 It is an historical fact as well as a psycho- 
 logical one that you do not get rid of traits or 
 institutions except as you replace them with 
 something of positive service, or greater com- 
 petitive value. The institution of capitalism 
 exists not because of its predatory character, 
 but because in spite of its exploitation it pro- 
 motes industry, and labor and other industrial 
 technicians do not. As our industrial institu- 
 tions have grown out of a predatory concept in- 
 stead of a creative one, as capture has been re- 
 warded rather than work, as the possessive de- 
 sire has been stimulated and the creative desire 
 has been sacrificed, as employers of men and 
 owners of machines have engaged in production 
 because of their interest not in the process or 
 in the use of the product, but in the reward, as 
 wage workers have hired out for the day's 
 work or continued during their adult life in 
 their trade without interest in its development, 
 because like their employers they wanted the 
 highest cash return, wealth exploitation has 
 come to be synonymous in the minds of men 
 with wealth creation. A creative concept which 
 could survive and inhibit the predatory concept 
 must rest on such elements of creative force as 
 are now absent from our industrial institution. 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 19 
 
 It is almost axiomatic to say that a system of 
 wealth production which cultivated creative 
 effort would yield more in general terms of life 
 as well as in terms of goods, than a system like 
 our own which exploits creative power. It is 
 obvious that the disintegrating tendency in our 
 system is due to the fact that production is de- 
 pendent for its motive force on the desire to 
 possess. It is also obvious that a rational sys- 
 tem of industry which sought to give that de- 
 sire among all men full opportunity for satis- 
 faction would also undertake to cultivate the 
 creative impulse for the sake of increasing crea- 
 tive effort The result would be an increase in 
 production. As logical as this observation may 
 be, it is not so obvious how such a social trans- 
 formation as this implies, may be effected. 
 
 Every advance in wealth creation which has 
 become an institutional part of an economic 
 system has been impelled and sustained by the 
 material interests of people who at the time 
 held the strategic position in the community. 
 The world has progressed, or retrogressed, as 
 the most powerful interests at any time adjust- 
 ed the institutions and customs governing 
 wealth production to their own advantage. As 
 the controlling interests in our present scheme 
 
20 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 are the business interests, it is the business man, 
 not the workman, who directs industry and de- 
 termines its policy as well as the general policy 
 of the nation in which it operates. It is to the 
 advantage of private business run for private 
 gain, to control creative effort for the purpose 
 of appropriating the product, and to inhibit 
 free creative expression as an uncontrollable 
 factor in the enterprise of exploitation. 
 
 The appalling and wanton sacrifice of life 
 which are incident to the evolution of machin- 
 ery and the division of labor seem to demand at 
 times their elimination. In weariness we are 
 urged to retrace our steps and go back to 
 craftsmanship and the Guilds. But it is idle to 
 talk about going back or eliminating institu- 
 tionalized features of society. We cannot go 
 back, we have not the ability to discard this or 
 that part of our environment except as we make 
 it over. The result of this making over might 
 be vitalized by methods which had belonged to 
 earlier periods, but neither the methods nor the 
 periods, we can safely say , will live again. 
 Neither our own nor future generations will 
 escape the influence of modern technology. It 
 will play its part. It may be a part which will 
 lead away from some of the destructive influ- 
 
PROBUCTItN CEEATIVE EFFORT 21 
 
 ences which developed in the era of craftsman- 
 ship and which dominate the present. But a 
 society too enfeebled to use its own experience 
 will not have the power to use the experience of 
 another people or of another time. It is beside 
 the point to look to some other experience or 
 scheme of life and choose that because it seems 
 good, unless the choice is based on a people's 
 present fitness to adapt that other experience 
 or other scheme of life to their own experience. 
 The proposition to revert to an earlier period 
 suggests nothing more than the repetition of 
 an experience out of which the present state of 
 affairs has evolved. 
 
 Nor is there ground for the hope that in time 
 institutions and relationships will be regulated 
 on principles of altruism. It is not apparent' 
 indeed that such regulations would yield even 
 the present allowance of happiness incident to 
 our own immature method of capturing what 
 wealth we can without relation to social factors. 
 As unfortunate as we are in pursuit of that 
 blind method, it is safe to predict that the world 
 would be a madder place than it is to-day if 
 every one devoted himself to doing what he be- 
 lieved was for the good of everybody else. 
 
 The hope of social revolutionists that private 
 
22 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 business would overreach itself and defeat its 
 own purpose, grew out of the expectation that 
 its tribute exactions would draw the subjects 
 of capital together in a common defensive move- 
 ment; that the movement on account of its num- 
 bers would overturn business and that in place 
 of private management democratic control 
 would be instituted. Some such outcome, sooner 
 or later, seems inevitable if civilization is 
 scheduled to advance. The labor union move- 
 ment, unlike the political socialist revolutionary 
 movement, undertakes in its operation to supply 
 labor with a certain working content, which the 
 administrative scheme of industry has excluded 
 from the experience of its workers. But this 
 content is not sufficient to stimulate the imagi- 
 nation of the trade unionists with the thought 
 that the world of industry is the field of creative 
 adventure. Their conception born of experi- 
 ence is not so flattering. It would be a brave 
 man who would undertake to convince the twen- 
 tieth century adult wage earner, involved in 
 modern methods of machine production, that 
 his poverty is less in his possession of wealth 
 than in his growth and in his creative oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 The industrial changes which the labor move- 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 23 
 
 ment proposes to make are on the side of a bet- 
 ter distribution of goods. A better distribution 
 would have a dynamic significance in wealth 
 production, if the actual increase which labor 
 secured in wages and leisure were a real in- 
 crease. But exploiting capital provides for 
 such exigencies as high wages by increasing the 
 price of products, thus reducing the wage earn- 
 ers ' purchasing power to the former level. High 
 wages fail to disturb the relative position of 
 capital and labor even more than they fail to 
 affect the purchasing power of the worker. 
 
 It is often suggested that if the state assumed 
 control of industry the blight of business could 
 be removed. But in the transfer we would not 
 necessarily gain opportunity to enjoy the adven- 
 ture which industry holds out. Industry as a 
 creative experience, it is safe to predict, would 
 be as rare a personal experience and as foreign 
 an influence in social existence under state man- 
 agement as it is under business management. 
 The state would curb the amount of wealth ex- 
 ploitation possibly, but would not alter the uni- 
 versal attitude toward wealth production, which 
 is to take as much and give as little as one can 
 get off with. 
 
 Although political socialism may be the eco- 
 
24 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 nomic sequel of private capital there is no foun- 
 dation 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 gen- 
 eral consumption, is blind and historically un- 
 warranted. The signs are that a socialist state 
 would lean exclusively on the consumption de- 
 sire for production results, just as the present 
 system of business now does. Neither fat in- 
 comes 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. Pos- 
 sibly 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 im- 
 pulse, a real intellectual interest in the adven- 
 ture of productive enterprise. 
 The creative desire is an incident or a sort of 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 25 
 
 
 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 in- 
 sures a democratic control of industry, neither 
 provides for growth, for education in the pro- 
 ductive process. A democracy of industry re- 
 quires a people's sustained interest in the pro- 
 ductive enterprise; their interest in the de- 
 velopment 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 produc- 
 tion. As power latent in inorganic matter has 
 been freed and applied to common needs, an en- 
 vironment has been evolved, filled with situa- 
 tions incomparably more dramatic than the pro- 
 vincial affairs of detached people and communi- 
 ties. Although this technological subject mat- 
 ter, rich in opportunities for associated adven- 
 ture and infinite discovery, is not a part of com- 
 mon experience, it exists, and if called out from 
 its isolation for purposes of common experi- 
 mentation, it is fit matter for making science a 
 
26 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 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 crea- 
 tive experience, to undertake the direction and 
 control of industry. 
 
 The present is better than any time earlier in 
 the history of technology for the development 
 of a concept of industry as a socially creative 
 enterprise. As craftsmanship extended and in- 
 tensified an interest in personal ownership, it 
 magnified the value of possessions ; as it deep- 
 ened the desire for protection of private prop- 
 erty and the strengthening of property laws 
 against human laws, it was not a socializing 
 force. While the craftsmanship period strength- 
 ened personal claims on workmanship and in- 
 terest in it, mechanical power and division of 
 labor have impersonalized industry.* In the 
 labyrinth of mechanical processes and economic 
 calculation it is not to-day possible for a worker 
 
 * Thorstein Veblen Instinct of Workmanship, Chapter V. 
 
PRODUCTION CREATIVE EFFORT 27 
 
 to think or speak of a product as his. He has 
 no basis for ownership claims in any article; 
 even the price is arranged between buyer and 
 seller and he is not the seller. An article owes 
 its existence to an infinite number of persons 
 and its place in the market .to as many more. 
 
 A worker's claim to the product of his la- 
 bor is merged in an infinity of claims which 
 makes the product more nearly the property of 
 society than of any one individual. And this 
 merging of claims which has resulted in the sub- 
 merging of all wage workers, has set up the 
 new educational task of discovering the possi- 
 bilities for creative experience in associated en- 
 terprise. 
 
 While an article manufactured under busi- 
 ness conditions is the product of enforced asso- 
 ciation, we have in this condition the mechanics 
 of a real association. As it now stands, the as- 
 sociation is one of individuals, with the impulse 
 for association and for creative effort left out. 
 The interests of some ninety workers associated 
 together in the making of a shoe are not com- 
 mon but antagonistic, except as they are com- 
 mon in their antagonism to the owner of the 
 shoe on which they work. They hang together 
 
28 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTEY 
 
 because they must; their parting is the best 
 part of a working day. 
 
 And yet the practice of dividing up the fabri- 
 cation of an article among the members of a 
 group instead of confining the making of it to 
 one or two people, opens up the possibility of 
 extensive social intercourse, and has the power, 
 we may discover, to sublimate the inordinate 
 desire for the intensive satisfaction of personal 
 life. Although the division of lab>r has given 
 us a society which is abortive in its functioning 
 like a machine with half assembled parts, -it 
 offers us the mechanics for interdependence 
 and the opportunity to work out a coordinated 
 industrial life. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ADAPTING PEOPLtE TO INDUSTRY THE AMERICAN 
 
 WAY 
 
 As machine power rivalled hand work, pro- 
 moters of industry until recently relied for its 
 advancement on the perfection of technology, 
 giving little thought to the perfection of labor. 
 It was confidently assumed that labor, out of 
 its own necessities, would adapt itself automati- 
 cally to the new requirements of the machine, 
 and to the shifts of business interest. When it 
 was discovered that there were limitations to 
 labor's voluntary adaptation under the condi- 
 tions laid down, intelligent business in America 
 decided that the responsibility for realizing la- 
 bor's adaptation or " labor's cooperation" as 
 they call it, must be assumed by the management 
 of industry and that that-management must be 
 scientifically worked out and applied. 
 
 Scientific management is scientific as it sub- 
 jects the labor operations on each job, each spe- 
 cific job to be performed in a factory, to a test- 
 
 29 
 
30 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 ing out of the energy consumed ; to discovering 
 how to secure labor's maximum productivity 
 without waste of time or energy. It is scientific as 
 the manager's state of mind towards the physi- 
 cal and psychological reactions of the work- 
 ers is one of inquiry and a readiness to accept, 
 as facts of mechanical science are accepted, the 
 reaction of the workers. A scientific manager, or 
 engineer as he is often called, bears the same 
 relation to the labor force in a factory that an 
 electrical engineer bears to the electrical equip- 
 ment. If his attention to the emotional reaction 
 of the workers is less detached than scientific 
 standards require, it must be remembered that 
 he is trying to make adjustments which must 
 first of all meet definite business conditions. 
 Where the reactions of the workers interfere 
 with the whole scheme of business administra- 
 tion (and interfere they ceaselessly do), he has 
 to substitute measures which are not strictly 
 speaking scientific. On these occasions he 
 adopts humanitarian schemes, which are gen- 
 erally spoken of as welfare work. It is the 
 introduction of these schemes which look like 
 a "slop over" from science to charity, that 
 makes it difficult for outsiders to tell just what 
 scientific management is and what it is not. 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 31 
 
 Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of 
 scientific management, was capable of scientific 
 detachment in studying working men in relation 
 to the specific job. He was able more notably 
 than others had been before him, and more than 
 many who have followed him, to extend the im- 
 personal state of mind, which he enjoyed in the 
 study of inorganic energy, to his study of hu- 
 man energy. Mr. Taylor's interest did not 
 emanate from sympathy with labor in its hard- 
 ships ; his interest was centered in an effort to 
 conserve and apply labor energy with maximum 
 economy for wealth production. Mr. Taylor 
 awakened the consciousness of industrial man- 
 agers to the fact that the energy of workers like 
 the power of machinery is subject to laws. He 
 demonstrated that it was possible in specific 
 operations to discover how the highest degree 
 of energy could be attained and the largest 
 output result, without loss through fatigue. 
 He showed how efficiency could be enhanced by 
 transferring the responsibility of standards of 
 work from the workers to the managers. He 
 formulated, as a business and industry doctrine, 
 that a definite relation between the expendi- 
 ture of labor energy and the labor reward could 
 be established; that the wage incentive, if ap- 
 
32 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 plied to labor in relation to energy expended, 
 would yield, or might be expected to yield in- 
 creased returns. These incentives, rewards, 
 stimuli, which employers could apply would 
 produce, he stated with unscientific fervor, the 
 workers' initiative. The inability of Mr. Tay- 
 lor and other scientific managers to distinguish 
 between initiative and short lived reaction to 
 stimulus is simple evidence that their scientific 
 experiments were confined to comparisons 
 which they could make between a yield in wealth 
 where the stimulus to labor is weak, and a yield 
 where it is strong. They will not discover what 
 a worker's productivity is, or might be, when 
 incited by his impulse to work, nor will they 
 secure labor's initiative, until they release the 
 factors, latent in industry, which have inspira- 
 tional, creative force. 
 
 The attitude of Mr. Taylor and his follow- 
 ers, however, differs from that of the ordinary 
 manager who maintains an irritated disregard 
 of the disturbing elements instead of accepting 
 them and, as far as is consistent with business 
 principles, allaying or cajoling them. The sig- 
 nificant contributions which scientific manage- 
 ment has made are in line with the experiments 
 originally introduced by Mr. Taylor. They call 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 33 
 
 for the study of each new task by the manage- 
 ment, for discovering the economy in the expen- 
 diture of labor energy before it is submitted to 
 the working force ; the standardizing of the task 
 in conformity with the findings ; the teaching of 
 the approved methods to the working force; 
 the introduction of incentives which will insure 
 the full response of labor in the accomplishment 
 of the task. Beside the standardizing of tasks 
 and the relating the wage to the fixed standard, 
 scientific management has made intensive ex- 
 periments in the scheduling of the various oper- 
 ations to be performed, which are divided 
 among the working force, so that no one opera- 
 tion is held up awaiting the completion of an- 
 other. It has shown in this connection that 
 work can be "routed" so that the time of work- 
 ers is not lost. The most successfully managed 
 factories also plan their annual product so that 
 employment will be continuous. They have dis- 
 covered that the periods of unemployment se- 
 riously affect the personnel of a labor force and 
 they estimate that the turnover of the labor 
 force which requires the constant breaking in 
 of new men is an item of serious financial loss. 
 The Ford Automobile Works at one time hired 
 50,000 men in one year while not employing at 
 
34 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTEY 
 
 any one time more than 14,000. They estimated 
 that the cost of breaking in a new man averaged 
 $70.00. To reduce this cost, they instituted 
 profit sharing, as an incentive for men to re- 
 main. Other factories have estimated the cost 
 of replacing men from $50.00 to $200.00. A rub- 
 ber concern in Ohio has a labor turnover of 150 
 per cent. In connection with the effort to' re- 
 duce the turnover in the labor force the man- 
 agement of well organized factories takes great 
 care to estimate a worker 's value before em- 
 ploying him. The policy of transferring a man 
 from one department to another where he is 
 better suited yields evidently valuable results. 
 In factories where there is effort to hold labor, 
 to make employment continuous, the turnover 
 has been reduced in some cases to as low as 18 
 per cent. Generally, however, it is still high; 
 frequently as high as 50 per cent, and 50 per 
 cent is still considered low, even in factories 
 which have given the subject much considera- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a tendency in developing the mechan- 
 ics of efficiency, as they relate to labor, to es- 
 tablish for machine production standards of 
 workmanship. Long and weary experience has 
 proved that wage earners under factory meth- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 35 
 
 ods and machine conditions are not interested 
 in maintaining standards of work. The stand- 
 ards which are set by the scientific manage- 
 ment schemes of efficiency are not, to be sure, 
 the qualitative standards of craftsmanship but 
 they are qualitative as well as quantitative 
 standards of machine work. The tendency to 
 establish standards should have educational 
 significance for workers. It would have, if the 
 responsibility for setting standards as well as 
 maintaining them rested in any measure with 
 the workers ; it would have, that is, if the work- 
 ers had the interest in workmanship, which 
 as things now stand they have not. The point 
 in scientific management is that efficiency de- 
 pends, wholly depends they believe, on central- 
 izing the responsibility for setting and main- 
 taining workmanship standards, on transfer- 
 ring the responsibility for standards of work 
 from workers who do it, to the management 
 who directs it done. I have learned of only one 
 manager who realizes that although the factory 
 workers are not to be trusted to maintain stand- 
 ards, a management nevertheless will fail to 
 get the workers' full cooperation until it 
 arouses their interest in maintaining them. 
 The manager is Mr. Robert Wolf, who illus- 
 
36 CEEATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 trated this point at a meeting of the Taylor So- 
 ciety in March, 1917. In describing the process 
 of extracting the last possible amount of water 
 from paper pulp, he said : 
 
 "Our problem was to determine the best length of 
 time to keep the low pressure on, as the high pressure 
 is governed entirely by the production coming from 
 the wet machine. After having determined that three 
 minutes of low pressure . . . gives maximum mois- 
 ture test, we furnished each man on the wet machines 
 with a clock and asked him to leave this low pressure 
 on just three minutes. As long as the foremen kept 
 constantly after their men and vigilantly followed 
 them up we obtained some slight increase in the test ; 
 but it required a constant urging upon our part to 
 focus the attention of the men upon this three minute 
 time of low pressure. . . . We realized finally that in 
 order to get the results we were after, it was neces- 
 sary for us to produce a desire upon the part of our 
 men to do this work in the proper way ... so we 
 designed an instrument which would give us a record 
 of the tune lost between pressing operations, also the 
 number of minutes the low pressure was kept on. It 
 took us something over a year to perfect this machine, 
 but after it was finally perfected and a record of the 
 operations made, we found that the men actually were 
 operating at an average efficiency of 42 per cent, and 
 our moisture test was running about 54 per cent. 
 Our next step was to post a daily record of the rel- 
 ative standing of the men in the machine room, put- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 37 
 
 ting the men who had the best record at the top of 
 the list, in the order of their weekly average efficien- 
 cies. (The efficiency of low pressure, which proved to 
 be the most important factor, was computed by calling 
 three minutes of low pressure 100 per cent and two 
 minutes either way per cent.) As a result of simply 
 posting this record our efficiencies rose to over 60 per 
 cent and our moisture test increased a little less than 
 1 per cent. Some of the best and most skilled men 
 had an efficiency of over 80 per cent, but quite a large 
 percentage of them were down below 50 per cent. We 
 therefore decided that it was necessary to have the 
 foreman give more detailed information to the men as 
 to what the machine meant and how their efficiencies 
 were obtained and to put the instrument which did 
 the recording into a glass case in the machine room 
 where all the men could see it. Each foreman took a 
 portion of the chart and one of the celluloid scales by 
 which we obtained the efficiencies and explained in 
 detail to each one of the men how their records were 
 calculated. As a result of this, our efficiency rose from 
 60 per cent to 80 per cent in less than four weeks, and 
 it has remained at 80 per cent ever since (ever since 
 being over two years) enabling us to get a moisture 
 of over 56 per cent. ' ' * 
 
 This was accomplished, Mr. Wolf told them, 
 without resorting to piece work or bonus or any 
 of the special methods of payments, their men 
 being hired by the day throughout the entire 
 
 * Bulletin of the Taylor Society March, 1917. 
 
38 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTEY 
 
 plant. Mr. Wolf accomplished the result by 
 giving meaning to a meaningless task, by let- 
 ting the men see for themselves how they ar- 
 rived at results, letting them see the different 
 processes of getting results and knowing on 
 their own account which were the most valuable. 
 There may be other managers who appreciate 
 the value of letting men in on the experimental 
 effort of getting results but it is not the practice 
 to do so and it is opposed to the idea of trans- 
 ferring the responsibility from the workshop 
 to the manager's office or laboratory. Because 
 of this practice the educational value of estab- 
 lishing standards of workmanship is lost so far 
 as the workers are concerned. Mr. Wolf's criti- 
 cism of orthodox scientific management and his 
 conclusions are illuminating; they are indeed 
 revolutionary in nature as they come from a 
 manager of a successful industrial enterprise: 
 
 "Our efforts, ever since we began to realize the 
 workman's point of view, have been not to take re- 
 sponsibility from him. It is our plan to increase his 
 responsibility and we feel that it is our duty to teach 
 him to exercise his reasoning power and intelligence 
 to its fullest extent. There is no advantage gained l>y 
 stimulating a man's reasoning power, and through this 
 means his creative faculty, if the management relieves 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 39 
 
 the m<m of the responsibility for each individual opera- 
 tion. The opportunity for self expression, which is 
 synonymous with joy in work, is something that the 
 workman is entitled to, and we employers who feel that 
 management is to become a true science must begin to 
 think less of the science of material things and think 
 more of the science of human relationships. Our in- 
 dustries must become humanized, otherwise there will 
 be no relief from the present state of unrest in the 
 industries of the world. 
 
 ' ' In this connection it might be well to observe that 
 our experience in the pulp industry has been that in- 
 structions which go too much into detail tend to 
 deaden interest in the work. "We realize fully the 
 value of sufficient instructions to get uniform results, 
 but we try to leave as much as possible to the judg- 
 ment of the individual operator, making our instruc- 
 tions take more the form of constant teaching of prin- 
 ciples involved in the operation than of definite fixed 
 rules of procedure. It is necessary to produce a de- 
 sire in the heart of the workman to do good work. 
 No amount of coercion will enlist him thoroughly in 
 the service. 
 
 ' ' The new efficiency is going to reckon a great deal 
 more with the needs of the individual man; but in 
 order to do this, it must have some philosophical con- 
 ception of the reason for man's existence. It is begin- 
 ning to be understood that when we deny to vast 
 numbers of individuals the opportunity to do creative 
 work, we are violating a great universal law." 
 
 Scientific management is sacrificing educa- 
 
40 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 tioiial opportunity latent in the realization of 
 workmanship standards in the same way that 
 machinery sacrificed it. They both curtail the 
 workers ' chance to discover first-hand what the 
 processes of fabrication are, the processes in 
 which they are involved ; they must adopt ready- 
 made methods of doing their work, they must 
 accept them out of hand without questioning, 
 or chance to question, their validity. Workers 
 endowed with good health and moral vigor re- 
 sist these attempts to put something over on 
 them, irrespective of their good or evil re- 
 sults. 
 
 The workers have resisted machinery not 
 only because as individuals they were thrown 
 out of jobs for a time or lost them permanently, 
 but because the machine imposed on them a 
 method of work, of activity over which they 
 had no control. Scientific management has un- 
 dertaken to gather up whatever bits of initiative 
 the machine had not already taken over and to 
 hand back to the workers at the bench direc- 
 tions for them to follow with a blind ability to 
 accept instruction. It is incredible to factory 
 managers that workers object to being taught 
 " right " ways of doing things. Their objection 
 is not to being taught, but to being told that 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 41 
 
 some one way is right without having had the 
 chance to know why, or whether indeed it is the 
 right way. This resistance to being taught, it 
 seems, is nothing more nor less than a wayward 
 desire of a worker to do his own way because 
 it is his way, and of course from the managers ' 
 point of view, that is stupid. It is stupid, but 
 the stupidity is in the situation. What does 
 this waywardness of the worker to do his own 
 way suggest? Not that he has a way worth 
 bothering about but that he wants to exercise 
 the quality which all industrial managers agree 
 he does not possess his initiative. Now a man 
 who has the desire to exercise initiative and does 
 not know how to put anything through is not 
 only a useless person in society but the most 
 pestiferous fellow in existence. Allowing that 
 he is does not mean that he has not the power 
 of initiative or that he could not have learned 
 to put this initiative to good use, if at any time 
 in his manhood or youth he had been taught to 
 use it, instead of being required to follow the 
 accepted ways of doing things without having 
 had the experience of trial and error. Schools 
 and factory management give workers scant op- 
 \ portunity to discover whether they have initia- 
 tive or have not. 
 
42 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 Mr. Wolf finds that "while it is possible, 
 under certain conditions, to compel obedience, 
 there is no possible way in which a man can be 
 compelled to do his work willingly and when he 
 does it unwillingly he is far from being efficient. 
 He must have the opportunity to enjoy his work 
 and realize himself in its performance. " "In 
 our plant," he remarks, "we never made it a 
 practice to determine arbitrarily standard meth- 
 ods for performing an operation, for we be- 
 lieve that the men who are actually doing the 
 work have generally as much to contribute as 
 the foremen and department heads in deciding 
 standard practices; and because we give the 
 workman the chance to have the most to say 
 about the matter, he is willing to conform to the 
 standard, because it really represents a con- 
 census of opinion of the men in his particular 
 group. " It is significant in this connection to 
 remember that he does not pay the men by 
 special methods to get the return. "I am not 
 necessarily opposed to piece work or task and 
 bonus methods of payment. . . . We have been 
 able to obtain splendid results without resorting 
 to a system of immediate money rewards." He 
 thinks it is better to pay the workers liberally 
 so that they "can forget this'economic pressure 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 43 
 
 and do good work because of the joy that comes 
 from the consciousness of work well done." 
 Scientific management like ordinary man- 
 agement as a matter of fact does not want to 
 cultivate initiative in the rank and file of work- 
 ers ; it would like to find more of it ; and its eter- 
 nal expectation is that enough of it will rise out 
 of the oppressive atmosphere of the factory 
 system to supply its limited needs. Scientific 
 management especially wants this, as it must 
 have more foremen and teachers to carry for- 
 ward its advanced schemes of organization. But 
 every manager will tell you that industry does 
 not produce men with sufficient initiative to fill 
 these positions. Their estimates of the num- 
 ber of men found in industry who have initia- 
 tive varies from one to five per cent. The rest 
 they believe are born, routine workers. They 
 speak of their limitations as native. Managers 
 do not stop to consider that their judgments 
 are based wholly on the reaction of the mass of 
 wage workers to the special stimuli which they 
 offer. They say also that high school and col- 
 lege boys show up very little if any better in 
 respect to initiative than the lower school prod- 
 uct. The truth is that schools and colleges are 
 more concerned with passing on the standards 
 
44 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 of an older generation to a younger, and the 
 younger that generation is te less it is en- 
 trusted with opportunity to make its own first 
 hand inquiries. That is, the lower schools which 
 deal with a generation at its most plastic time, 
 furnish the higher schools with minds inured to 
 the pressure of accepting subject matter with- 
 out independent inquiry or curiosity. 
 
 Factory management like college and school 
 management, instead of depending on the sub- 
 ject matter to interest the workers, instead 
 of opening up to them the factors of in- 
 terest in industrial enterprise, has adopted 
 incentives for getting the required work done. 
 {Enlightened school practice, out of long failure 
 to get the children's initiative by the artificial 
 stimulus of rewards for work done, now de- 
 pends upon the content of the subject matter 
 and the children's experiments with it, to de- 
 velop their desire to do the work. The practice 
 of depending on school rewards instead of in- 
 terest in subject matter is largely responsible 
 for superficial knowledge and lack of ability to 
 think as well as to act. As schools fail to incite 
 the interest of the children they train them to 
 put through this and that task and reward them 
 for it without having added to their power of 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 45 
 
 undertaking tasks on their own account. In- 
 deed, as they fail to give them the chance to do 
 that, they actually decrease whatever power 
 they may have had. 
 
 The doing of tasks in factories for the sake 
 of rewards, gives the workers experience in win- 
 ning rewards. As they are interested only in 
 the reward, they carry away no desire or inter- 
 est in the work experience. As the method of 
 doing the work is prescribed in every detail and 
 their only requirement, under scientific man- 
 agement, is to follow directions with accuracy, 
 they are trained to do their tasks as the chil- 
 dren in school are trained. They are trained 
 in routine, and to do each task as it is given. - 
 This is not education, it is training to do tricks. 
 The worker does not take over what can be called 
 experience from one task to another. He forms 
 certain motor habits, called skill. But under 
 the efficient methods of scientific management 
 the acquirement of this skill is robbed even of 
 the educational value that it had under the un- 
 scientific method of factory work, which within 
 its limited field, left the worker to discover by 
 trial and error what were the best methods of 
 getting results. Moreover, the standards of 
 workmanship which scientific management sets 
 
46 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 up are not the worker's own standards; he has 
 had no part in the making of them or in decid- 
 ing on the comparative merits of the results. 
 He accomplishes the results as he follows direc- 
 tions, not for the sake of the result, not for the 
 sake of good workmanship, but for the reward. 
 As I have said scientific management has 
 given the subject of incentives the same careful 
 thought that it has given to the study of lost 
 energy. The two important incentives for in- 
 ducing the response of labor to productive en- 
 terprises which scientific management has car- 
 ried forward in their applications, are wages 
 and promotion. The general assumption is that 
 the wage as an incentive has no limitations, 
 except the physical limitation of a human being 
 in response to stimulus. And surely it is true 
 that the chance to "make money" is to-day the 
 most powerful stimulus in use. But thoughtful 
 managers of industrial enterprise tell you, in- 
 credible as it may seem, that the worker's ob- 
 jection to applying himself to his task is not 
 invariably overcome by anticipation of the wage 
 return; he will slack or be perverse or throw 
 over a job in the face of opportunities to earn as 
 good a wage or a better one than he can get else- 
 where. It is well known that workers join 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 47 
 
 unions in the face of opposition of employers 
 and at the risk of losing permanent positions. 
 
 A resourceful manager in one of the most in- 
 telligently managed plants in the United States 
 told me that women were less susceptible than 
 men to the wage incentive. He found that 
 many of them are content when their wage 
 covers a sum which represents for them their 
 personal requirements; that they cannot in- 
 terest them in trying for more. On that ac- 
 count the manager takes up the case of the in- 
 dividual girl to see if her ambition to earn more 
 money cannot be stimulated. They find some- 
 times that a mother requires her daughter to 
 give in her whole wage at the end of the week 
 and that the girl has no pleasure in the spend- 
 ing of it; they visit the mother and persuade 
 her to let the girl keep a proportion of her wage 
 and point out to the mother that she is limiting 
 the girl's ambition. They also find girls who 
 have entire control over the spending of their 
 wages, who are without ambition to earn over 
 and above a certain sum because that sum will 
 meet their own recognized needs. The case of 
 these girls the management tries to cover by en- 
 couraging them to save for vacations and other 
 purposes which they offer by way of suggestion. 
 
48 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTEY 
 
 In both of these instances the management un- 
 dertakes to create new wants or ways of realiz- 
 ing wants which were not recognized by the 
 workers themselves. The satisfaction of these 
 wants may or may not be in the direction of 
 extending experience and expanding contacts. 
 But that is neither here nor there. The point is, 
 the manager of the industry has used an incen- 
 tive for increasing production which has no re- 
 lation to production itself. He is forced to do 
 this because he fails to make the process of 
 production a matter of interest to the worker. 
 The processes of production do not of them- 
 selves as we know compel the workers' applica- 
 tion or stimulate their desire for productive 
 enterprise. 
 
 It is in the nature of the case impossible to 
 increase the wage incentive indefinitely. One 
 large and scientifically managed plant has made 
 remarkable provisions for staving off the time 
 when the dead line is reached. They have taken 
 stock account of the labor power they require, 
 the amount of energy which each worker pos- 
 sesses, for the purpose of evaluation and pay- 
 ment. They have undertaken to cover as sep- 
 arate items each condition which affects a 
 worker's relation to his job. They rate as sep- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 49 
 
 arate items the worker's proficiency, reliability, 
 continuity in service, indirect charges, increased 
 cost of living, and periods of lay-off ; they rate 
 him according to the number of technical proc- 
 esses he is proficient in, whether or not he is 
 engaged on more than one ; they rate him if he 
 attends the night school connected with the 
 factory and shows in this way a disposition to 
 learn other operations than those he already 
 knows. Why, they wonder, does only ten per 
 cent of the force take advantage of the school 
 and what, they are eager to find out, can they 
 do further to secure the men's cooperation. 
 For "cooperation," they say, "in a special way 
 deserves credit, since it is unexpected . . . cer- 
 tain well defined acts of cooperation will bring 
 extra reward." Their rewards so carefully 
 calculated did not seem to enlist response as 
 spiritual in its nature as cooperation. It 
 seemed that they had reached "the dead line" 
 where wage stimulus fails to draw its hoped for 
 response. 
 
 To get from the workers the highest efficiency 
 the scientifically managed plants pay for a task 
 a stated rate based on piece or time ; if the task 
 is performed within the time set and the direc- 
 tions for doing the task as laid out by the man- 
 
50 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 agement, are followed, the worker receives in 
 addition to the regular rate> a bonus- Mr 
 H. L. Gant, while working with Mr. Taylor, 
 discovered that there was weakness in the sys- 
 tem of paying bonuses, and the weakness was 
 not overcome until he devised a method of pay- 
 ing the workman for the time allowed plus a 
 percentage of that time according to what he 
 did. This method he declares constantly in- 
 duced further effort and overcame what they 
 discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus. 
 As fair or as superior as this bonus may be in 
 relation to the prevailing rate in the market, 
 managers say that the workers are apt in time 
 to fall below the standard as their work be- 
 comes routine, unless the incentive after a time 
 is increased or changed in character. In other 
 words the wage incentive is like a virus injec- 
 tion. The dose is not continuously effective, 
 except as the amount is increased or altered. 
 
 A usual method of keeping alive the financial 
 incentive is profit sharing and schemes for par- 
 ticipation in profits, but they are rewards of 
 -general merit and bids for continuity of ser- 
 vice ; they have no direct relation to the work- 
 ers 9 efficiency and compliance with standards 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 51 
 
 which distinguish the wage rewards of scien- 
 tifically managed plants. 
 
 Promotion, the incentive second in impor- 
 tance to the wage incentive, is of assistance in 
 postponing the time when the dead line for 
 the worker is reached. Nothing better illus- 
 trates the limitations of promotion in this re- 
 spect than the fact that in factories where the 
 turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to pro- 
 mote the workers decreases ; it falls in propor- 
 tion to the length of their term of service. That 
 is, chances for promotion are the lowest in 
 factories where conditions otherwise are favor- 
 able to the worker. In the factory where the 
 turnover is only 18 per cent the management 
 says that promotion is a negligible factor. 
 Where the turnover is high there is greater op- 
 portunity in plants scientifically managed than 
 in others to promote men, as the scheme of or- 
 ganization calls for a larger number of what 
 tkey call "functionalized foremen " and teach- 
 ers in proportion to the working force. 
 
 It is as I have said, on account of the neces- 
 sity of these positions in the general scheme 
 that managers of factories are interested in 
 finding more men who have initiative, than in- 
 dustry under their direction has produced. 
 
52 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 Before scientific management was discovered, 
 business management and machinery already 
 had robbed industry of productive incentives, 
 of the real incentive to production ; a realization 
 on the part of the worker of its social value and 
 his appreciation of its creative content. All that 
 was left for scientific management to gather to- 
 gether for its direction were bits of experience 
 which workers gained by their own experimen- 
 tal efforts at how best to handle tools. Their 
 efforts it is true were not sufficiently great in 
 this direction to promise progressive industrial 
 advance. The margin for experiment which 
 was still theirs was not sufficiently large to in- 
 sure continued effort inspired by an interest in 
 the work. 
 
 When we have taken into full account the 
 repressive effect of scientific management on 
 initiative, we may well admit an advantage: 
 educationally speaking, the repression is direct. 
 The workers are fully aware that they are doing 
 what some one else requires of them. They are 
 not under the delusion that they are acting on 
 their own initiative. They are being managed 
 and they know it and all things being equal 
 (which they are not) they do not like it. The 
 responsibility they may clearly see and feel 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 53 
 
 rests with them to find a better scheme for 
 carrying industry forward. The methods of 
 scientific management are calculated to incite 
 not only open criticism from the workers but to 
 suggest that efficient industry is a matter of 
 learning, and that learning is a game at which 
 all can play, if the opportunity is provided. 
 
 Scientific managers have hoped that their 
 plans to conserve energy and increase the wage 
 in relation to expenditure of energy would meet 
 little opposition. They also have hoped that 
 the paternalistic feature of welfare work would 
 allay opposition. But I am not inclined to in- 
 clude the welfare schemes in a consideration of 
 scientific management; they have little light 
 to throw on what educational significance there 
 is in the efficiency methods which scientific man- 
 agement has introduced in industry. The play- 
 grounds attached to factories, the indoor pro- 
 visions for social activity, the clubs, while not 
 having an acknowledged relation to the scien- 
 tific management of the factory and while re- 
 pudiated by some managers, are a common fea- 
 ture of plants which claim to be scientifically 
 managed. There are scientifically managed 
 plants which object to the recreational and 
 other features which have to do with matters 
 
54 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 outside the province of the factory, on the 
 ground that it is a meddling with the personal 
 side of people's lives. "A baseball game con- 
 nected with the factory," said the educational 
 manager of a certain plant, "has the effect of 
 limiting the workers' contacts; it is much bet- 
 ter for them, as it is for every one, not to nar- 
 row their relationships to a small group, but 
 to play ball with the people of the town." It 
 is significant that this concern deals with the 
 union and conforms to its regulations. Whether 
 this more generous concept of the workers' 
 lives yields more in manufactured goods than 
 one that confines the activity of the workers 
 to the factory in which they labor, scientific 
 management, so far as I know, has not discov- 
 ered. 
 
 The very nature of the welfare schemes sug- 
 gests that they are inspired more out of fear 
 of the workers' freedom of contact than 
 launched on account of comparative findings 
 which relate strictly to the economy of labor 
 power. The policy of leaving the workers free, 
 it was clear in the instance just cited, had been 
 adopted out of a personal preference for free- 
 dom in relationships. The introduction of 
 clinics, rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary pro- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 55 
 
 visions, and all arrangements relating directly 
 to the workers' health have a bearing on effi- 
 ciency and productivity which is well recognized 
 and probably universally endorsed by efficiency 
 managers, even if they are not invariably 
 adopted. 
 
 Scientific management wants two things; 
 more men in the labor market to fill the posi- 
 tions of functionalized foremen, more men than 
 modern industrial society has produced; and 
 it wants an army of workers who will follow 
 directions, follow them as one of the managers 
 said, as soldiers follow them. It wants this 
 army to be endowed as well with the impulse 
 to produce. It may by its methods realize one 
 of its wants, that is, an army of workers to 
 follow directions; but as it succeeds in this, 
 as it is successful in robbing industry of its con- 
 tent, and as it reduces processes to routine, it 
 will limit its chances to find foremen who have 
 initiative and it will fail to get from workers 
 the impulse to produce goods. 
 
 During the last four years, under the stress 
 of a consuming war every stimulus employed by 
 business management for speeding up produc- 
 tion has been advanced. Organized efficiency in 
 the handling of materials has increased the out- 
 
56 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 put, as increased rewards to capital and labor 
 have stimulated effort. But the quantitative de- 
 mand of consumption requirements is insati- 
 able. It is not humanly possible under the pres- 
 ent industrial arrangements to satisfy the 
 world's demand for goods, either in time of 
 war or peace. It was never more apparent 
 than it is now, that an increase in a wage rate 
 is a temporary expedient and that wage rewards 
 are not efficient media for securing sustained 
 interest in productive enterprise. It is becom- 
 ing obvious that the wage system has not the 
 qualifications for the coordination of industrial 
 life. As the needs of the nations under the 
 pressure of war have brought out the ineffi- 
 ciencies of the economic institution, it has be- 
 come sufficiently clear to those responsible for 
 the conduct of the war and to large sections of 
 the civil population, that wealth exploitation 
 and wealth creation are not synonymous; that 
 the production of wealth must rest on other mo- 
 tives than the desire of individuals to get as 
 much and give as little as particular situations 
 will stand. 
 
 In England and in the United States, where 
 the individualistic conception of the industrial 
 life has been an inherent part of our national 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 57 
 
 philosophy, the governments, with cautious 
 reservations, have assumed responsibilities 
 which had been carried in normal times by busi- 
 ness. Because business administration had 
 been dependent for its existence on a scheme of 
 profiteering it is not in the position where it 
 can appeal to labor to contribute its produc- 
 tive power in the spirit of patriotic abandon. 
 But governments as they have taken over cer- 
 tain industrial responsibilities are in a better 
 position to make such appeals to capital as well 
 as to labor. 
 
 The calculable effect of the appeal to capital 
 to assume the responsibility is in the long run 
 of passing importance, as under the present 
 business arrangement that is the position cap- 
 ital occupies. In other words, the appeal will 
 mark no change in capitalist psychology as it 
 promises to do in the case of labor. 
 
 The calculable effect on labor psychology may 
 have revolutionary significance. It is quite an- 
 other sort of appeal in its effect from the 
 stereotyped and familiar one of employers to 
 labor to feel their responsibility. That appeal 
 never reached the consciousness of working men 
 for the reason that it is impossible to feel re- 
 sponsible or to be responsible where there is 
 
58 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 no chance of bearing the responsibility. Ex- 
 periencing responsibility in industry means 
 nothing more nor less than sharing in the de- 
 cisions, the determination of procedure, as well 
 as suffering from the failure of those decisions 
 and participating in their successful eventua- 
 tion. As the governments in the present case 
 have made their appeals to labor they have car- 
 ried the suggestion of partnership in respon- 
 sibility because the government is presumably 
 the people's voice and its needs also presum- 
 ably are the common needs and not the special 
 interests of individuals. It is hardly necessary 
 to point out that it was not the intention of 
 government officials who made the appeal to 
 excite a literal interpretation; they did not ex- 
 pect to be taken so seriously and up to date 
 they have not been taken more seriously than 
 they intended by American labor. All they 
 mean and what they expect to gain, is what em- 
 ployers have meant and wanted; that is labor's 
 surrender of its assumed right to strike on the 
 job, its surrender of its organized time stand- 
 ards and its principle of collective bargaining. 
 But when officials speak in the name of a gov- 
 ernment what they mean is unimportant; what 
 it means to the people to have them speak, and 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 59 
 
 the people's interpretation of what they say, 
 is the important matter. 
 
 These appeals of the governments in this 
 time of war to the working people have the ten- 
 dency to clear the environment of the sugges- 
 tion that common labor, that is the wage earn- 
 ing class (as distinguished from salaried peo- 
 ple, employers and the profiteers pure and sim- 
 ple) are incompetent to play a responsible part 
 in the work of wealth production. A respon- 
 sible part does not mean merely doing well a de- 
 tached and technical job; it means facing the 
 risks and sharing in the experimental experi- 
 ence of productive enterprise as it serves the 
 promotion of creative life and the needs of an 
 expanding civilization. As the appeals of the 
 governments at this time bear the stamp of a 
 nation's will, its valuation and respect for com- 
 mon labor, there is the chance, it seems, that 
 they may carry to the workers the ener- 
 gizing thought that all the members of 
 the industrial group must assume, actually as- 
 sume, responsibility for production, if produc- 
 tion is to advance. Equally important in the in- 
 terest of creative work is the power of these ap- 
 peals to shift the motive for production from the 
 acquisitive to the creative impulse. In the midst 
 
60 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 of the world's emergency, driven by the fear 
 of destruction the nations have turned instinc- 
 tively to the unused creative force in human and 
 common labor, that is to the ability of the wage 
 earner to think and plan. If the responseof 
 labor is genuine, if with generous abandoWfc 
 releases its full productive energy, it is quite 
 certain as matters now stand that neither the 
 governments nor the financiers are prepared to 
 accept the consequence. 
 
 If labor in answer to these appeals gains the 
 confidence that it is competent to carry indus- 
 trial responsibility, or rather that common la- 
 bor, together with the trained technicians in 
 mechanics and industrial organization are com- 
 petent as a producing group to carry the re- 
 sponsibility, one need we may be sure will be 
 eliminated which has been an irritating and an 
 unproductive element in industrial life ; I mean 
 the need the workers have had for the cultiva- 
 tion of class isolation. As the workers become 
 in the estimation of a community and in their 
 own estimation, responsible members of a so- 
 ciety, their more rather than less abortive effort 
 to develop class feeling in America, will disap- 
 pear. Under those conditions concerted class ac- 
 tion will be confined to the employers of labor 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 61 
 
 and the profiteers, who will be placed in the po- 
 sition of proving their value and their place in 
 the business of wealth creation. On this I be- 
 lieve we may count, that labor will drop its de- 
 ive program for a constructive one, as it 
 BS to appreciate its own creative potentiality. 
 
 Judging from recent events in England, 
 where the government appeals to labor have 
 had longer time to take effect, it seems that new 
 brain tracks in labor psychology have actually 
 been created. English labor apparently is be- 
 ginning to take the impassioned appeals of its 
 government seriously and is making ready to 
 assume the responsibility for production. The 
 resolutions adopted by the Labor Party at its 
 Nottingham Conference in November in 1917 
 covered organized labor's usual defense pro- 
 gram relating to wage conditions. The Mani- 
 festo which was issued was first of all a poli- 
 tical document, written and compiled for cam- 
 paign purposes. But the significance of the 
 party's action is the new interpretation which 
 it is beginning to give industrial democracy. It 
 is evident where state ownership is contem- 
 plated that the old idea that industry would pass 
 under the administrative direction of govern- 
 
62 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 ment officials, is replaced by the growing in- 
 tention and desire of labor to assume respon- 
 sibility for administration whether industry is 
 publicly or privately owned. The Party stands 
 for the " widest possible participation both eco- 
 nomic and political ... in industry as well as^ 
 in government/' In explanation of the Mani- 
 festo, the leader of the Party is quoted in the 
 Manchester Guardian as saying, that when la- 
 bor now speaks of industrial democracy it no 
 longer means what it did before the war ; it does 
 not mean political administration of economic 
 affairs ; it means primarily industrial self-gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 Perhaps an even better evidence of the inten- 
 tion of English labor in this direction is the 
 movement towards decentralization in the trade 
 union organization. This movement, known as 
 the "shop-stewards" movement is essentially 
 an effort of the men in the workshops to assume 
 responsibility in industrial reconstruction after 
 the war, a responsibility which they have here- 
 tofore under all circumstances delegated to rep- 
 resentatives not connected directly with the 
 work in the shops. As these representatives 
 were isolated from actual problems of work- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 63 
 
 shop production and alien therefore to the 
 problems in their technical and specific appli- 
 cation, they were incapable of functioning ef- 
 ficiently as agents of productive enterprise. 
 This "shop stewards " movement recognizes 
 and provides for the interdependence of indus- 
 trial interests, but at the same time it concerns 
 itself with the competent handling of specific 
 matters. 
 
 Such organization as the movement in Eng- 
 land seems to be evolving, the syndicalists have 
 contended for as they opposed the German idea 
 of state socialism. But the syndicalists in their 
 propaganda did not develop the idea of indus- 
 try as an adventure in creative enterprise. In- 
 stead they emphasized, as did the political so- 
 cialists and the trade unionists, the importance 
 of protecting the workers' share in the posses- 
 sion of wealth. They made the world under- 
 stand that business administration of industry 
 exploited labor, but they did not bring out that 
 both capital and labor, so far as it was possible 
 for each to do, exploited wealth. That was not 
 the vision of industry which they carried from 
 their shops to their meetings or indeed to their 
 homes. Their failure at exploitation was too 
 obvious. 
 
64 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 An interesting illustration of what would hap- 
 pen in the ranks of the syndicalists if the busi- 
 ness idea of labor's intellectual and emotional 
 incapacity for functioning, gave way before a 
 community's confidence in the capacity of la- 
 bor we have in the case of the migratory work- 
 ers in the harvesting of our western crops. The 
 harvesters who follow the crops with the sea- 
 sons from the southern to the northern borders 
 of the United States and into Canada are mem- 
 bers of the most uncompromisingly militant 
 organization of syndicalists, The Industrial 
 Workers of the World. On an average it takes 
 ten years for these harvesters to become skilled 
 workers and these men, members of this con- 
 demned organization, are the most highly skilled 
 harvesters in the country. On account of their 
 revolutionary doctrines and their combined de- 
 termination to reap rewards as well as crops, 
 they are considered and treated like outlaws, 
 and outlaws of the established order they are 
 in spirit. When the owners of the farms of 
 North Dakota realized that their own returns 
 on the harvests were diverted in the marketing 
 of their grain, they combined for protection 
 against the grain exchanges and the elevator 
 trusts. While developing their movement they 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 65 
 
 discovered that the natural alliance for their 
 organization to make was with the men who 
 were involved with them in the production of 
 grain. And as the farmers have accepted the 
 harvesters as partners they have formed in 
 effect a coordinated producing combination. 
 Without finally settling the problem of agricul- 
 ture, they have strengthened the production 
 group and eliminated strife at the most vital 
 point. 
 
 In the period of reconstruction the industrial 
 issues of significance to democracy will be 
 whether or not management of industry as it 
 has been assumed by the state for the purpose 
 of war shall revert after the war to the condi- 
 tion of incompetency which the war emergency 
 disclosed or whether state management shall be 
 extended and developed as it was in Germany 
 after the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately, 
 these evidences of a new interest of labor in in- 
 dustry as a social institution, give us some 
 reason to hope tnat we shall not be confined to 
 a choice between business incompetency and 
 state socialism. The evidence of the desire 
 on the part of the labor force to participate in 
 
 Che development of production is the factor we 
 should keep in mind in any plans for demo- 
 
66 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 cratio industrial reconstruction. It is inevitable 
 that an effort to open up and cultivate this de- 
 sire of labor will be regarded by the present 
 governing forces with apprehension. The move- 
 ment of labor in this direction is now looked up- 
 on with suspicion even by people who are not in 
 a position of control. The general run of peo- 
 ple in fact outside of those who recognize labor 
 as a fundamental force in industrial reconstruc- 
 tion, conceive of the labor people as an irre- 
 sponsible mass of men and view their move- 
 ments as expressions of an irresponsible desire 
 to seize responsibility. They are the men who 
 are not experienced in business affairs and 
 therefore cannot, it is believed, be trusted. The 
 arguments against trusting them are the same 
 old arguments advanced for many centuries 
 against inroads on the established order of 
 over-lordship. But over-lordship has flourished 
 at all times, and in the present scheme of in- 
 dustry it flourishes as it always has, in propor- 
 tion to the reluctance of the people to partici- 
 pate as responsible factors in matters of com- 
 mon concern. Corruption and exploitation of 
 governments and of industry are dependent 
 upon the broadest possible participation of a 
 whole people in the experience and responsi- 
 
THE AMERICAN WAY 67 
 
 bilities of their common life. It is for this rea- 
 son that we need to foster and develop the op- 
 portunity as well as the desire for responsi- 
 bility among the common people. 
 
 After the war, it is to be hoped that America 
 will undertake to realize through its schemes 
 for reconstruction its present ideals of self- 
 government. As it does this, we shall discover 
 that the issues which are of significance to de- 
 mocracy are of significance to education; for 
 democracy and education are processes con- 
 cerned with the people's ability to solve their 
 problems through their experience in solving 
 them. If America is ever to realize its concept 
 of political democracy, it can accept neither the 
 autocratic method of business management nor 
 the bureaucratic schemes of state socialism. It 
 cannot realize political democracy until it rea- 
 lizes in a large measure the democratic admin- 
 istration of industry. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY THE GERMAN WAY 
 
 STATESMANSHIP in Germany covered "indus- 
 trial strategy " as well as political. Its labor 
 protection and regulations were in line with its 
 imperial policy of domination. Within recent 
 years labor protection from the point of view of 
 statesmanship has been urged in England and 
 America. The waste of life is a matter of un- 
 concern in the United States so long as private 
 business can replenish its labor without seri- 
 ously depleting the oversupply. It becomes a 
 matter of concern only when there are no work- 
 ers waiting for employment. The German, 
 state has regulated the conditions of labor and. 
 conserved human energy because its purpose 
 has been not the short-lived one of private busi- 
 ness, but the long-lived one of imperial compe- 
 tition. It was the policy of the Prussian state 
 to conserve human energy for the strength and 
 the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 69 
 
 good for the Empire was good, it was assumed, 
 for the people. The humanitarians in the United 
 States who tried to introduce labor legislation 
 in their own country accepted this naive philos- 
 ophy of the German people, which had been so 
 skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, with- 
 out appreciating that its result was enervating. 
 Our prevailing political philosophy, however, 
 that workers and capitalists understand their 
 own interests and are more capable than the 
 state of looking after them, stood in the way 
 of adopting on grounds of statesmanship the 
 German methods. 
 
 The American working man has never been 
 convinced that he can get odds of material ad- 
 vantage from the state. Hisjmethod is to_get 
 all he can thrhull'ood Kck or his su- 
 
 perior wits. He could find no satisfaction like 
 hi~frerman brothers in surrendering concrete 
 interests for some abstract idea of a state. He 
 could find no greater pleasure in being exploited 
 by the state than he now finds in exploitation 
 by private business. The average American 
 values life for what he can get out of it, or for 
 what he can put into it. He has no sentimental 
 value of service, nor is service anywhere with 
 us an institutionalized ideal. We judge it on 
 
70 CEEATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 its merits, detached perhaps, but still for what 
 it actually renders in values. 
 
 In conformity with American ideals, wage 
 earners look to their own movements and not to 
 the state for protection. Their movements re^ 
 quire infinite sacrifice, but they supply them 
 with an interest and an opportunity for initia- 
 tive which their job lacks. The most important 
 antidote for the workers to factory and busi- 
 ness methods is not shorter hours or well cal- 
 culated rest periods or even change-off from 
 one kind of routine work to another. As im- 
 portant as these may be, reform in labor hours 
 does not compensate the worker for his exclu- 
 sion from the directing end of the enterprise of 
 which he is a part and from a position where he 
 can understand the purpose of his work. The 
 trade union interference with the business of 
 wealth production is in part an attempt to es- 
 tablish a coordination of the worker which is 
 destroyed in the prosecution of business and 
 factory organization. The interference of the 
 union is an attempt to bridge the gulf between 
 the routine of service and the administration 
 and direction of the service which the worker 
 gives. 
 
 I do not intend to imply that the labor move- 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 71 
 
 ment is a conscious attempt at such coordina- 
 tion. It is not. The conscious purpose is the 
 direct and simple desire to resist specific acts 
 of domination and to increase labor's economic 
 returns. But any one who follows the sacrifices 
 which organized workers make for some small 
 and equivocal gain or who watches them in their 
 periods of greatest activity, knows that the la- 
 bor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch 
 of interest, not from its struggle for higher 
 wage rates, but from the worker's participa- 
 tion in the administration of affairs connected 
 with life in the shop. The real tragedy in a lost 
 strike is not the failure to gain the wage de- 
 mand; it is the return of the defeated strikers 
 to work, as men unequipped with the adminis- 
 trative power as men without will. 
 
 There could be no greater contrast of methods 
 of two movements purporting to be the same, 
 than the labor movement in Germany and in 
 the United States. The German workers de- 
 pended on their political representatives al- 
 most wholly to gain their economic rewards. 
 Their organizations made their appeal to the 
 sort of a state which Bismarck set up. They 
 would realize democracy, happiness, they be- 
 
72 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 lieved, when their state represented labor and 
 enacted statutes in its behalf. 
 
 If Germany loses the war the chances are 
 that the people may recognize what it means 
 for the people of a nation to let the title to their 
 lives rest with the state; they will know per- 
 haps whether for the protection they have been 
 given and for the regulation of their affairs 
 and destiny they have paid more than the work- 
 ers of other countries, who, less protected by 
 law, suffered the exigencies of their assumed 
 independence. 
 
 How much the German people depended upon 
 the state and how much their destiny is affected 
 by it is illustrated better by their educational 
 system and its relation to industry than by any 
 labor legislative protective practices or policy. 
 
 George Kerschensteiner, the director of the 
 Munich schools, in his book on "The Idea of the 
 Industrial School," tells us that the Purposes 
 and Duties of the schools are to realize the ideal 
 ethical community, and that this realization 
 is possible in so far as the educational provis- 
 ions are made from the standpoint of the ethi- 
 cal concept of each state. In America we do 
 not think of the state as the embodiment of our 
 ethical concepts. The state, as we know it, 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 73 
 
 is one of the several instruments for realizing 
 ends, ethical as well as material. The state is 
 supposed to serve the common ends of all peo- 
 ple. A state may be used, we are all aware, 
 as an instrument, either by Prussian junkers 
 or American business men ; either may capture 
 a state to serve their ends. But as a state serves 
 special individuals it belies its professed reason 
 for existence, and in America is in danger of 
 falling from grace, so far, that is, as the com- 
 mon people are concerned. But when a state 
 stands in the minds of a people as the embodi- 
 ment of their ideals as it has in Germany, it 
 must for its own purpose spend time and sub- 
 stance in purchasing the people's confidence. In 
 assuming the place of guardian it must of neces- 
 sity minister to the physical needs of the people. 
 If it retains the people's confidence in its guar- 
 dianship, it is incumbent on it to pursue this pol- 
 icy. It is incumbent on such a state to mould the 
 people's ideas of what their needs are. The 
 schools obviously offer the most hopeful media 
 for the accomplishment of that result, and they 
 have been used in Germany more effectively in 
 this way than the schools of any other country. 
 The German school system follows hard and 
 fast preconceptions of aims and ends, and be- 
 
74 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 cause of this it was possible for Germany to 
 put over its own particular sort of efficiency. 
 
 As a first requisite of efficiency, Germany class- 
 ifies its people, gives them a place in the scheme 
 of things, and holds them there. By circum- 
 scribing within definite limitations the experi- 
 ence of individuals it produces specialists at the 
 sacrifice of a larger human development. The 
 classification of the people and the training of 
 them naturally for the German purpose falls to 
 the schools. The sorting out of individuals be- 
 gins at the early age of ten in the elementary 
 schools, when each child's social and economic 
 position is practically determined. It is decided 
 then whether he shall be one of the great army 
 of wage workers or whether he shall fall into 
 some one of the several social classes and voca- 
 tions which stand apart from the common mass 
 of wage earners. The children in the German 
 schools, who are selected at the age of ten for 
 a more promising future than the trades hold 
 out, have more leeway in the making of their 
 decision. But even these children from the 
 American point of view are summarily dis- 
 posed of and fatally consigned. 
 
 The telling off of children at the age of ten 
 \ and assigning them to a place in the social 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 75 
 
 scheme for life is not American in spirit, nor 
 does it conform to our habits and institutions. 
 But, it is complained, the American habit of tak- 
 ing chances is not efficient. The habit of let- 
 ting children escape into life with their place 
 unsettled creates confusion and makes calcula- 
 tions in serious things like industry difficult. 
 Therefore, unfaithful to the development of 
 our own concepts of life we are expected to 
 emulate Germany and to determine the destiny 
 of the child. Germany undertakes to eliminate 
 the chances of the individual and the taking of 
 chances by the state, while the American ideal 
 is to leave its people free to make the most of 
 each new exigency that life turns up. 
 
 At the age of fourteen it is decided in Ger- 
 many what industry or trade the children shall 
 enter, that is, the children who at ten are told 
 off to industry. After they enter their trade, 
 their special education for their job is looked 
 after in the continuation schools as well as in 
 the shop. Their attendance at the continuation 
 schools is compulsory. This compulsory at- 
 tendance does not only insure supplementary 
 training for a particular job, but holds the 
 children to the industry which was chosen for 
 them. That is, a boy is compelled, if he works 
 
76 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the con- 
 tinuation school for waiters, until he is eight- 
 een. He may not go to a continuation school 
 for butchers if he decided at the end of a year 
 or so in his first job that he would rather be a 
 butcher, or that he would rather do anything 
 than wait. 
 
 The continuation schools protect German 
 manufacture and the national industrial effi- 
 ciency against indulgence in such vagaries. A 
 butcher would prefer to engage lads who have 
 had experience in butcher shops and butcher 
 continuation classes. Avenues of escape from 
 jobs just because they are uncongenial are thus 
 quite effectively closed together with the chance 
 to experiment with life the chance which 
 Americans take for granted. But it is just this 
 element of waywardness and the opportunity 
 America leaves open for its indulgence among 
 working people that makes labor from the stand- 
 point of American manufacture so inefficient. 
 For want of opportunity to put individuality to 
 some account we frequently fall back on way- 
 wardness in an awkward and futile protest 
 against domination. 
 
 While the German scheme of placing its 
 workers is efficient in its own way, so also is 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 77 
 
 the training for each particular trade. A child 
 is trained first to be skillful and second, to quote 
 Mr. Kerch ensteiner, "to be willing to carry out 
 some function in the state ... so that he may 
 directly or indirectly further the aim of the 
 state." "Having accomplished this," he says 
 "the next duty of the schools is to accustom 
 the individual to look at his vocation as a duty 
 which he must carry out not merely in the in- 
 terest of his own material and moral welfare 
 but also in the interest of the state." From 
 this, he says, follows the next and "greatest 
 educational duty of the public school. The 
 school must develop in its pupils the desire and 
 strength . . . through their vocation, to con- 
 tribute their share so that the development of 
 the state to which they belong, may progress 
 in the direction of the ideal of the community." 
 His assumption in defining the "greatest 
 duty" is that the members of the state are free 
 to evolve and will evolve a progressive ethical 
 community. But after a child has passed 
 through the hands of a competent teaching 
 force which fits him successfully into a ready- 
 made place, after he has accepted this ready- 
 made place on the authority of modern technol- 
 ogy and business, on the authority of the state 
 
78 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 and religion, that the place given him is his to 
 fill ; to fill in accordance with the standards de- 
 termined by the schools and by industry after 
 all this, it is difficult to imagine what else a 
 child could do but conform. He could do no 
 more, thus trained, than go forward in the di- 
 rection he is pushed and in the direction de- 
 termined before he was born. This is not our 
 idea of a progressive life, 
 
 It has been understood generally in America 
 that Germany's preparation and classification 
 of her future workers and their placement in 
 industry, was more responsible than any other 
 policy for Germany's place in the world market. 
 British and American manufacturers before the 
 war urged the emulation of German methods 
 of education and a reorganization of school sys- 
 tems more in conformity with the German. The 
 demand of the manufacturers for reorganiza- 
 tion came at a time when intelligent educators 
 in America were recognizing that some reorgan- 
 ization was necessary to bring the school experi- 
 ence of children into relation with their envir- 
 onment and with the actualities of life. The 
 industrial education movement in this country 
 was based on the German, and the German idea 
 was the dominating one. The movement here 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 79 
 
 has shown little imagination as it adopted a 
 system foreign to America, instead of initiating 
 schemes which represented the aspirations of a 
 free people. 
 
 Herman Schneider, of the University of Cin- 
 cinnati, has made one of the most intelligent 
 contributions in the adaptation of the German 
 scheme of education. He divides trades into* 
 two classes, which he calls energizing and en-'v 
 ervating. In those which are energizing there 
 is an element of individual expression and op- 
 portunity for self-direction. The enervating 
 trades are wholly automatic, and induce a 
 lethargic state of mind and body. His comment 
 on the situation is: "We are rapidly dividing 
 mankind into a staff of mental workers and an 
 army of purely physical workers. The physical 
 workers are becoming more and more lethargic. 
 The work itself is not character building ; on the 
 contrary, it is repressive and when self-expres- 
 sion comes, it is hardly energizing mentally. 
 The real menace lies in the fact that in a self- 
 governing industrial community the minds of 
 the majority are in danger of becoming less 
 capable of sound and serious thought because 
 of lack of continuous constructive exercise in 
 earning a livelihood." 
 
80 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich 
 this barren soil by alternating the time of pu- 
 pils between the shop or store and the school, 
 thus coordinating the worker's experience, with 
 the assistance of schoolmasters who go into the 
 shops and follow the processes the pupils are 
 engaged in and who see that the experience of 
 the week in the shop is amplified and supple- 
 mented in the school. The arrangement also 
 provides that the pupils shall be taken through 
 the various shop processes in the course of ap- 
 prenticeship. The experience while it lasts 
 may have educational value for the pupil. But 
 in spite of what it may or may not hold, for the 
 general run of pupils it leads up a blind alley 
 because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the 
 promise which apprenticeship supposedly holds 
 out. That is, the pupil, when he becomes a 
 worker, will be thrown back into some factory 
 groove where his experience as an apprentice 
 cannot be used, where he is closed off from the 
 chance to develop and use the knowledge or 
 training he received. If, as Dean Schneider as- 
 serts, "we are rapidly dividing mankind into a 
 staff of mental workers and an army of purely 
 physical workers," and if "we cannot reverse 
 our present economic order of things," then any 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 81 
 
 apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a 
 pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most en- 
 ergizing of the trades leads the pupil nowhere 
 in particular. Even the skilled trade of loco- 
 motive engineering, which Dean Schneider 
 classes as the most highly energized of trades, 
 does not escape. As a spokesman for the 
 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers ob- 
 serves : ' ' The big electrical engines which are 
 being introduced in the railroad system are rap- 
 idly eliminating the factors of judgment on the 
 part of the engineer and transforming that 
 highly skilled trade into an automatic exer- 
 cise." 
 
 The one-time value of a trade apprenticeship 
 to a youth was tha't it furnished the background 
 for mastery of machine processes ; but appren- 
 ticeship under modern factory methods can do 
 no more than make a youth a good servant to 
 machines. The Schneider system fills, as well 
 as can be filled, a scheme of apprenticeship in 
 conformity with the prevailing shop organiza- 
 tion and requirements, but it is not a fulfill- 
 ment for youth ; it is not educational. There is 
 no progression from apprenticeship to indus- 
 trial control; no chance to use the knowledge 
 gained where opportunity for participation in 
 
82 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 administration and reorganization of industry 
 is cut off. The best of trades is a blind alley, 
 educationally speaking. 
 
 However abortive such an effort as Dean 
 Schneider's might be in giving workers oppor- 
 tunity to enrich their experience for their own 
 reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils 
 more content and better training than the or- 
 dinary 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 suc- 
 cumbed to the fatalism involved in the adapta- 
 tion 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 pre- 
 pare young people for wage earning occupa- 
 tion and to provide supplementary trade train- 
 ing 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, educa- 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 83 
 
 tional factors could not take precedence over 
 economic. They said : * * The primary considera- 
 tions in the intelligent selection of a vocation 
 relate to wages, steadiness of employment, 
 health risks, opportunity for advancement, ap- 
 prenticeship 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 his- 
 tory 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 tech- 
 nique of industry or physical science can en- 
 rich, under the circumstances, the worker's ex- 
 perience to any important extent. It accepts the 
 bald truth that all the material classed as cul- 
 tural will count for nothing of value in a fac- 
 tory worker's life in comparison with the high- 
 est possible wage in the most enervating of in- 
 dustries. It stresses this highly important 
 factor, as it should, but merely as a physical 
 
84 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTEY 
 
 necessity. There is vital education in the con- 
 sciousness of self-support, in the consciousness 
 that one is earning the living one gets. But 
 under present conditions the educational ex- 
 perience of wage recompense is not so sig- 
 nificant 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. 
 
 The Gary school system is a notable effort in 
 public school education to fulfill children's de- 
 sire for productive experience. It is in striking 
 contrast to the German scheme as it is based on 
 processes which have educational force and sig- 
 nificance. In saying this I differentiate between 
 training for industry and participation in the 
 industrial activity which is an organic part of 
 the life of the children and of the community. 
 The children are an actual part of the repair 
 and construction working force on Gary school 
 buildings and on the equipment. As the chil- 
 dren are involved in the upkeep of a school it 
 becomes their school. They experience the re- 
 sponsibility of maintaining the school plant, 
 not by some artificial scheme of participation, 
 but by the actual application of trade standards 
 and acquired technique to operations which have 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 85 
 
 for them and those with whom they live impor- 
 tant significance. They gain in their work a 
 first hand knowledge of industrial processes 
 and activity. In conjunction with skilled me- 
 chanics they work on the carpentry, the plumb- 
 ing, the masonry, the installation of electricity 
 used in the school building. They do the school 
 printing and accounting. 
 
 The children's life in these schools is an ex- 
 perience in industry where there is nothing 
 to hide, no trade secrets to keep back. The chil- 
 dren have the full opportunity of seeing their 
 work through to its completion and under- 
 standing its purpose and recognizing its value 
 and use. It provides more than any other 
 school system a liberal field for productive en- 
 deavor. But the Gary schools are not industry; 
 they are a world apart ; they represent, as all 
 schools are supposed to, moments sacred to 
 education and growth. They are not subjected 
 to the test of coordination in the world of in- 
 dustry. They give the children a respect for 
 productive enterprise that should be invalu- 
 able later in effecting their resistance to the 
 prostitution of their creative power. They do 
 not give them experience in the administrative 
 side of industry for which the children of high 
 
86 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 school age are ready and in need. But in an 
 admirable way they subordinate training in 
 technique to purpose and give the children the 
 experience of exercising control over their own 
 industrial activity. As an industrial experi- 
 ence for children of grammar school age, it is 
 richer than any other school system which has 
 been developed. 
 
 The industrial education of Germany which 
 was recommended for our adoption and which 
 we have emulated to an alarming degree in our 
 industrial towns, imposes prevailing methods 
 of industry and technique of factory processes 
 as final and determined. As industrial history 
 and technique are taught in the schools, in ef- 
 fect they bind the children to the current in- 
 dustrial practice and to the current conditions. 
 They stifle imagination and discourage the con- 
 cept that industry is an evolving process. The 
 effect of technical training in the German con- 
 tinuation schools (and the tendency is the same 
 in our own industrial education courses) is to 
 teach the children that the methods and pro- 
 cesses as they are carried forward in the shop 
 are right. No question of their validity is raised 
 in the school. They are accepted by the chil- 
 dren in the spirit of authority which the school 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 87 
 
 carries, as they would not be so finally accepted 
 by them in the shop. The impress of a devel- 
 oped curriculum, connected with an active trade 
 experience, that is, a trade in which the children 
 are at work, like the curriculum of a continua- 
 tion school, is greater than the curriculum 
 which has been evolved for its abstract cultural 
 values. As the curriculum coordinates shop 
 and school activities and as it fails at the same 
 time to stimulate inquiry on the part of the 
 pupil into industrial or special trade pro- 
 cesses as they are practiced in the shop, it be- 
 comes a .positive, inhibiting factor in the intel 
 lectual life of the children. The perfection of 
 an industrial school room equipment with its 
 trade samples, its charts and maps, its litera- 
 ture, relating to the extension of trade and of 
 commerce, has the tendency like the curriculum 
 to impose on the children the weight of accom- 
 plishment, if this equipment is not used to stim- 
 ulate inquiry and experiment in industry as 
 the ever fresh field for adventure that it is. But 
 the intention of these industrial schools is to 
 train the children in the acceptance of processes 
 and methods which are established. Nowhere, 
 in no country, has this intention been so success- 
 fully realized, because nowhere has it been so 
 
 :1 
 
88 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 successfully organized as in Germany through 
 its continuation school system. And nowhere 
 as in Germany are the people so successfully 
 subjected to an institutionalized life as it has 
 been worked out in the light of modern tech- 
 nology and business. 
 
 There are other and special reasons why the 
 best of industrial education experiments in 
 America have not met with greater hospitality. 
 The average American parent still believes 
 that a boy "rises" in the industrial world, not 
 as they once thought through his ability as a 
 workman. The men of their acquaintance who 
 have been successful, have attained wealth and 
 position, not as a rule through their mastery of 
 technique or their skill in a trade; they have 
 not come by their promotion merely on account 
 of good workmanship, but through influence. 
 It might be that they had had their "chance" 
 through a relative or successful business man, 
 or it might be that they "got next" to a poli- 
 tician, who required no other qualification than 
 "smartness." A boy in a telegraph or a law- 
 yer's office has a better opportunity to reach 
 influence than a boy in a workshop. The scholas- 
 tic requirement for such advancement as these 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 89 
 
 vocations contemplate, is provided for in the 
 established school program of the lower grades. 
 A certain display of a few historical and liter- 
 ary facts beside a facility in reading, writing, 
 and arithmetic are the qualifications which 
 average parents believe are the necessary ones 
 for their children's advancement. And, taking 
 the situation in general as it is, they are right, 
 and will be as long as the whole social system 
 discounts productive effort and rewards ex- 
 ploitation of productive enterprise. 
 
 Obviously false from an educational point of 
 view as these school standards are, they are true 
 to the facts, to the actual situation which the 
 parents have to face. The wave of popular op- 
 position to a reorganization of the schools for 
 a preparation of the children for factory life 
 expresses the original conception of popular 
 education among sovereign people. The com- 
 mon school system exists, it is still assumed, 
 to fit the children to rule their own lives ; to give 
 them an equipment which will protect them from 
 a servitude to others. Its ability to do this had 
 not been questioned a generation ago and, 
 theoretical as its original intention is to-day, 
 its traditional purpose to develop the power of 
 each child to govern his destiny, holds over. 
 
90 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 If training children to read, write and count, 
 training them in facts relating to history and 
 language, did not, as it had been hoped, lay the 
 world at the feet of the children, training them 
 in factory processes, parents felt competent to 
 declare, laid the children at the feet of exploi- 
 ters. That is where in any case, in the light of 
 common experience, they might expect them to 
 land. To reorganize the schools with that pos- 
 sibility in mind was for the parents a surrender 
 of their gambling chance. 
 
 The promoters of industrial education, with 
 some success, have made it clear to the com- 
 munity generally that parents were giving 
 heavy odds in their gamble, but these promoters 
 would have made this more obvious to parents 
 if they could have shown that the assets accru- 
 ing from the new school curriculum increased 
 more materially than has the wage earn- 
 ing capacity of their children. The results for 
 individual children are not sufficiently striking 
 to advertise the departure, and if they were, the 
 departure would not warrant the endorsement 
 of the community on the ground of the higher 
 wage, as wages are fixed by competition. They 
 are advanced by a general increase in produc- 
 tivity. But the increase that occurs through 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 91 
 
 more efficient methods in productive enterprise 
 is not a real increase ; it does not relatively af- 
 fect the social or economic position of the wage 
 earner. 
 
 In the last analysis, the wage return is not 
 an educator's criterion, in spite of the prag- 
 matic recommendation of the Cleveland Sur- 
 very. The Survey's recommendation for a re- 
 organization of the school system is based on 
 the belief that the school is, or should be, an 
 integral expression or reflection of the life of 
 the community ; that to function vitally it must 
 be contemporaneous with that life, as are all 
 serviceable institutions. As a school reflects 
 the life of a community it enriches the experi- 
 ence of the children and endows them with the 
 knowledge and power to deal with environment. 
 "When a school system disregards, as our es- 
 tablished system does, the entire reorganization 
 of the industrial world, it stultifies growth and 
 cultivates at the same time an artificial concept 
 of life, a false sense of values. The German 
 system of industrial education has recognized 
 the reorganization of the industrial world, but 
 this recognition has meant the sacrifice of in- 
 dividual life and development; it has come to 
 
92 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 mean in short the prostitution of a people and 
 the creation of a Frankenstein. 
 
 None of our industrial educational systems 
 or vocational guidance experiments disclose the 
 full content of the industrial life nor do they 
 give the children the knowledge or power to 
 deal with it. The general dissatisfaction with 
 these school movements is that they neither 
 prostitute the schools in the interest of the em- 
 ployers nor endow the children with power to 
 meet their own problems. The training in tech- 
 nique which they supply has a bearing on the 
 every day life around them which stories of 
 Longfellow's life have not. But that technique, 
 divorced as it is from its purpose, its use or 
 final disposition, is as valueless as a crutch 
 for a man without arms. An elaboration of 
 technology through instruction in the general 
 principles of physical science, industrial and 
 political history and the aesthetics of industry 
 only emphasizes the absence of the really sig- 
 nificant factors. The conspicuously absent fac- 
 tors in all industrial educational schemes are 
 those which give men the ability to control in- 
 dustry. No work in subject matter is educa- 
 tional which does not in intention or in fact give 
 the person involved the ability to participate 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 93 
 
 in the administration of industry, or the ability 
 to judge the extent of his mastery over the sub- 
 ject. Industrial educational schemes, even the 
 best of them, leave the pupils helpless before 
 their subject. As they furnish them with a cer- 
 tain dexterity and acquaintance with processes 
 and a supply of subject matter necessarily 
 more or less isolated, the pupils gain a sense 
 of the power of the subject to control them, 
 rather than an experience in their power to 
 master the subject. The industrial school em- 
 phasizes the fact that the administration and 
 disposition of wealth production is no concern 
 of those versed in the technique of fabrication. 
 
 Many educators appreciate the lack of con- 
 tent provided by industrial school systems as, 
 with weak emphasis, they undertake to embroi- 
 der the system with history and aesthetics of 
 textiles or other raw material which the work- 
 ers handle, or introduce the story of past proc- 
 esses. As this furbishing of impoverished in- 
 dustry fails dismally to add content, it succeeds 
 in emphasizing the actual poverty that exists. 
 
 Dr. Stanley Hall makes the suggestion that 
 books on the leading trades should be written 
 to stimulate the interest and intelligence of the 
 young who are engaged in industry or prepar- 
 
94 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 ing to become the wage earners of the trades. 
 In speaking of "the urgent necessity now of 
 books on the leading trades addressed to the 
 young," he says:* "The leather industry, 
 particularly boot and shoe manufacture, is per- 
 haps the most highly specialized of all in the 
 sense that an operator may work a lifetime in 
 any one of the between three and four score 
 processes through which a shoe passes and know 
 little of all the rest. Now the Shoe Book should 
 describe hides and leathers, tanning, old and 
 new methods, with a little of the natural history 
 of the animals, describe the process of taking 
 them, of curing and shipping, each stage in the 
 factory, designating those processes that re- 
 quire skill and those that do not, and so on to 
 packing, labeling and shipping, with descrip- 
 tions showing the principles of the chief ma- 
 chines and labor-saving devices, at any rate 
 so far as they are not trade secrets; it should 
 include a glance at markets, prices, effects of 
 business advance, depression and strikes, per- 
 haps something about the hygiene of the foot, 
 about bootblacks and what is done for them, 
 history of the festivals and organizations from 
 St. Crispin and the guilds down, tariffs, syn- 
 
 * Stanley Hall, Educational Problems; p. 624. 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 95 
 
 dicates, societies, statistics, social conditions 
 in shoe towns, nationality of operatives, all 
 these could be concisely set forth to show the di- 
 mensions, the centers of interest, the social and 
 commercial relations of the business, etc. What 
 is not yet realized is that all these things could 
 and should be put down in print and picture, 
 almost as if it were to be issued as a text-book 
 or a series of them; all of this could be done 
 to bring out the very high degree of culture 
 value now latent in the subject. Just this is 
 what pedagogues do not and will not see, and 
 what even shoe men fail to realize ; viz., that the 
 story of their craft rightly told, would tend to 
 give it some degree of professional and human- 
 istic interest and dignity which the most un- 
 skilled and transient employee would feel. It 
 would foster an esprit de corps, pride in mem- 
 bership and above all an intelligent view of the 
 whole field that would make labor more valu- 
 able and more loyal. This material, once gath- 
 ered, should be used in some form in all in- 
 dustrial schools and courses in towns where 
 this industry dominates. It would bring a 
 wholesome sense of corporeity, historic and 
 economic unity, would give a touch of the old 
 guild spirit and more power to see both sides on 
 
96 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 the part of both employers and workmen. Noth- 
 ing is so truly educational in the deepest psy- 
 chological sense of that word as useful informa- 
 tion vitalized by individual and vocational in- 
 terest." 
 
 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 aesthe- 
 tics 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' "individ- 
 ual 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 stitch- 
 ing vamps for all'the working hours and days of 
 a wage earner's year, while there is no experi- 
 ence of cultural value in the occupation, divided 
 as the making of a shoe is into some ninety 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 97 
 
 operations, and distributed among ninety work- 
 ers. 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 indus- 
 try has given him, that is, industry as it is now 
 administered. He cannot impose culture or dig- 
 nity through books on a trade which is prosti- 
 tuted by business for profiteering. If the pur- 
 pose of the Shoe Book was to create the glamor 
 that was intended around the present day ar- 
 rangement of making shoes, it would be a false 
 contribution in schoolroom equipment ; it would 
 be as pernicious as other literature that intro- 
 duced an artificial note into a real and living 
 experience like industry. 
 
 The most romantic account of shoe making 
 will do nothing to bridge the gulf between capi- 
 tal and labor as Dr. Hall seems so confidently 
 to believe it should. The problem is not so sim- 
 ple or so easily disposed of. As Dr. Hall him- 
 self says: "As long as workmen are regarded 
 as parts of the machinery to be dumped on the 
 scrap heap as soon as younger and stronger 
 hands can be found, the very point of view 
 needful for the correct solution of vocational 
 education is wanting."* Dr. Hall recognizes 
 
 * Stanley Hall Educational Problems, p. 632. 
 
98 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 some evils which, are inherent in the present 
 scheme of industry and which are antagonistic 
 to growth, but neither he nor any of the ad- 
 vocates of the German methods of industrial 
 education make provisions in their educational 
 schemes for eliminating the aspect which con- 
 templates the dumping of workers on scrap 
 heaps. None of the advocates view the equip- 
 ment of workers for industry in terms radically 
 different from the terms in which they are 
 viewed by business men; they offer them tech- 
 nique and matter of insignificance and indirec- 
 tion ; they make no suggestion or move to open 
 up the adventure of industry for the worker's 
 actual participation in it; they accept the or- 
 ganization of industry which excludes their 
 participation as an unalterable fact; even un- 
 alterable as an experience in the prevocational 
 schemes of education. 
 
 National, state and local campaigns have been 
 carried on in America during the last fifteen 
 years for the protection of childhood and youth. 
 They have been on the whole successful in their 
 purpose to get children out of factories and 
 stores and into schools. It was an embarrass- 
 ment to the pioneers in the campaign to find 
 that the children were against them; that they 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 99 
 
 preferred factory or commercial life to the 
 schools. The evidence of this preference was 
 their wholesale exodus from schools when they 
 reached an age where they were acceptable to 
 employers or where they were not prevented by 
 law. Back of the exodus, universal as it is, there 
 is an urge of elemental force. A common ac- 
 counting for it, the nearest at hand, is that par- 
 ents of working class children are penurious; 
 or that they are too ignorant to understand the 
 deteriorating effect of factory life on children ; 
 or that they are too hard pressed in their physi- 
 cal needs to consider the best interest of the 
 children. This reason given for the failure 
 of the schools to supply children with matter of 
 interest or significance to them, explained only 
 why children did not want to stay in school; it 
 did not explain their eagerness to enter in- 
 dustry. None of the reasons accounted for the 
 zest of the children for wage earning occupa- 
 tion. 
 
 The failure of the schools to hold the children 
 gave educators who recognized the artificial 
 character of school curricula, their best reason 
 for introducing matter relating to industrial 
 life. The children's preference was indeed a 
 valuable indication where reality or real sub- 
 
100 CREATIVE .IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 jeot matter would be found. The change off 
 from old school subject matter to instruction in 
 methods of industry was a logical experiment. 
 But the movement for industrial education was 
 not inspired by a watchful sympathetic obser- 
 vation of children's needs; it was in line with 
 the general theory, more or less accepted, that 
 schools should be a reflection of the children's 
 environment; it was in line with the demand 
 of employers for efficient workers either 
 equipped for specific processes or adaptable to 
 factory methods. 
 
 If the promoters of industrial education had 
 been observers of children from twelve to four- 
 teen and sixteen years, they would have found 
 that as they left school they were eager not for 
 skill in technical processes, not for wages, not 
 for greater freedom of association in adult life, 
 not for any of these alone, but for all of these 
 as they were a part of the adventure of the 
 adult world in which they lived. ' ( We have neg- 
 lected to study the most vital thing in the situa- 
 tion, namely the zests of the young ... we 
 have not taken account of the nature of the 
 great upheaval at the dawn of the teens, which 
 marks the pubescent ferment and which re- 
 quires distinct change in the matter and method 
 
THE GERMAN WAV*-' ^ '<iO*l 
 
 of education. This instinct is far stronger and 
 has more very ostensive outcrops than in any 
 other age and land, and it is less controlled by 
 the authority of school or the home. It is a pe- 
 riod of very rapid^ if not fulminating psychic 
 expansion. It is the natal hour of new curiosi- 
 ties, when adult life first begins to exert its 
 potent charm. It is an age of exploration, of 
 great susceptibility, plasticity, eagerness, per- 
 vaded by the instinct to try and plan in many 
 different directions."* 
 
 Children of this adolescent time would re- 
 spond more readily to school instruction re- 
 lated to the adult activities which held their 
 interest and connected in some way with their 
 own conception of their functioning in the adult 
 world. Courses of study in processes of in- 
 dustry and practice in the technique of those 
 processes would have actual bearing on the en- 
 vironment of which they were eager to be 'a 
 part. 
 
 But instruction in mechanical processes and 
 practice in technique of manufacture are the 
 husks of industry when divorced from the plan- 
 ning, the management, the examination of prob- 
 lems, the determination of the value of goods in 
 
 * Stanley Hall Education Problems, pp. 544-545. 
 
IN INDUSTRY 
 
 their use and in their place in the market, the 
 division of labor throughout an enterprise, the 
 relation of all persons involved to each other 
 and to the product. The schools with their in- 
 dustrial education courses do not undertake > 
 to supply their young people with an opportun- 
 ity to plan ; they are true reflections of factory 
 existence as they eliminate all the adventure of 
 industry, the opportunity for experiment and 
 discovery; they do not satisfy the high impulse 
 of young people to be of use, to be a part of the 
 world of work. The spirit of the schools is 
 preparation for something to come; the spirit 
 of the children is in the present, and the pres- 
 ent pressing impulse of adolescence is to share 
 adult responsibilities. 
 
 The impulse of youth to take its place in adult 
 life is exploited by industry and repressed or 
 perverted by a system of education which fits 
 the children into a system of industry without 
 giving them the insight and power to effect 
 adjustments. The actual job in a trade has sat- 
 isfying features which the school lacks. It 
 pays wages. That fact for eager children is es- 
 timated beyond its purchasing power. For 
 them it is an acknowledgment, a very real one, 
 that they have been admitted, are wanted in the 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 103 
 
 big world where they are impelled by their psy- 
 chic needs, to enter. It places them more nearly 
 on an equality with the older members of their 
 family and entitles them to consideration which 
 was not given them as dependent children. 
 They learn shortly of how little account they 
 are to the boss employer but they are establish- 
 ing all the time a new basis of contact and a new 
 place in their personal relations; they are es- 
 tablishing it because they have economic value 
 in the world outside of home as well as in it. 
 The industrial schools and the old type of 
 schools are both adult schemes of getting chil- 
 dren ready for adult life, not by experiencing 
 it, but by doing certain things well so that they 
 can be entrusted to do later on, what adults in 
 their wisdom have decided that they are to do. 
 But they fail to prepare children for the future 
 as they fail to supply the children's present ur- 
 gent needs. They use the period for ulterior 
 purposes; purposes ulterior to the period of 
 growth with which they are dealing. As they 
 use this period for another time than its own, 
 in effect they exploit it. Without consciousness 
 of the fact so far as the children are concerned, 
 the schools exploit this period of growth as ef- 
 fectively as the employers reap the profits of 
 
104 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 child labor. Employers as beneficiaries have 
 more reason than the schools for diverting youth 
 from its own purposes, as they are under the 
 necessity of a price system which is competi- 
 tive. The schools as well as industry use up 
 the placticity of youth ; they kill off the eager- 
 ness of children to explore and plan, and cast it 
 aside for more consequential ends. 
 
 The consequential ends in America, we have 
 seen, have been less clearly defined than in Ger- 
 many. Within a year, the United States has 
 become conscious as a nation of place and power, 
 conscious that it is to play a part with the other 
 states of the world. In playing this part, will 
 it retain its role of servant of the people, or will 
 it assume with its new world dignity the role, 
 if not of master, then of leadership! If still 
 servant, will it serve more efficiently than it has 
 our dominant institution, industry! If the si- 
 lent partnership between business and the state 
 is strengthened, will not the promoters of in- 
 dustry be in a better position than before to 
 appeal through the state, through the patriot- 
 ism intensified by our newly acquired world 
 position, for a more universal and a systema- 
 tized adaptation of workers in industry! The 
 schools in their disinterested capacity, disin- 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 105 
 
 terested, that is, in the profits of production, it 
 would seem could be used most effectively to- 
 ward this end. German manufacture made that 
 clear to American manufacture before the war. 
 It also must be remembered that it was Prus- 
 sian pride for imperial position that inspired 
 the complete and efficient surrender of the Ger- 
 man schools to the needs of the German manu- 
 facturers. 
 
 America is, of course, ' ' different. ' ' All peoples 
 are. But so is our position in the world dif- 
 ferent from what it was. Our position is not 
 now, nor could it be, the German position. Our 
 past is different, and that will continuously have 
 its effect on our future. But we are facing a 
 great period of change, and the strongest forces 
 in the country are the industrial, and the strong- 
 est leaders are the financiers. What the finan- 
 ciers and industrial managers most want is 
 efficient, docile labor. The German system of 
 education, in spite of the fact that we are dif- 
 ferent, might conceivably have that effect on 
 the youth of this country. Under the pressure 
 of industrial rivalry after the war, under the 
 pressure of an imperial industrial policy, it 
 may be that the people of the country will yield 
 to the introduction of a scheme of education 
 
106 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 which it has been proved elsewhere can fit chil- 
 dren better than any other known scheme into a 
 system of mass production. 
 
 It is clear that industry could set up models 
 of behavior more successfully in the name of 
 education than in its own, and to the extent 
 American children come up to these models the 
 more employable they would be from the stand- 
 point of business. If the pressure is sufficiently 
 strong the people may yield to the introduction 
 of a system of compulsory continuation schools 
 similar to those of Germany. If they do, I be- 
 lieve they will eventually fail. But there is 
 danger through loss of energy and loss of pur- 
 pose in their introduction. Is it impossible for 
 us to hold to our native experimental habits of 
 life and attain standards of workmanship? Is 
 / it possible to realize the full strength of as- 
 j sociated effort and at the same time advance 
 \wealth production? 
 
 Germany's industrial supremacy was due, as 
 Professor Veblen shows, to the fact that ma- 
 chine industry was imposed ready-made on a 
 people whose psychology was feudal. The 
 schools of Germany, an essential part of her 
 industrial enterprise, were organized on the 
 servility of the people. We now know what 
 
THE GERMAN WAY 107 
 
 bnilding as Germany has built her educational 
 and industrial system on the weakness of a peo- 
 ple means. We are in the process of discover- 
 ing whether in sacrificing the expansion of her 
 people she can secure a permanent expansion 
 of her Empire. It would seem the better part 
 of statesmanship in America after the war to 
 build industrially on the strength of our people 
 and not on the weakness of another. It is the 
 business of educators to point out the danger 
 and to discover whether efficiency may not be 
 gained in the country by giving children in their 
 adolescent period the impulse for production 
 and high standards of work, not for the sake of 
 the state, but for themselves, for the sake of the 
 community, out of love of work and for the 
 value of its service. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EDUCATIONAL INDUSTEY AND ASSOCIATED 
 ENTEEPEISE 
 
 As capital and so far labor have failed to 
 make industry an expansive experience it be- 
 comes, as Professor Dewey has pointed out, the 
 business of educators concerned with the growth 
 of individuals to cultivate the field. 
 
 If educators regard opportunities for growth 
 with sufficient jealousy they will not wait for 
 industry to emerge with a new program, or sys- 
 tem of production; they will initiate produc- 
 tive enterprises where young people will be free 
 to gain first hand experience in the problems of 
 industry as those problems stand in relation to 
 their time and generation. Their alliance should 
 be made with engineers and architects and the 
 managers of industry who have made them- 
 selves, through experience and training, mas- 
 ters of applied science and the economics of 
 production. Engineers, not under the influence 
 
 108 
 
EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY 109 
 
 of business, are qualified to open up the creative 
 aspects of production to the workers and to 
 convince them through their own experience 
 that that there are adventurous possibilities 
 in industry outside the meagre offerings of pay- 
 day. Mr. Robert Wolf is one of the engineers 
 who is ready for the venture. He told the mem- 
 bers of the Taylor Society that ' ' scientific man- 
 agers have not been scientific enough in dealing 
 with this very important subject of stimulating 
 the thinking and reasoning power of the work- 
 man, thereby making him self-reliant and crea- 
 tive. ' ' In describing the field in which practical 
 engineers should operate, he laid stress on their 
 giving large space to the originating, choosing, 
 adapting power in men and the direction of it 
 into positive constructive channels; to men's 
 self-consciousness of their place in the great 
 scheme of things. 
 
 This conception of the field of operation for 
 engineers also described the field for educators. 
 The latter have failed to seize the chance in the 
 present industrial arrangement for the devel- 
 opment of ' l the originating, choosing power ' ' in 
 the working man because they have been ob- 
 sessed by the business appreciation of the work- 
 ing man's power of adaptation. It is because 
 
110 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 they labor under this obsession that they turn 
 industrial education into industrial training 
 whenever they include industry in their cur- 
 ricula. Educators know that there is adventure 
 in industry, but they believe that the adventure 
 is the rare property of a few. They believe this 
 so finally that they surrender this great field of 
 experience with its priceless educational con- 
 tent without reserving the right of such experi- 
 ence even for youth. They know, as we all do, 
 that industrial problems carry those who par- 
 ticipate in their solution into pure and applied 
 science; into the market of raw materials and 
 finished products; into the search for uncon- 
 quered wealth. They know that the marketing 
 of goods is an extensive experience in the world 
 of men and desires. They are not alone in their 
 lack of courage to admit that limiting this ex- 
 perience perverts normal desires and creates 
 false ones. For the sake of education it is to be 
 hoped that such engineers as Mr. Wolf may 
 overcome the timidity of educators, and that, in 
 conjunction with men capable of productive en- 
 terprise, they will undertake to give young peo- 
 ple an experience which is not tagged on to 
 industry under the influence of profits, but 
 which is inspired by the desire to produce and 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 111 
 
 the opportunity to develop the inspiration. 
 
 Before establishing a system of industrial 
 education like Germany's, or extending the 
 makeshift attempts which have been introduced 
 here in the United States, it would seem well to 
 undertake experiments which would stimulate 
 the impulses of youth for creative experience, 
 which would give them an industrial experience 
 where the motive of exploitation is absent and 
 where the stimulus was the content which 
 the production of wealth offers. Such ex- 
 periments would entail the organization of 
 workshops in connection with schools in 
 which the workshop experience was translated 
 and extended. 
 
 Such workshops would be financed inde- 
 pendently of the schools. They would 
 not be financed on a basis of profits, but 
 the capital invested would draw a legal rate of 
 interest. The enterprise would be under the di- 
 rection of managers competent in technological 
 processes, in the estimate of costs, and the or- 
 ganization of the work on a basis of productive 
 efficiency. The working force would be a corps 
 of young people who had received their ele- 
 mentary school certificates and their certificates 
 for employment together with the necessary 
 
112 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 complement of adult workers for the successful 
 development of the plant. The working force 
 would be paid the market rate of wages. The 
 juvenile members of the force would be paid on 
 a half-time basis as they would work in alter- 
 nate shifts in the shop and in the school, so 
 that work in the shop would be continuous and 
 would run on full time. The exchange of shifts 
 between the shop and school would occur daily 
 or weekly or semi-weekly, as it was conducive 
 to the health and the intellectual experience of 
 the children and to the needs of production in 
 the organization of the shop. 
 
 The workshop would be devoted to the pro- 
 duction of some marketable article or articles 
 which are simple in construction. The selection 
 of the product would not depend upon technical 
 processes of construction to furnish educational 
 subject matter. Educationally speaking, the ac- 
 quisition of technique is a factor, but not a pri- 
 mary one, in the modern scheme of production. 
 The primary factors are those which have uni- 
 versal significance, that is which are common to 
 all industry, the relation of labor, of mechanical 
 equipment, of raw material, of the finished 
 product to the whole and to each other; the 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 113 
 
 relation of the market to productive effort and 
 an effective organization of all of these. 
 
 The technical processes or their acquisition 
 are of educational value, because they furnish 
 the necessary experience for the evaluation and 
 appreciation of workmanship ; or would furnish 
 a basis for such a valuation if the educational 
 factors which are common to all industry were 
 matters in which all the workers participated 
 and were matters which they understood. It 
 may be that there are certain mechanical proc- 
 esses which have universal technical significance 
 and on that account would have special educa- 
 tional value, but even if those processes were 
 determined and selected for industrial instruc- 
 tion and acquisition, it would not imply that 
 those who acquired them were industrially edu- 
 cated. They would be industrially equipped to 
 act as efficient factory attachments, but the ac- 
 quisition of processes, even the fundamental 
 ones we have had ample opportunity to dis- 
 cover, do not inspire creative interests and de- 
 sires. 
 
 Because educational content in modern fac- 
 tory work is not accessible to the mass of work- 
 ers, we have fostered the illusion that the edu- 
 cational subject matter of industry was inherent 
 
114 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 in the technical process of fabrication. As we 
 have fostered this illusion, we have missed the 
 educational principle applicable to the craft 
 period, as well as to the present, that the con- 
 dition of the educational requirement, is that 
 workers' participation in productive enterprise 
 coincide in the long run with creative intention 
 and accomplishment. This central requirement 
 of industrial education means that individuals 
 learn to function with conscious creative inten- 
 tion in the environment in which they live and 
 that their learning furnishes a basis for critical 
 and informed evaluations in industrial activity. 
 In the craft period the creative intention re- 
 quired the worker's mastery over every process 
 of his craft. In this machine age of associated 
 enterprise the creative intention requires the 
 ability to associate with others in the adminis- 
 tration of industry as well as to take the place 
 of an individual in the routine of factory work. 
 For the reasons I have just stated the educa- 
 tional experiments I am suggesting could cover 
 advantageously one of the many industries 
 which are generally classed as unskilled, and al- 
 most any one of these unskilled routine indus- 
 tries would serve as well as another. Almost 
 any one of the so-called child labor industries 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 115 
 
 could be made over into opportunities for young 
 people to experience the stimulating effect of 
 associating with others in a productive effort, 
 and gain the impetus which the stimulation sup- 
 plied to pursue their subject matter far afield 
 in general mechanics, science, economics, geog- 
 raphy, history and art. 
 
 For the educational purposes of the experi- 
 ment the selection of the industry would not 
 be made on the ground that the technical proc- 
 esses of one required greater intellectual activ- 
 ity than another; neither would the selection 
 depend upon whether or not the industry chosen 
 offered young people better chances than an- 
 other for entrance to a trade where jobs, com- 
 paratively speaking, drew fair rates of wages, 
 or the economic conditions were in other re- 
 spects superior. The experiment would in no 
 sense be a trade preparation but an experience 
 where the enterprise of production was opened 
 up and the possibilities of creative life were 
 realized in association with others, so far as the 
 conditions and time allowed. 
 
 The industrial basis for selection of such ex- 
 periment should hinge, first, on whether or not 
 the young people could function in the industry 
 advantageously to themselves educationally 
 
116 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 speaking and to the industry socially consid- 
 ered: that is, whether or not the productive 
 processes were in line with the capacity of 
 adolescent children and the product was of so- 
 cial value; second, whether the product could 
 be introduced successfully in the market and 
 the enterprise become self-supporting. 
 
 At the present time, a proposition for the 
 promotion of such an educational experiment is 
 being worked out. Wooden toys have been 
 chosen as the article for manufacture, because, 
 first, the models were sufficiently simple in con- 
 struction to make the work practical for young 
 people who make up the work-shop staff; it is 
 practical for the majority of the staff to range 
 in age from 14 to 17 years. Second, the work 
 done by Caroline Pratt on children's play- 
 things has disclosed the fact that the present 
 toy market is below grade from the point of 
 view of the service of toys to children. The 
 market does not supply the children with the 
 sort of material and the sort of tools they re- 
 quire in their play schemes. Therefore, the 
 product chosen has a legitimate social claim 
 on the market. However, it would be valid, 
 though not so interesting, if a certain sort of 
 paper box which filled a legitimate trade need 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 117 
 
 had been selected and a paper box factory had 
 been set up as the basis of the experiment. As 
 a theoretical illustration of my general thesis, 
 paper boxes would serve better than wooden 
 toys, because the latter product, as it is con- 
 ceived, covers special intellectual content. But 
 the particular sort of content is not a funda- 
 mental requirement for the educational purpose 
 of the experiment. However, as the experiment 
 is actually being planned in connection with 
 wooden toys, I shall use the plan, as far as it is 
 worked out, as my illustration. I shall refer 
 later in discussing the school curriculum to the 
 special intellectual content which the manufac- 
 ture of these toys will represent. 
 
 After I set down the details of the experi- 
 ment, which is now being planned for a work- 
 shop and school concerned with the production 
 of play materials, I am hoping that educators 
 and industrial managers may readily make the 
 application to other lines of industry. The plan 
 is tentatively confined to a two years' course. 
 It may be found that two years is too long a 
 time to confine the pupils to the work and the 
 problems of the shop. It may be found in the 
 first year that the pupils will be interested in 
 following some of the problems not in relation 
 
118 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 to their work and in that case they would break 
 their connection with the shop. 
 
 The working staff of the Toy Shop will in- 
 clude forty young people (twenty at work at a 
 time in the shop) from 14 to 17 years who have 
 received their working certificates and have left 
 school with the intention of going to work. It 
 will include also six or seven adults who will 
 do the work on machines too heavy or unsafe 
 for children to handle and who will help to su- 
 pervise and direct the children in their tasks. 
 The shop itself will equal the best of shops in 
 point of equipment, safety and sanitation. It 
 will not, however, like many of the best, elab- 
 orate these basic features in ornamental expen- 
 ditures. The shop will present itself to the 
 young workers as sustaining the best and most 
 essential standards in use, but like all other 
 problems connected with the shop, the best will 
 always be presented as a temporary achieve- 
 ment which with sufficient attention can be im- 
 proved. An important source from which im- 
 provements may be expected is the staff of 
 workers who are in constant contact with the 
 plant. In other words, nothing will be offered 
 the workers in the spirit of final achievement, 
 and the suggestion of completeness will be 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 119 
 
 avoided. The opportunity to test out and ap- 
 preciate the standards will occur in the shop 
 experience, and the chance to achieve or ex- 
 periment with other standards will be reserved, 
 as I shall show presently, for the school hours. 
 This will be the case with methods of work and 
 with shop organization. During the hours in the 
 shop the workers will be occupied wholly with 
 their special tasks as they would be in any other 
 shop, that is in any shop which had due consid- 
 eration for the labor force ; as much considera- 
 tion as it usually has for the economy and the 
 protection of the mechanical force would be con- 
 siderable. 
 
 The workers may acquire the technique of all 
 or of several of the processes. Their general 
 facility in technique may contribute to their 
 productive value in the shop or their mastery 
 over several processes may have its educational 
 value for them in relation to the industry as a 
 whole; they may to advantage shift from one 
 process to another to relieve the strain of rou- 
 tine work. For the sake of production and for 
 the sake of the educational value to the workers, 
 the shifting of the workers from one process 
 to another will be a matter of experiment. But 
 the workers will not be shifted from one con- 
 
 1 
 
120 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 traction process to another for the sake of 
 learning all the processes because skill in all 
 the processes is not a requisite either of educa- 
 tion or production. The experience in the ship- 
 ping of goods and in the handling of raw ma- 
 terials, in the installation of power, in the up- 
 keep of the equipment and the general care of 
 the factory will be participated in by all the 
 workers in their turn, according to the require- 
 ments of the industry. 
 
 While there will be adjustment of the work- 
 ers, and trials as to the place of each will be 
 made in the shop, intensive experiments in shop 
 organization, like other shop problems, will be 
 carried out in the school. This arrangement 
 will serve the educational and the productive 
 purpose, as experimentation should not be lim- 
 ited by the requirements of the shop, but by the 
 requirements of industry at large. The school 
 will be indeed the workshop laboratory where 
 problems which originate in the shop can be 
 taken over for analysis and solution. These 
 concrete shop problems will represent required 
 school subjects as the progress of the shop 
 and the success of the enterprise depend upon 
 their solution. 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 121 
 Among these required subjects are: 
 
 First: The Technical Problems of Manu- 
 facture, such as (a) the receiving and the 
 storing of stock; (b) making out orders for 
 stock from shop orders and bills of materials ; 
 
 (c) planning operation and routing work; (d) 
 standardizing materials and simplifying op- 
 erations; (e) the elimination in loss of time 
 in waiting for material; (f) the division of 
 labor; (g) advantages and disadvantages of 
 supervising in certain operations; (h) ma- 
 chine versus hand work and quantity produc- 
 tion; (i) preparing and routing shipments; 
 (j) making out bills of lading; (k) study of 
 friction, loose belts ; improper oiling, tool 
 cutters and saws. 
 
 Second: Keeping the Financial Accounts 
 and Estimating Costs, (a) Making out bills of 
 materials; (b) calculating costs of material 
 from bill ; (c) calculating board measure and 
 unit cost of direct labor and indirect labor; 
 
 (d) calculations of power used by each unit 
 of machine power; (e) calculating pay roll; 
 
 (f) making out business forms, such as bill- 
 ing goods, invoices, calculating discounts; 
 
 (g) paying bills by check, note and draft; 
 
122 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 (h) business correspondence; (i) banking, 
 depositing money, obtaining money on notes, 
 discounting notes, drawing notes, balances of 
 check books and checking up cancelled vouch- 
 ers and obtaining bank balances ; (j) time and 
 call loans; (k) calculations and payment of 
 interest on capital; (1) maintenance of sink- 
 ing fund. 
 
 Third: Up-Jceep of the Working Force, 
 Buildings and Equipment, (a) Heating, venti- 
 lating and lighting of the factory in relation 
 to its effect on the workers; (b) valuation for 
 each worker of his own physical condition ard 
 expert advice in regard to nutrition and other 
 physical needs; (c) care of motors and me- 
 chanical equipment, care of belts, saws and 
 cutters; (d) efficient installation of motors, 
 sectional drive and individual drive; (e) dis- 
 position of sawdust, etc., study of exhaust 
 fans and construction operation and function. 
 
 Fourth: The Economics of the Enterprise. 
 (a) The market of the raw material the 
 study of the market in relation to grades, to 
 cost, to transportation, to quantity in cost of 
 purchases, to time of purchase; (b) manufac- 
 tured product; selection of models in relation 
 to their use and their art values ; their cost of 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 123 
 
 manufacture; relation to the selling price; 
 the relation of cost to quantity and quality; 
 (c) the relation of the rate of wages paid in 
 the shop to rates paid in similar industries, 
 to cost of production, to needs of the work- 
 ers; (d) necessary margin of income over ex- 
 penses for the up-keep of the plant, for its ex- 
 tension, for the maintenance of the sinking 
 fund and possible contribution to the ex- 
 pense of the school ; (e) the economic value of 
 the school to the work of the shop. 
 
 Fifth: Art and Service. The shop will not 
 depend upon the pupils in the school for 
 models, but will welcome models which come 
 from the pupils as evidence that the shop ex- 
 perience is a stimulating one. But it will be 
 recognized that the pupils will have little to 
 offer on account of their inexperience and 
 that there is a world of designers from whom 
 to draw and the shop is eager to command the 
 best models which are obtainable. There will 
 be a Jury for the determination of models 
 to be manufactured. This Jury will receive 
 certain instruction on the subject of toys, 
 and will be responsible for making further 
 study of the subject. But as has been pointed 
 out for the last ten years by Caroline Pratt, 
 
124 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 who has given the subject scientific attention, 
 toys are the tools of little children which they 
 use in their effort to become acquainted with 
 their environment, which they nse in schemes 
 of play, and which are in fact efforts on their 
 part to try out and experience the adult life 
 into which they are thrown. 
 
 Because this is true and the market is un- 
 supplied with toys of serious value to chil- 
 dren, the subject will be a matter for devel- 
 opment and the introduction in the market 
 of models which will serve the purpose of 
 children in their play will be considered a 
 matter of social importance and demand the 
 serious consideration of the Jury. This Jury 
 will be composed of the workers in the shop, 
 the manager of the shop, an artist, and one or 
 two people who have given the subject of toys 
 careful attention. Discussion of the Toy 
 Jury on submitted toys will center around, 
 first, the value of the toys as tools to the 
 children in their schemes of play, and second, 
 around the art value. Both these points will 
 entail much examination and thought. The 
 first will involve fundamentally the subject 
 of education, and the second, the technique 
 of art as it is expressed through drawing, 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 125 
 
 color and design, but the decision in regard 
 to models for manufacture finally can not rest 
 on either of these fundamental points. It will 
 hinge on whether or not the models selected 
 are practical for production and whether they 
 can he marketed at a price which will cover 
 cost of manufacture. 
 
 The attention of the pupils will be directed 
 to the factory and school buildings and the 
 importance of making them a pleasant work- 
 place and an acquisition to the neighborhood 
 in which they are situated. The problem of 
 noise from machinery and dirt and dust from 
 fuel will be taken up as subjects demanding 
 generous consideration. 
 
 Sixth: Literature and History. Authentic 
 accounts and inspirational stores of indus- 
 trial life, especially of the lumber, the wood- 
 working, and the toy industry will be gath- 
 ered by the pupils and the teachers. Special 
 excursions, investigations, or general obser- 
 vations casually or unexpectedly made by the 
 pupils and teachers will be turned to liter- 
 ary use or historical record. The pupils will 
 be given full opportunity to write out state- 
 ments of facts they have discovered or to 
 write stories or plays or poetry which are in- 
 
126 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 spired by the subject matter they have gath- 
 ered. These literary productions will not be 
 called for as exercises in the art of writing or 
 of fact-recording, but as contributions toward 
 the equipment of the school. The books 
 which are collected as well as the original 
 compositions will be submitted to critical 
 analysis and accepted as accessions to the 
 library if they come up to standards in au- 
 thenticity and in literature. The teachers as 
 well as the pupils will submit new books or 
 other matter and before they are accepted, 
 they will be subject to the same critical analy- 
 sis as the material submitted by the chil- 
 dren. This analysis will be the literary ex- 
 perience and training as it will be partici- 
 pated in by all the pupils who are interested 
 in this expression of their work. 
 
 Not all of this school work is incident to the 
 success of the shop, if we measure success by 
 usual business standards. But it is all incident 
 to the development of a creative impulse in the 
 individual, and it is incident to the development 
 of industry as a socially productive enterprise. 
 The fact that the school and shop work repre- 
 sent the planning and the decisions, that they 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 127 
 
 demand knowledge and experience, does not sig- 
 nify that the young people will assume to carry 
 more responsibility than they are capable of, or 
 that more will be expected of them than they 
 are equal to. It does not mean that their insuf- 
 ficiency will not be recognized and admitted. 
 On the contrary the accumulated knowledge and 
 experience of the adult workers and the teach- 
 ers will be appreciated by the pupils as they 
 have the chance to make real and full evalua- 
 tions. All the members of the staff will carry 
 on the work in the shop as producers and 
 learners and it is hoped they will carry 
 on the work in the school in the same 
 spirit. Young people will stand in the re- 
 lation of partners as well as pupils to the 
 adults associated with them. If the school and 
 the workshop experience gives its pupils a re- 
 gard for high accomplishment it will be un- 
 necessary to stress the fact that as responsible 
 members of the working staff the learners are 
 not on a footing with the expert workers. The 
 teachers or shop managers will help the younger 
 members to gain the knowledge and facility 
 which they have acquired as fellow members of 
 an enterprise in which all have a common in- 
 terest. The participation of the young mem- 
 
128 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 bers in the enterprise will be great or small de- 
 pending upon their achievement of standards. 
 For instance, in the case of office work whether 
 the individual children are entrusted with the 
 correspondence, bookkeeping or banking, will 
 depend upon whether or not they have achieved 
 the adult standards in the shop for such busi- 
 ness details. But standards in business ac- 
 counting, in estimating costs, in planning oper- 
 ations, and in technique, will not be maintained 
 as they usually are in industrial schools for the 
 sake of the training, but for the purpose of 
 carrying forward successfully the actual work 
 with which the shop is concerned. While the 
 educational experience is concerned in part 
 with appreciation of workmanship, creative 
 inspiration in modern industry will never be a 
 common experience until the workers gain 
 an understanding and recognize the significance 
 of their special enterprise in relation to other 
 industrial enterprises and to the business of 
 wealth production as a whole. 
 
 If the school experience is educational, the 
 interest of the pupils in subject matter will not 
 end with the solution of their shop problems 
 or with their experience in industry. Theabove 
 outline of tentative school subjects representing 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 129 
 
 as they do the solution of the problems of a 
 specific industry signifies merely the starting 
 point of an adventure for young people in the 
 serious affairs of adult life. There will be a 
 large margin for choice in the election of sub- 
 jects in which individual children will care to 
 specialize but these subjects will be related more 
 or less directly to the industry. The pupils 
 will doubtless be freer in the second year than 
 in the first to choose where they want to spe- 
 cialize as they will have had time in which to 
 establish their ground work. 
 
 But the election of studies in a two years' 
 half-time course will not admit of flights very 
 far afield of the subject in hand and of the 
 problems originally set up. Those children 
 who find that their participation in a produc- 
 tive enterprise is an enriching experience may 
 elect to follow some special leads in science, in 
 the past and present history of manufacture 
 and commerce, in economics, in literature or in 
 art. The intention of the school is to open up 
 opportunities for such expansive expressions of 
 the concrete experience as time and the capacity 
 of the pupils admit, provided that the expres- 
 sion has its valid relation to the promotion or 
 
130 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 the enrichment of the enterprise of which they 
 are responsible members. 
 
 Certain pupils, we will say, will elect to carry 
 further than others the testing of fuel, of heat- 
 ing and ventilating. Others may be concerned 
 with experiments in power. A subject pos- 
 sibly will become of such absorbing interest to 
 a pupil that he will want to experiment with 
 the one he elects for its own sake and without 
 relation to the problems in the shop. His inter- 
 est may carry him into pure science, unat- 
 tached to any problem in hand. In such cases 
 the pupil should be given a chance to test out 
 his interest; he should be placed on probation 
 in relation to his elected subject and if his inter- 
 est holds and is sufficiently serious he will be 
 advised to give up the school-shop work and 
 follow the lead his interest has taken in some 
 other place or school. 
 
 Indeed the value of the experiment will rest 
 on discovering whether or not it holds the in- 
 terest of the pupils, or how and where it diverts 
 it. The experiment is launched on the assump- 
 tion that the normal adolescent child is con- 
 cerned with the responsibilities of adult life; 
 especially it is assumed that he is concerned to 
 function creatively, to associate with others in 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 131 
 
 productive work, to help supply such funda- 
 mental needs as the housing, feeding and cloth- 
 ing and the pleasures of the world demand. 
 It is assumed that the desire for experience in 
 pure science, in art for art's sake, comes 'before 
 as well as after this period when the need for 
 social contact is, it is again assumed, the dom- 
 inating emotion. We have no scientific proof 
 that any of these things are true, but we have 
 sufficient evidence to justify an experiment. 
 
 "Whether or not it is possible for modern in- 
 dustry to offer young people a proper chance for 
 making their social adjustments is also a ques- 
 tion which I hope this experiment may help to 
 answer. We can do no less than use the con- 
 ditions of industry as they present themselves 
 to us as our basis for a trial. I have started 
 with the belief that possibly the division of la- 
 bor and scientific methods of management if 
 handled by the workers in conjunction with en- 
 gineers and people of experience can be made 
 the instruments of associated life. If there is 
 ground for this assumption it will be important 
 to induce the young people who enter the school 
 and work shop to give their industrial experi- 
 ence a fair trial and to postpone the pursuit 
 of pure science or art for its own sake. 
 
132 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 The subject matter taken up in this school 
 can be subjected to a formal school classifica- 
 tion, under such regular academic headings as 
 Mathematics, Science, Economics, Geography, 
 History, Reading, Composition and Drawing. 
 While these subjects will be experimentally 
 rather than academically pursued, it will be a 
 matter of small moment and short time for pu- 
 pils to make up deficiencies which the traditional 
 school courses require. This is true because 
 the pupils will have had first hand experience 
 with the subject matter in which the ordinary 
 school child is trained or hears about. The free 
 pursuit of their studies will give them a famili- 
 arity and speaking acquaintance with the sub- 
 ject matter with which the traditional school is 
 avowedly concerned but which it handles and 
 guards as though it were the custodian of some 
 precious, but insubstantial matter, belonging 
 to a world somewhat attenuated. 
 
 It is the intention of this educational experi- 
 ment to bring down the great enterprise of in- 
 dustry, so far as it is possible to its real char- 
 acter and to high accomplishment, and in so 
 doing to give the young people the experience 
 of the industrial adventure and full achieve- 
 ment, lest they become the subjects of those 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 133 
 
 who control the movements of industry and 
 determine the character of its advance. The 
 practical test of the experiment briefly outlined 
 would be: (1) Was the creative impulse 
 aroused? (2) Were standards of workmanship 
 discovered and sustained? (3) Was a broad as 
 well as a working knowledge of subject matter 
 acquired? (4) Did the children approach es- 
 tablished methods in a spirit of hospitality and 
 of inquiry as to their validity? (5) Did the 
 problems create sufficient interest to arouse the 
 desire and will to reject faulty methods, and in- 
 troduce others of greater service? (6) Was the 
 enterprise a productive one from the point of 
 view of the market and an educational one from 
 the point of view of growth? 
 
 Such experiments educators and engineers 
 would enter together and together enjoy in re- 
 ality the development of creative effort, which 
 is their profession. Such productive educa- 
 tional experiments in the absence of profiteer- 
 ing would give meaning to the early years of in- 
 dustrial life which now lead the children no- 
 where. They would give the young people, as 
 the experiments come up to the test, the spirit 
 for the adventure of industrial life, the courage 
 
134 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 and desire for solving the pressing issues of 
 their time. 
 
 If the claim made by employers were true, 
 that from 95 to 99 per cent of the working 
 force is without productive impulse, that this 
 condition of development represents, as they 
 say it does, the "native limitation " of the men 
 who work, industry as a progressive enterprise 
 is doomed and high hopes for civilization are 
 without foundation. 
 
 If the position of employers is true and the 
 limitations of individuals are as final as they 
 have determined, there is nothing to do except 
 perfect the mechanical responses of men. This 
 preeminently would be the business of employ- 
 ers and not of education which is concerned 
 with the growth of the individual. On such a 
 basis, it is inconceivable that educators would 
 concern themselves with preparing people for 
 industry. If, however, these limitations are not 
 native, but are due to some incompatibility be- 
 tween the institution of industry and the in- 
 terest of the labor force, then the limitations 
 of workers and of industry are a matter of par- 
 amount importance in the field of education. 
 
 As I have said before there is a common sup- 
 position among people who are not employers 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 135 
 
 of labor, that such features of industry as the 
 mechanical devices of modern technology and 
 the division of labor in factory organization, 
 are in their nature opposed to the expansive 
 development of the people involved; that these 
 features of apparent intrinsic importance to 
 mass production, are antagonistic to individual 
 growth and to the interest of workers in produc- 
 tive effort. 
 
 Without question, it is the business of educa- 
 tors to determine whether such features of in- 
 dustry as machinery and the division of labor 
 are fundamentally opposed to growth or 
 whether they are opposed only in the way in 
 which they have been put to use and directed. 
 We can discover whether or not these features 
 are opposed only as the people concerned have 
 the chance to master them and undertake, 
 through their experience, to turn them to ac- 
 count. 
 
 Because industry has been impersonalized 
 and the mechanics of associated effort in in- 
 dustry worked out in such large measure, it is 
 to-day possible to conceive of spiritual as well 
 as physical association in productive enterprise. 
 A difficulty in the way of this conception, aside 
 from the business complex, is our habit of think- 
 
136 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 ing exclusively of creative effort as an individ- 
 ual expression. In describing the individual 
 expression we would say that a man may create 
 a machine but that when men jointly produce 
 one they work. The creative act is in the con- 
 ception of the machine in conjunction with its 
 construction, and the conception, after our 
 habit of thinking, is an individual and isolated 
 achievement. As a matter of fact it frequently 
 is. A man may create a machine if he conceives 
 it and constructs it or if he conceives and directs 
 its construction. Those he directs, those who 
 do the work of construction alone, do not par- 
 ticipate in the creative act, as the creative act is 
 the concentrated intellectual and emotional ex- 
 pression and effort to produce an article or 
 idea. The creative impulse is concerned with 
 the transforming of a concept or some material 
 into an expanded concept or a new object. The 
 creative impulse itself finds its satisfaction in 
 the process of completion and loses its force 
 when the concept or object is produced. The 
 use of the concept or object created is not a 
 characteristic of the creative but of the social 
 impulse. A man who is interested in the use 
 or application of a product, the value it has for 
 others, possesses the social impulse as well as 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 137 
 
 the creative. One impulse is intensive and the 
 other extensive. 
 
 But the creative effort is not necessarily an 
 individual matter. It may be possible for a 
 group of people to associate cordially and free- 
 ly together with a single creative purpose and 
 endeavor. It may be possible for each worker 
 to experience the joy of creative work as he 
 takes part with others in the planning of the 
 work along with the labor of fabrication. It is 
 a creative experience or dull labor as his asso- 
 ciation with others in the solution of the prob- 
 lem is freely pursued and genuine, or as it is 
 forced and perfunctory. 
 
 My justification for making this assertion 
 will be recognized by every one who has had the 
 opportunity to attend shop meetings of a newly 
 organized trade union. These meetings are 
 unique as they disclose the force in a produc- 
 tive group, and the value of giving the 
 individuals engaged in routine work the oppor- 
 tunity to pool their common experience 
 and pass judgment on methods of work. 
 Whatever decisions these workers come to, 
 none are fully realized or freely pursued under 
 conditions which industry imposes. But in the 
 course of shop meeting discussions, it becomes 
 
138 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 clear to an observer that methods of work is as 
 absorbing a topic as the relation of the work 
 to the wage. The routine which is the apparent 
 result of the division of labor, becomes under 
 discussion a matter of technical import. The 
 workers ' knowledge of labor saving devices and 
 their resources for inventing new ones are as 
 expert as is the business man's knowledge of 
 how labor cost can be saved. This matter un- 
 der discussion is of high interest and concern. 
 There is an integrity in the concern which evi- 
 dently springs from experience and the sup- 
 pressed interest in perfecting methods and the 
 inter-relation of the workers in a shop. The 
 vitality and intelligence of these machine ten- 
 ders may well inspire the agitator who ad- 
 dresses their meetings to curse a system which 
 withholds full knowledge of the workshop and 
 blocks the opportunity for eager workers to try 
 out new schemes born of intensive experience 
 and failure to function in the fullness of their 
 capacity. 
 
 Industry offers opportunities for creative ex- 
 perience which is social in its processes as well 
 as in its destination. The imaginative end of 
 production does not terminate with the posses- 
 sion of an article ; it does not center in the prod- 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 139 
 
 uct or in the skill of this or that man, but in the 
 development of commerce and technological 
 processes and the evolution of world acquaint- 
 anceship and understanding. Modern machin- 
 ery, the division of labor, the banking system, 
 methods of communication, make possible real 
 association. But they are real and possible 
 only as the processes are open for the common 
 participation, understanding and judgment of 
 those engaged in industrial enterprise; they 
 are real and possible as the animus of industry 
 changes from exploitation to a common and as- 
 sociated desire to create ; they are real and pos- 
 sible as the individual character of industry 
 gives way before the evolution of social effort. 
 We speak of interdependence in industrial 
 enterprise as though it were some new thing. 
 The early interdependence had its roots in the 
 common knowledge and use of an inherited tech- 
 nology, where property was common in the 
 common use of it. Interdependence due to mod- 
 ern technology has increased, and the interde- 
 pendence which characterizes our own time is 
 economic. The tools of industry as well as the 
 natural resources are owned, and only by appli- 
 cation to the owner can a man live or labor. 
 However disastrous that ownership has been to 
 
140 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 past generations, it has bound men together in 
 their use of what we ironically call labor saving 
 devices; devices which have not saved labor in 
 the interest of labor. 
 
 -f^Out of this close association of men in indus- 
 try have grown our national and international 
 business corporations and our national and in- 
 ternational labor unions. These corporations 
 and unions are transforming local and provin- 
 cial relations into cosmopolitan acquaintance- 
 ship. The recognized value of the acquaintance 
 is in the extension of knowledge of people 
 through their use and wont of material things, 
 of the ways and means of life outside limited 
 and personal areas. The acquaintanceship does 
 not imply friendship or sympathy or under- 
 standing among men or nations, it does not 
 necessarily result in wisdom, and to date, it 
 does not result in a larger social spirit. The 
 acquaintanceship is based not on mutuality of 
 interest, but rather on rivalry and misinterpre- 
 tations. 
 
 While our institutional life is an acknowledg- 
 ment that interdependence is a necessary factor 
 in modern wealth production, we still measure 
 the strength of a man, or a society, or a nation, 
 and say of all that they are strong or weak as 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 141 
 
 they are able apparently to stand alone. We 
 have not yet discovered that a desire to stand 
 alone in an enterprise where people are of 
 necessity dependent, is a weakness and that our 
 ability to cooperate with others in such an en- 
 terprise is a measure of our strength. "From 
 a social standpoint dependence denotes a power 
 rather than a weakness ; it involves interdepen- 
 dence. There is always danger that increased 
 personal independence will decrease the social 
 capacity of an individual. In making him more 
 self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; 
 it may lead to aloofness and indifference. 
 It often makes an individual so insensitive in 
 his relation to others as to develop an illusion 
 of being really able to stand and act alone, an 
 unnamed form of insanity which is responsible 
 for a large part of the remediable suffering of 
 the world/'* 
 
 This provincial desire of individuals to stand 
 apart and prove to themselves and to others 
 that they are exceptional people is a primitive 
 ambition in conflict with the actual facts of a 
 present day society where interdependence is a 
 law of living. This conflict is kept alive by the 
 industrial motive of exploitation of people and 
 
 * John Dewey Democracy and Education, p. 52. 
 
142 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 i 
 
 of wealth. Exploitation precludes sympathy 
 as it precludes growth. "For sympathy as a 
 desirable quality is something more than mere 
 feeling; it is cultivated imagination for what 
 men have in common and rebellion at what- 
 ever unnecessarily divides them." And fur- 
 ther, Professor Dewey remarks: "It must be 
 borne in mind that ultimately social efficiency 
 means neither more nor less than capacity to 
 share in a give-and-take experience. It covers 
 all that makes one 's own experience more worth 
 while to others and all that makes one partici- 
 pate more richly in the worth while experiences 
 of others."* 
 
 What Professor Dewey says in reference to 
 the growth of children and adults is as abun- 
 dantly significant in its application to society. 
 "Normal child and normal adult alike . . . are 
 engaged in growing. The difference between 
 them is not the difference between growth and 
 no growth, but between the modes of growth 
 appropriate to different conditions. With re- 
 spect to the development of powers devoted to 
 coping with specific scientific and economic 
 problems we may say the child should be grow- 
 ing in manhood. With respect to sympathetic 
 
 * John Dewey Democracy and Education, p. 141. 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 143 
 
 curiosity, unbiassed responsiveness, and open- 
 ness of mind, we may say that the adult should 
 be growing in childlikeness. ' ' * 
 
 As America and the greater part of Europe 
 have been for over a century devoting their 
 attention to coping with specific scientific and 
 economic problems, is their manhood due to 
 appear? Is the raw, immature character of 
 present day association and interdependence to 
 be enriched by sympathetic curiosity, unbiased 
 responsiveness and openness of mind? In the 
 midst of this world war I venture no pre- 
 diction on the appearance of manhood. But 
 clearly there is a line of action for educators to 
 pursue. Clearer than ever before it is evident 
 that it is the business of educators to see that 
 schemes of education are introduced which do 
 not fit children into a system of industry that 
 serves either Empire or business, but a system 
 that serves whole-heartedly creative enterprise 
 as it might be pursued in the period of youth 
 as well as in adult life. Within the past century 
 and particularly in the past generation we have 
 made brave efforts at cooperation, but our fail- 
 ures to realize the spirit of cooperation are as 
 notorious as the efforts themselves. The effort 
 
 * John Dewey Democracy and Education, p. 59. 
 
144 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 to work together in industry has been brutal 
 rather than brave. We shall account for this 
 brutality in industry and recognize why the 
 spirit for cooperation in other fields has failed, 
 as we distinguish between a puerile desire of 
 individuals to express themselves and their im- 
 pulses for creative enterprise. 
 
 As industry through the ages has changed 
 from the isolated business of provisioning a 
 family to the associated work of provisioning 
 the world, it has blazed a pathway for relation- 
 ships which are socially creative. But art in 
 social relationships will not be realized until a 
 passionate desire for the unlimited expression 
 of creative effort overcomes inordinate desires 
 of individuals for self-expression. Art in living 
 together is possible where the intensive interest 
 of individuals in their personal affairs and at- 
 tainments, in their social group, in their voca- 
 tion, in their political state, is deeply tempered 
 by a wide interest and sympathetic regard for 
 the life of other groups and people. Art in 
 social relationships is contingent on broad sym- 
 pathies and extended relationships, and it is 
 contingent as well on ability to work for social 
 ends while remaining in large measure disre- 
 gardful of the personal stakes involved. Be- 
 
INDUSTRY AND ENTERPRISE 145 
 
 cause of our inability to lose our personal 
 attachment for our own work, because of what 
 it may yield us in personal ways, the world 
 never yet has experienced the joy and creative 
 possibility of associated effort. And because 
 it has not we have still to experience art in social 
 contact. 
 
 In group work there may be as much power 
 to release emotional and intellectual creative 
 force as in individual work ; there may be more 
 we do not know. There is a tendency we do 
 know in isolated, individual creative effort, 
 imless highly charged with creative impulse, 
 to cultivate personal equations intensively, limit 
 relationships, and circumscribe vision. As the 
 movement of our time is toward world acquaint- 
 anceship, the desire of individuals to limit their 
 experiences for the sake of intensifying them, 
 signifies from a social point of view as well as 
 a personal, a neurotic tendency. There is a 
 common and false supposition that the neu- 
 rotic temperament is induced in the world of 
 art. It is true that an art environment 
 attracts people whose creative impulse is 
 feeble or not sufficiently strong to sublimate 
 the desire for intensive personal excitation. 
 Such people choose art associations because 
 
146 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
 
 they are limited to individual expression and 
 not because of the overpowering necessity to do 
 work which is creative. As the era in which we 
 live represents a struggle for associated work 
 and common interests and its highest concept 
 is opposed to limited interests and autocratic 
 rule, we may well give our best endeavor to 
 realizing creative impulse in the field of asso- 
 ciated effort, in the hope that the field of art 
 will be some day coextensive with life, and that 
 its expressions will not be confined to the lim- 
 ited world of sculptors, painters, musicians and 
 poets. 
 
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