INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AND DEPENDENCY
Industrial Education and Dependency What Kind of Training Must the State Provide for Its Workers To Prevent Vagrancy, Irregular Employment and Pauperism? By JOHN R. COMMONS In an Address, April...
...It goes to the very sources of prosperity and poverty...
...and, second to make the employer and the schoolmaster cooperate with and supplement each other, instead of duplicating and controverting each other...
...But they are not yet ready to take up a trade...
...It develops the intelligence of a few, and makes it less necessary to develop the intelligence of the great mass of machine-hands and common laborers...
...It would be far better for the boys to get lower wages, if thereby they get industrial education...
...If they can build up a skeleton framework of, say, a hundred foremen, superintendents, skilled mechanics, and efficiency experts, who stay with the establishment permanently, then they are independent of the five hundred machine hands and common laborers that pass through their shops like sub-conscious machines...
...The former apprentice worked with hand tools and learned all parts of the trade by imitating the journeymen...
...Yet he cannot keep his hands...
...LET US imagine these two kinds of teachers...
...It moves by the generation of power that began with the brain of Isaac Watt, Michael Faraday, or the inventor of the gas engine...
...We must look elsewhere for the system that will unite intelligence and labor...
...He gets no further than manual training...
...Social progress does not spring suddenly, like a full-grown talking machine from the forehead of Edison...
...At the age of seventeen or eighteen they have been earning eighteen to twenty cents an hour—twice as much as you offer them...
...In fact, the continuation school, in Wisconsin, is the first step in recognizing the most important need of both modern industry and modern education—the need of making apprenticeship universal...
...Here he is paying eighteen to twenty cents an hour for work that takes little intelligence...
...The apprentice now needs intelligence more than manual skill...
...As you look at the panorama passing through the employment office you see the human products of Wisconsin's prosperity...
...On the other hand, picture a teacher in a continuation school who comes to his superintendent after the third day, and says: "I have showed the boys all I know about wiping joints, fitting pipes and using tools—what shall I teach them next...
...That one is the type that leads to manual training, in order to supplement academic philosophy...
...but they gradually slipped off into experiment stations, engineering colleges, the higher colleges of agriculture, or the usual academic colleges of letters and arts...
...They could earn that much before they were sixteen years old...
...5,000 men will have only a hundred or two hundred apprentices...
...All of these requirements are common to all occupations, yet no occupation of modern industry teaches them...
...If the boy and the girl are to learn how to design and appreciate a beautiful product, they must learn it outside the factory...
...Their factories are not built to produce intelligence...
...His idea of industrial education is the training of carpenters, plumbers, steam-fitters and the other unionized trades that have not yet been broken up by the factory system, or else the training of hired girls for the kitchen...
...If he is rightly instructed in shop mathematics and mechanical drawing, he is really thinking out for himself the thoughts that go back to Newton, Watt or Faraday, and applying them to the machines and forces that he is pretending to manage...
...It is rather to teach them the essentials which lead to promotion in that or any other industry...
...It is this kind of training in intelligence and in learning to study and think, that the shop itself does not give...
...he must protect his health, if he would stand the strain of study and exertion that are the first condition of promotion...
...He keeps on—his mind shrinks —he never thinks of his work unless something goes wrong—he thinks of other things—his childhood, his former playmates—his days and nights of fun and wild oats—anything to keep his mind off from the deadly monotony...
...Brain Factories of Industry" BUT THE modern factory is just as wonderful in its system of organization, division of labor, specialization and management as it is in its mathematics and engineering...
...It is the mind, not the hand, that they are teaching...
...The Measure of Prosperity WE ARB accustomed to measure prosperity by the millions of dollars' worth of cheese and butter and machinery and leather put out and placed on the market...
...It must be universal...
...that he sees nothing in it for him but the twenty cents he gets for it...
...At sixteen or seventeen they are put to work feeding a semi-automatic machine...
...What shall we say of a factory that hires and discharges a thousand men and boys in one year in order to keep up a steady force of three hundred...
...We are, indeed, already well prepared to train these teachers...
...Three million people cannot figure out together in advance just what they will want...
...Not until such a policy is adopted can we predict that industrial education will do much toward reducing the amount of dependency that modern industry produces...
...His foreman will not change him to a different machine or a different foreman...
...By JOHN R. COMMONS In an Address, April 10, at the Social Service Institute WHAT is the part that Industrial education should perform in preventing vagrancy, irregular employment, and pauperism...
...For, industry is not merely the machines and shops, nor even the commodities turned out in amazing quantities, but it is mainly the boys and girls entering the shops and the men and women coming out...
...A boy of eighteen years of age, at ten or twelve cents an hour, is prima facie an apprentice, although he may have no apprenticeship contract...
...Why is it that these boys do not look ahead...
...In some places, with the right kind of teachers, employers are gladly making apprenticeship contracts, where formerly they refused them or had canceled them...
...Their high wages are not due to their skill, but to their disgust...
...They think they want to take up something else, such as machinery, carpentry or stenography...
...Picture to yourself a school-teacher who starts her thirteen-year old children off with what she calls the "principles of design...
...If boards of industrial education do not know the kind of teachers required for this work, they are likely to get teachers who only know how to lead their boys and girls along the lines of manual training, where they simply try to teach what the boys can learn just as well or better in the shops...
...The other extreme is the mere shop-man or mechanic, who knows how to do a thing with his hands, but does not know anything of the science, philosophy, or mathematics that are necessary to make the thing an intelligent process, and are necessary to set the worker to thinking out the reasons for the job that he is merely imitating...
...These have not, of course, been drawn into the stream that runs through the modern factory...
...Then we may expect that industrial education will be accepted and enlarged...
...Further, the employer's apprenticeship system really enlarges the evil which it should reduce...
...It comes to them in the scarcity of all-round mechanics and intelligent foremen...
...His was the artistic and romantic point of view...
...This would be the case if all boys under eighteen, or perhaps twenty-one, were by law treated as apprentices...
...The Stout Institute at Menomonie is recognized the country over as a normal school without a superior in the training of industrial teachers...
...It would not be strange if the children did not understand...
...The gap must be filled by the state, the school and the teacher...
...But it reaches such a small number of people, and is so re-mote from the great current of factory industry that it needs only to be mentioned to show its inadequacy...
...How We Started THE COMMON SCHOOLS in America started off some sixty or seventy years ago with the idea of making the common laborer and the working man an intelligent worker...
...Most of them, indeed, are engaged in what is known as "blind-alley" jobs, that lead nowhere...
...We may expect that when teachers of continuation schools have learned to teach the theory and science which modern apprenticeship requires, then all boys and girls up to eighteen, and perhaps even to twenty-one years of age, shall be declared by law to be apprentices...
...It has inspired a few maiden ladies of Massachusetts, or a few mountaineers of North Carolina, to restore the quaint weaving and needle work of colonial times...
...Some Present Problems THE LAW of 1911 requires boys and girls under sixteen, and apprentices over sixteen, to attend five hours a week in the day-time...
...He hunts another shop—gets on another machine or a similar machine under different surroundings...
...Back of this is the bigger question—how to know the kind of teachers that are needed...
...Soon he has learned several machines by a wandering apprenticeship through several shops...
...But this at least can be said for the state that takes the lead in industrial education;—if it adopts a comprehensive system for all boys and girls—if it exerts itself above all else to bring out and train teachers who combine practical shop work with an understanding of the theories and sciences that underlie intelligent shop-fvork, and with ability to teach them— such a state will take the lead in the Industrial development of the country...
...This does not mean that he must be a scientist, engineer, chemist, or biologist...
...But the work is monotonous—just one or two operations, hour after hour, ten hours a day, sixty hours a week...
...Instead of turning out teachers for the common schools, they turned out scientists, engineers and experts...
...But there is a difference...
...Consequently, the modern apprentice, if he becomes more than a multiplied machine-hand or an imitative journeyman, must understand the machines and the forces of nature that he is charged with directing...
...Even for the boys and girls between fourteen and sixteen years of age the true object of the continuation school is not so much to teach them a trade different from that of the industry in which they are employed...
...the other that leads to trade schools, in order to supply manual dexterity...
...These are essentials that every workingman and workingwoman should know, for upon them depends their future ability to take care of themselves, and thus to become steady and successful workers instead of casual workers, paupers and dependents...
...Of course, it takes time...
...The machine-hand gets eighteen to twenty cents an hour on piece-work—the apprentice gets ten or twelve cents an hour on time-work...
...Stand for an hour in that office and see the hundreds of men and boys waiting for jobs to turn up...
...You offer them a position at a dollar or a dollar and a quarter a day, where they can learn a trade or get promotion, and they laugh at you...
...In our revolt against academic teaching, which is merely brains without experience, we are in danger of going to the other "practical" extreme, which is experience without brains...
...It is not reasonable from the standpoint of the state, that takes into account the interest of all employers, as well as the future working population that all industries must depend upon...
...If this is true, then the blame is on the teachers in the continuation schools...
...It is the business of those who do the planning to know in advance what the results will be...
...But for them, industrial education should have a place as well as for the factory worker...
...No other possesses greater promise of usefulness...
...The boys make more money than their fathers who have gone through the same machine, and so their fathers get the pauper's idea of living on the wages of their children...
...He thinks first of all of the dearth of skilled mechanics for his shop, or of the short supply of skilful cooks and domestic servants for his household...
...But manual training starts from the standpoint of the professions...
...How shall he get it...
...They quit on the least provocation...
...The employer raves and storms...
...He has suddenly found himself earning more than his immigrant father...
...In some towns the continuation schools are beginning to provide for them...
...He must pass around the shop and learn to operate all the machines...
...This is not trade education, nor even vocational education,—it is that universal apprenticeship that is common to every trade and vocation...
...A more rational excuse would be that the kind of teaching secured does not help the boys to become more intelligent workmen...
...Other policies that are necessary might also be mentioned...
...he must become an intelligent worker, if he would advance beyond the dead-line of dependency on others...
...The first thing is to go slow on numbers and, above all else, get teachers...
...That ten years from now they will be loafing in the back part of the employment office with the flotsam and jetsam that they already see behind them, vainly waiting for a twenty-cent job of two or three days, or else hopelessly accepting, for the rest of their lives, an old man's job at a dollar or so a day, long hours, and Sundays thrown in...
...This is especially true of such a profound and far-reaching reform as industrial education...
...This is the one great and pressing problem ahead of the continuation schools in this state—how to get and keep the right kind of teachers...
...second, "Harmony," or "the consistency of likeness," and third, "Balance," or "that repose which results from the opposition of attractions...
...In the case of girls there is an additional problem...
...Failures here and there will occur, but successes here and there will confute them...
...The danger in Wisconsin grows out of our sudden and comprehensive plan of stimulating industrial education without securing in advance the quality of teachers required...
...namely, the lack of teachers who have had a thorough acquaintance in the shop with some industry or trade, and at the same time are capable of using that knowledge to teach the intellectual and artistic principles that the boy does not get in the shop...
...This separates out a few with the intelligent and artistic work, and leaves the thousands with only the manual and monotonous work...
...Even then, there are many other things that are also necessary—a state-wide system of employment offices to reduce the time lost between jobs—to bring employees to the jobs they are fitted for-—to equalize employment in dull seasons and busy seasons...
...It reaches into almost every workshop and every home in the state...
...Find the Teacher...
...The machine is an iron brain...
...He is virtually paying the employer eight or ten cents an hour for the opportunity of leaving one machine as soon as he has learned to operate it, and learning to operate the next machine...
...He went back to the time of small industries, when each worker made a complete article and had an interest and an ambition in his work...
...Hence, large employers, who can afford it, have set up apprenticeship schools in their establishments, where the apprentice puts in part time along with his shop work...
...The foreman must have output—he puts up with beginners and learners only because he must...
...Instead of making labor intelligent they added a number of scientific professions to the former number of learned professions...
...He disregards the fact that, with his specialized machinery, he does not want intelligence, except in his foremen and master mechanics...
...This movement really accomplishes the object intended...
...The law does not as yet apply, in its compulsory attendance requirements, to children who work at home, nor to girls in domestic service, nor to children on the farm...
...But, as soon as they secure a nation-wide market for their artistic product, then it pays to make it on a large scale, and the factory system comes in, with its designers and artists on the one hand, separated from its machine hands on the other...
...To meet this, a wave of manual training passed over the schools...
...Why do they not know that twenty cents is the highest they will ever earn...
...first, to make the intellectual and artistic side of industry reach every boy and girl, instead of a few apprentices...
...A continuation school does not always need machinery and tools, like a man-al training school—indeed, the great tinuation schools of Magdeburg and Berlin in Germany have no machine equipment whatever...
...It is built on theories of mathematics and mechanics that have accumulated since the time of Archimedes...
...If we start from the educational side we find that the teachers, also, have been specialized in the learned, scientific, or artistic professions...
...Before we can answer the question we need to know what kind of industrial education we mean, and what kind of industry it is that needs this education...
...The boy quarrels and quits in a huff...
...Otherwise reaction occurs, and the program goes further backward than it was at the beginning...
...Other boys have got the speed there...
...Of course, it takes time...
...Every town that starts a school and gets full attendance, thereby gets a share of the state fund, and the effort in some of the towns is directed more to forcing large numbers of children into the schools in order to qualify for the state fund, than it is to making sure that they will get the right kind of instruction after they are forced in...
...That they will scarcely hold such a job more than four or five months...
...Even the large companies keep it down to narrow limits...
...These schools, with their mathematics, designing, business organization, and other studies, are the brain-factories of modern industry which produce intelligence, while the shop itself, like the older kind of apprentices, turns out only manual dexterity...
...These are the commodities that the state is interested in...
...No matter from what standpoint we start, we find the same result...
...You can measure it by the rate of pay...
...that if the machine hand stops to think about his work, he promptly abhores it...
...A shop of "The State That Takes the Lead" THIS at least can be said for the state that takes the lead in industrial education:—if it adopts a comprehensive system for all boys and girls—if it exerts itself above all else to bring out and train teachers who combine practical shop work with an understanding of the theories and sciences that underlie intelligent shopwork, and with ability to teach them—such a state will take the lead in the industrial development of the country...
...The separation of brains from hands is a business necessity...
...It will produce a smaller proportion of helpless and ill fitted workers—an expensive charge upon the growing and changing industries of the state and upon the taxpayers who must provide their useless support...
...On the other hand, when the schoolmaster starts off in the industrial business, his idea is the training of the hand to supplement the training of the brain...
...So far, the apprentice is merely a machine-hand...
...What happened to the common schools, however, was not the education of labor as such, but the instruction of labor toward the learned professions...
...These are the machines that the state must depend upon for its future food, clothing and shelter, for its politics, its prosperity and its power of endurance...
...The great danger that threatens this forward attempt is the same as that which has side-tracked similar attempts in the past...
...There had been plenty of private schools for the education of boys to become doctors, lawyers, preachers and teachers, but there was little or nothing for the workingman except charity schools or pauper schools...
...He became a skilled man working with his hands, rather than an intelligent one, working with his brains...
...It makes the worker see and understand both the beauty and the money to be obtained from his work...
...He compares them with himself and others who, by hard work, low pay and thrift, have climbed to eminence...
...No greater undertaking could be espoused by a democratic people...
...We are, in fact, calling for a new profession in teaching—the profession of the practical man who can teach the theory and sci-ence that underlie his practice...
...There is the spot in the state where you can see passing before you, in miniature, the panorama of modern industry...
...Forty years ago William Morris revolted against the deadening effects of modern industry on the worker...
...If we want to see the industries of Wisconsin, let us begin, not at the factory or shop or farm, but at the Free Employment office in Milwaukee...
...It is but just that the employer should give up a few hours of his girl's time that she may get instruction in home-keeping, cooking, sewing and the like, as well as industrial and business essentials...
...Monotony and specialization terminate in mental degradation, irregular work, underpaid work, or pauperism, for the grown-up workingman of the state, although it is seemingly offset by fallacious high wages for boys...
...in that every boy and girl must become a business man, if he would hold his own in the increasing competition of buying and selling...
...Here is a kind of raw material taken in every day and a kind of half-finished product poured out, that means more for the state of Wisconsin than its inflow of pig iron and its outflow of machinery...
...No wonder that manual training has found its place in the high schools that lead to colleges and universities, and not much in the grade schools that stop where industry begins...
...If he studies the raw material he is using, and compares it with other material, he is getting into such sciences as chemistry, biology, or commercial geography...
...When the employer starts off in the schooling business he gets no further than the trade school...
...This may give an appearance of success, but, if it is success based on the police power of the state rather than the useful education secured, the success will only be temporary...
...The employer ascribes their instability and impudence to their laziness, intemperance, vice...
...The monotony grows — gets unendurable...
...But he must not be kept on one machine...
...Every local industrial board could well afford at its own expense, to give its teachers a summer course every year in that school...
...Only large companies can afford it...
...He must get a move...
...So important and vital is the movement that the failures must be promptly corrected and the successes be made universal...
...There is evidently needed something that will unite the factory and the school, that will bring together the employer and the school master...
...It will produce a larger proportion of steady and intelligent workers...
...Just as modern industry has no need of intelligent workers to operate its machines, so it has no need of artistic workers...
...These studies open up to him the line of promotion to foreman, superintendent, manager...
...The excuse which some employers have offered for thus evading it, is that they do not purpose to pay their boys for something they do not earn—they will not pay apprentices for going to school...
...To the boy of sixteen, twenty cents an hour, at a two-months' job, looks bigger than the fifty cents or a dollar an hour and steady work at the end of a ten-year line of future promotion...
...Let us measure it by the thousands of men and women turned out and placed upon the labor market...
...It is expen sive...
...The employer who hires a girl must be looked upon as making a present profit at the expense of the future homes of the state, as well as a profit at the expense of the girl's own future promotion in industry...
...It will produce a smaller proportion of helpless and ill-fitted workers—an expensive charge upon the growing and changing industries of the state and upon the taxpayers who must provide for their useless support...
...You are astonished at seeing the crowds of boys and young men—the army of the semi-skilled...
...They lack those essentials of shop arithmetic, elementary book-keeping, shop organization, business correspondence, and so on, that are essential to advancement in the industry in which they are employed, and which will also be found essential to any other industry that they may afterwards fall into...
...Some twenty or thirty years ago the states began to enforce compulsory attendance at school and to prohibit child labor in factories...
...But the modern apprentice works with machines...
...What Industrial Education Will Do I HAVE been able only to sketch an outline of the relations between industrial education and dependency...
...gets impudent and is "fired...
...The old apprenticeship system went to pieces with the incoming of specialized machines and machine hands...
...They are, first, she says, "Rhythm," which she defines as "joint movement or action...
...The older man at the machine is afraid to quit...
...Boys and girls are eager to get to work...
...Social progress does not spring suddenly, like a full-grown talking machine from the forehead of Edison...
...They have been spoiled...
...Getting Our Bearings THIS PROBLEM of industry and education, therefore, again forced itself to the front...
...Outside the towns it is the problem of the rural schools in agricultural education...
...It is a good thing for the professional man to have done some work with his hands...
...and all shall be required to attend the school on their employers' time, regardless of any apprenticeship contract...
...A system of education that leads to the learned and scientific professions, conducted by teachers trained to that system, makes of manual training a branch of liberal education—not industrial education...
...But this is not enough for modern apprenticeship...
...This excuse is plausible for the individual employer who looks only at his own personal profits...
...If we start from the industrial side we find the overwhelming pressure of modern industry toward specialization...
...or else they get teachers who only know how to teach a trade, just as the old-style journeymen taught the apprentice to imitate himself...
...The hand is taught in the factory—the mind in the continuation school...
...I might mention other efforts that have been made to connect up industry with education...
...Instead of thousands of intelligent hoys and young men in their shops, from whom to select, the employers are compelled to resort to engineering colleges, and then to start their young engineers on a course of shop-apprenticeship...
...As fast as teachers are equipped, in town or country, for the kind of instruction that their children require, so fast may we expect the people and the lawmakers to require their children to attend...
...With such a system of industrial education, beginning at fourteen, extending to eighteen or twenty-one, and supplementing the training of the shop, we may expect considerably to erase that blot on our modern industry —the boy of seventeen to twenty, vainly wandering from shop to shop in search for an illicit apprenticeship, and finally sinking into the class of stupid, low-paid workers, or the class of dependent paupers...
...Separating Brains from Hands BUT THIS modern apprenticeship cannot go very far...
...Worst of all, other employers "steal" the apprentices, and the company finds itself educating mechanics for the use of its competitors...
...The Iron Brain IN THE first place, he must learn to operate the machine...
...His apprenticeship differs only from that of the other machine hands, in that he learn the different machines in the same shop, while they learn them by traveling from shop to shop...
...Consequently, in the third place, if the apprentice studies different plans of shop organization, book-keeping, cost-keeping, efficiency, labor problems, and so on, he is thinking out the elements of accounting, government, political economy, and even psychology, as applied to the business of which he is a part...
...Hundreds of "mechanics' colleges," "mechanics' institutes," "agricultural colleges," and so-called colleges of "learning and labor" were started and were expected to teach the boys to become intelligent farmers and mechanics...
...The machine is the accumulated intelligence of the past, harnessed up to belts and motors...
...A Gap That Must Be Filled THUS gradually shall we approach the new apprenticeship that modern business, in industry and agriculture, imperatively demands...
...But employers can evade the apprenticeship part of the law by refusing to make apprenticeship contracts, or by canceling contracts already made...
...It merely means that he must think over again and understand the principles that philosophers, scientists, engineers and inventors of the past have embodied in the workshop of the present...
...But compulsory attendance is not compulsory education...
...Such a teacher is what we call "academic...
...Bring School and Factory Together SO IT IS...
...From him has come the so-called "arts and crafts" movement...
...Their wages go up to eighteen or twenty cents an hour...
...What Wisconsin Is Doing THE STATE of Wisconsin, at last, has adopted a system of continuation schools that is planned to remedy these things...
...This limits their instruction to the benefit of the few whose work is to be intellectual or artistic, and neglects the thousands who much earn their living by manual work...
...Thus the evils create each other in a vicious circle...
...The Wages of Disgust LET US SEE where they got their notions of work and wages...
...This was inevitable, because there were as yet no teachers except those who had been taught in the learning that led to the professions...
...One is half-baked philosophy—the other is rule-of-thumb...
...It will produce a larger proportion of steady and intelligent workers...
...One extreme is the academic or normal school graduate who knows only the intellectual forms of education, and does not know by experience the shop practice that those forms are to be applied to...
...He makes each boy take a course in carpentering, or drawing, even though the boy wants to be a grocery boy, a book-keeper, or a salesman...
...that it will contribute a decided share toward the reduction of dependency and the elevation of independence...
...Modern industry must employ a hundred and fifty to five hundred men every year in order to keep a hundred positions steadily filled...
...Here the problem widens out and reaches into nearly every home...
...Industrial education is one of the essential things needed to offset the monotony and specialization of modern industry, and to prevent dependency...
...It is made up of metals and it transforms raw material, that can be understood only by a glimpse into chemistry or biology...
...So in the past ten or fifteen years they have begun to create positions for apprentices...
...This applies to both boys and girls in all of those subjects which the Wisconsin law includes under instruction in health, safety and citizenship...
...They can only pass upon the results after they have happened...
...It will afford a wider range of selection for the mechanics, foremen and intelligent leaders in its industries...
...Then the numbers will come...
...he must become a citizen, in fact as well as law, if he would take his part in the complicated government that determines his opportunities and his burdens...
...In two months they have learned the job and got the speed...
...They are conducting a continuous, unorganized strike...
...But it did not solve the problem of how to teach the millions of boys who must work with their hands for a living, also to work with their brains at the same time...
...The modern factory is indeed the forces of nature obeying the stored-up thought of man...
...Neither leads to that combination of the shop and the school that should distinguish the method of the continuation school...
...Neither is competent to handle the problem by himself...
...But the boy rebels...
...This teacher is What would be called "practical...
...This, also, was inevitable, and, indeed, advantageous, for such professions are needed...
...They need a certain amount of brains, distributed through the shop, to supervise the machines and to "boss" the machine hands...
...Where Danger Creeps in FAR MORE important than the machinery and tools is the supply of teachers...
...It will afford a wider range of selection for the mechanics, foremen and intelligent leaders in its industries...
...Feeling the Pinch LARGE EMPLOYERS have begun to feel the pinch...
Vol. 5 • April 1913 • No. 15
