TRAINING CITIZENS WITH "SPUNK" FOR SOCIAL SERVICE
Ross, Edward Alsworth
Training Citizens With "Spunk" for Social Service By EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin WITHIN the last twenty years many of our colleges and universities have...
...Upon many of us it has not dawned that one aim of our public schools should be to make it impossible for the boys to accept the game as they find it Into the public mind have filtered during the last twenty years many of the newer ideas about the meaning of industry and trade...
...Its first great commandment is "Let us alone...
...To tie down the combatants with rules limiting the use of their superior strength, adroitness, or cunning, spoils sport and is unfair to the "better man...
...Out in the world," we tell them, "there is the great game, and there are the great prizes...
...As to the consuming public—for the sake of which in sooth, all such enterprise exists—it lies vague in the dim background with no interest in the fight save as humble and admiring spectators...
...Go in and win...
...In educating for social service, it aims at something greater than lessons in kindness and consideration...
...In this battle, strength has a place and cunning has a place...
...But on the other hand, business men have been drawing together into associations and harken-lng to the utterances of their big dominating personalities...
...Education for social service is to open the eyes of the young to the social nature of their work in life, to purge their minds of a current false notion that to enter one's life work is to take a hand in a poker game or put on the gloves for a prize fight...
...Likewise, it seems as if little charities for news boys or tenement babies or hospitals prosper greatly just because they raise no embarrassing questions and leave the public with a soothing illusion that something is being done...
...Most of the lawyers are warm defenders of the time-hallowed contentious procedure by which our courts ascertain the right and wrong of disputes, despite the obvious consideration that the stronger side ought to win the case, not the side with the stronger champion...
...Its beatitude is "Blessed is the employee who demands nothing and expects nothing, for verily he shall not be disappointed...
...while those who promote movements that lessen somebody's profits or dividends or rentals get the cold shoulder and fail...
...Six-sevenths of American teachers are women, and there is danger lest they, with their lady-like ideas of conduct quench the natural pugnacity of our boys below the point of even chivalrous spunk...
...The next social service is to fight the anti-social tendency of the combat regime...
...Boards of trade and chambers of commerce are its temples...
...It meets current notions of success and reward with more exacting ideals growing out of a new vision of social welfare...
...But in the schools naive commercial ideas prevail...
...It presents life from a new angle...
...COMMERCIALISM has become self-conscious and aggressive...
...The social service that is supreme is not some bit of charitable work, but the following of one's calling as service, not as exploit...
...In some of the professions likewise the combat idea is well-established...
...It aims to turn out youth ready not only to make their calling a service, but to grapple with the old egoistic carnivorous type and eject him from places of influence where he can be a sinister pattern and pace-setter for the next generation...
...The hampering of the contending business men with pure-food laws, sanitary requirements, safety regulations, anti-combination acts, and finally the meddling of a trade commission on the alleged behalf of the consuming public, is held to be an intrusion and an impertinence inflicted on "legitimate business" by the demagogy of "politicians...
...Certainly, a woman-taught generation is showing an alarming willingness to take oppression and robbery lying down...
...It insists that business is an arena in which the strong-hearted and the capable contend with one another for the Supremely Desirable, i. money...
...A democracy, then, will use its schools to counteract the anti-social spirit that too often radiates from the big masterful figures of commercial life...
...THIS whole conception of business as a jungle fight, with its implied admiration of the money-maker as a wonderfully powerful and clever fellow, its thinly veiled contempt for a man who wins only a livelihood, its cool ignoring of the public for whose sake business exists, belongs in a class with trial by ordeal and judicial combat...
...I sometimes suspect that trivial social service is employed to side-track people from economic reform...
...The "tricks of the trade are to be tolerated as we tolerate the feints and ruses of the prize ring...
...I for one deplore the lady-like citizen...
...Training Citizens With "Spunk" for Social Service By EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin WITHIN the last twenty years many of our colleges and universities have caught something of the social view of things...
...Not that there is a purpose behind it all...
...that while oceans of legal verbiage are poured forth on the question whether or not this or that business is "affected with a public interest," there is, in fact, no legitimate business or profession that is not affected with a public interest and should not be required to square itself with the ascertained social welfare...
...The business interests are its priests...
...While the social view has been making headway in the general public, the contrary manner of thinking has been hardening and defining itself within the business world...
...Its holy days are Monday to Saturday...
...The kept newspaper is strong for "swat-the-fly," anti-roller towel, and "clean-up," movements...
...The typical newspaper man is by no means apologetic of the sensationalism, red ink, fakes, deceitful headlines, and spiced news, by which he has beaten his rival is circulation...
...I fear our schools are turning out too many sissies, and that the rough greedy element are taking advantage of it...
...Its promise is prosperity...
...In spite of the impression social ideas have made on the worker and the producer, commercialism has gone on developing within its sphere until it is becoming a religion...
...It is to persuade them that it is wisdom to spend wealth for more welfare, but folly to spend welfare— even somebody else's welfare—for the sake of more wealth, that industries should be run to yield dividend's rather than profits, that a "living wage" must come before a "living dividend," that commercialized sports, commercialized amusements, commercialized newspapers, and commercialized vice are tumors, not flesh, that "prosperity" in the business man's sense is but one element in social well-being and not always the greatest...
...The good-government movement, I notice, attracts many mild-mannered gentlemanly citizens quite bluffed by ward heeler's invitation to the, use of the natural weapons...
...don't ask for less risk or fewer hours, or for more pay or more rights...
...ONE WAY to divert the people from fundamentals is to get them hurrahing for petty betterments...
...Its plea is "Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not...
...In these commercial battles, natural resources, working men and child toilers come to be looked upon as mere raw material to be moved about, husbanded or sacrificed, as the exigencies of the fight may demand...
...It will rear its youth in the ethics of brotherhood, team-work, and responsibility...
...Social service implies not only a willingness to be spent for the common good, but, as well, a capacity for ire and hard-hitting...
...Its favorite parable is of the man who burned down his barn to get rid of the rats...
...They have been told of the wonderful chances to rise and have been stimulated with the assurance that the harder they studied the sooner they would get up in life...
...It seems to me sometimes as if the springing-up of a great variety of petty charities which annoy nobody, antagonize nobody, and produce but trifling results, is to be interpreted as an endeavor to switch the public mind from the big social services involving questions of fares, prices, wages, hours, and conditions of work, which antagonize prominent people but which also hold forth the possibility of raising the plane upon which great groups of us live...
...Our more promising youth still issue from the class room into practical life with glowing visions of a personal and private success...
...but those who start innocent charities get support and put them through...
...Obviously, the rules of the fight should not be changed while the fight is going on, and, of course, the fight is going on all the time...
...Slowly there is rising in the popular mind the idea that businesses and professions are not owned by the men who, for the moment, are engaged in them, that they are but instrumentalities for meeting the wants of the public, not roped rings for the conduct of a prize fight...
...Education for social service ought not to damp the primal impulses of moral indignation...
...So that the promoters of social service learn the lesson: "Ask for reading rooms, or fresh air, or teddy-bears...
Vol. 6 • November 1914 • No. 45
