CHAPTER IX

EDUCATION AND WORK

In the closing sentence of the preceding chapter, I used the words “spiritual life.” Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that I did not have in mind anything vaguely metaphysical, supernatural or mystical. I meant the phrase to designate a hierarchy of values which is possible to an organism capable of exercising choice among its experiences. It is in the sense that it deals with qualities and their relative importance that education may be said to be spiritual, spiritual in a purely naturalistic sense. It is the ordering of interests and habit patterns so that behavior is characterized by a tone and a significance that it would not otherwise possess.

There are those who write and speak of education as if the mind and its ideas existed in a world apart from the world of things. It is possible for a man to pursue his studies in complete isolation from the world about him. But as mental life is possible only in response to some environment, such pursuit of learning merely substitutes an artificial and sequestered environment for the actual one. If the meanings and values disclosed in this artificial environment remain permanently different from those which might be realized in the world of our daily tasks and relationships, such education is merely an elaborate escape from reality. The educated mind responds to our common world. It differs from the uneducated mind not in that it responds to a different set of situations, but in that it responds with a different system of values. Education is not so much a special interest separated from other interests as it is a method of transforming all our interests.

It ought to have something of importance to do with work, since most people are engaged in some form of work most of their time. And when in an industrial age like the present, the whole life of society revolves about the system of production of wealth, it is impossible to precede with education and ignore the challenge to it of our industrialism. It may not be the task of education to provide a solution of the labor problem. But education certainly fails of its function when men are unable to retain its values while struggling with such problems.

People rarely behave like educated human beings when they are confronted by an economic issue. Liberality of outlook, tolerance, temperance of judgment, self-control, ability to see when one is making oneself ridiculous, respect for the truth, are not often found on either side of an industrial conflict. Fantastic notions of the relation of education to work abound because there is much confusion about the meaning and value of work for human personality. Labor is at the same time idealized and despised.

Ruskin, Carlyle, and many humanitarians have held labor to be most praiseworthy. Work is a blessing, in it are peace of mind and self-respect. Work is noble, and it ennobles him who does it. A contemporary writer on the subject of education warns us that the hand may not be “dishonored with impunity.” By dishonored he means that hand work may be considered inferior to brain work to the extent that there is great disparity between the rewards. Distinction has been made between work of hand and work of brain. The former is real work. Once in a parade of working men in Pittsburgh, I saw on a banner carried at the head of a column of metal workers, these words in very large capitals, _We Work_. The implication was that some others, slightly to their discredit, did not really work. From the idealization of work to the idealization of the worker is a logical step. The working class, a class which in earlier centuries was looked upon as the despised “proletariat,” attained a new status in nineteenth century thought. Men began to look to labor as the one class capable of righting the age-long wrongs of humanity, and to believe the control of society by organized labor to be the only means to the establishment of peace and justice. Most of the writers who praised labor were themselves members of the so-called leisure class. A few like Tolstoi vainly tried to support themselves by manual toil. Many who wrote convincingly of the blessings of labor did not personally avail themselves of its ennobling advantages. In the earlier humanitarian sentiment of the nobility of labor, the worker was envisaged as a free and independent person in whose wholesome activity there was healthfulness. Good workmanship commanded general respect and revealed the dignity of labor. There were simplicity and grandeur in the primitive act of a man eating his bread in the sweat of his brow. He who lived close to earth gained something of the silent, calm majesty of nature. Able to cope with natural forces and giving mankind as good as he received, he need ask favor of no man.

Rousseau says, “Outside of society, an isolated man, owing nothing to any one, has a right to live as he pleases; but in society, where he necessarily lives at the expense of others, he owes them in labor the price of his support; to this there is no exception. To work, then, is a duty indispensable to social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a knave.

“Now of all the occupations which can furnish subsistence to man, that which approaches nearest to the state of Nature is manual labor; of all the conditions the most independent of fortune and of men, is that of the artisan. The artisan depends only on his labor. He is free--as free as the husbandman is a slave; for the latter is dependent on his field, whose harvest is at the discretion of others. The enemy, the prince, a powerful neighbor, may take away from him this field; on account of it he may be harassed in a thousand ways; but wherever there is a purpose to harass the artisan, his baggage is soon ready; he folds his arms and walks off. Still, agriculture is the first employment of man; it is the most honorable, the most useful, and consequently the most noble that he can practice. I do not tell Emile to learn agriculture, for he knows it. All rustic employments are familiar to him; it is with them that he began, and to them he will ever be returning. I say to him, then, Cultivate the heritage of your fathers. But if you lose this heritage, or if you have none, what are you to do? Learn a trade.... I wish to give him a rank which he cannot lose, a rank which will honor him as long as he lives. I wish to raise him to the state of manhood; and whatever you may say of it, he will have fewer equals by this title than by all those which he will derive from you.... It is important to learn a trade, less for the sake of knowing the trade than for overcoming the prejudices which despise it. You say you will never be compelled to work for a living. Ah, so much the worse--so much the worse for you! But never mind; do not work from necessity, but work for glory....

“You enter the first shop whose trade you have learned: ‘Foreman, I am in need of employment.’ ‘Fellow-workman, stand there and go to work.’ Before noon comes you have earned your dinner, and if you are diligent and frugal, before the week has passed you will have the wherewithal to live for another week; you will have lived a free, healthy, true, industrious and just man. It is not to lose one’s time to gain it in this way.”

Here as always Rousseau is romantic. This is all very beautiful--until you try it. I am inclined to think that most men who entertain this view have never worked for a living. The happy few amongst the toilers of earth may here and there have enjoyed this independence. It is certainly not the experience of the rank and file in our present industrial system. With the development of the system, and the consequent organization of labor, the idealization of work is supplanted by the idealization of the labor movement and its aims. In the writings of Marx, labor as work is represented merely as so much homogeneous effort-filled time which is measured and reckoned in strictly numerical terms, as if its qualitative or personal elements could be ignored or were non-existent. Skill and artistic genius are represented as the mere telescoping or contraction of a number of labor-time units into a given period--a speeding up, as it were, not something inherently superior in kind. This point of view might satisfy one who was concerned only with the number of hours of employment and indifferent to what he did or how he did it. But it takes little account of that pride in achievement without which those who assert the dignity of labor are making a virtue of necessity.

Marxians assert with much truth that pride in achievement is crushed by the methods of machine production and by the exploitation of labor under a system of “wage slavery.” But this is to abandon the older idealization of work and of workmanship. Labor is now viewed _realistically_ as an irksome servitude. Marxians argue that labor creates all wealth and is therefore justly entitled to it all. It is beside our point to enter into a discussion of this proposition. I am merely seeking to show that in this philosophy, emphasis is shifted from the idealization of work to the idealization of the labor movement itself. A Marxian could agree with Aristotle that mechanical toil is debasing, only he would add “under the present system.” Emancipate labor, give it its rights, reward it justly and force all to do their share of it, and then work will be ennobling. Which is to say, work will be ennobling only in an ideal society. This position is an attempt to restore with one hand what is taken away with the other. Work is robbed of its dignity when excellence in it is not thought worthy of consideration, when superiority of workmanship is represented merely as a greater quantity of abstract labor-time. Advocates of the cause of labor do not say much about the distinction between superior and inferior workmanship. And here we have an example of the mass-psychology of which I spoke earlier. In the degree that you consider men as mass, you ignore individual worth.

There has been a slight tendency to regard labor as an instinct. The impulse to work is of course a universal human trait. Work is normal, natural, right, and those who have no desire for it are going contrary to the demands of human nature. Some such position as this is taken by Mr. Veblin in his delightful satire, “The Instinct of Workmanship.” The author of this book holds with McDougall that man has an instinct to work, but that unfortunately the instinct has been corrupted. This corruption began in primitive times with elders, medicine men and warriors. And throughout historic time, with each succeeding privileged class, human nature has become steadily more perverted and abject, until this instinct reaches its final stage of corruption in the present capitalist system. Thus a last count is added to the indictment of capitalism. It has corrupted labor’s instinct of workmanship.

I have never known whether Mr. Veblin meant his humor to be taken seriously, or intended his book to be a subtle thrust at the theologians. His argument may be regarded as a clever parody of the doctrine of the fall of man in Adam’s sin, with the consequent curse upon all the descendants of our first parent. In any case, his contention adds somewhat to the confusion as to the true significance of labor. I have not found evidence to prove that man has an instinct of workmanship. Hence the relation of education to work is not that of the rational control of instinct, for if the knowledge of simple labor processes were innate, men would not even need “practical” education in them.

Not all men have held a high opinion of labor. Nietzsche says work is a disgrace. There are doubtless many people who secretly agree with him. I have known working men who suffered from an “inferiority complex.” It is possible that the protest of labor is not wholly against injustice, but is in part a protest against the feeling of inferiority. It is not uncommon to find young people who are ashamed to work. It is not only among the rich and privileged that we find those who look down on labor. The same attitude exists in all classes, for much the same reason that the majority of people despise the poor and emulate the rich. Work has in the past been the lot of the slave. Most men are at present driven to labor by necessity, and many entertain the hope of escaping from the necessity as soon as possible.

We have even Biblical authority for this attitude. The punishment of Adam for his act of disobedience is a life of labor. Henceforth he must earn his living, tilling the ground and eating his bread in the sweat of his brow--in other words, labor is a curse. And so it is regarded by the law of the land. When a man is convicted of a crime the court sentences him to prison and to “hard labor”--until such time as he is pardoned and may return to his career of crime and life of leisure.

It is interesting to note the place assigned to work by the Hebrew and Christian religions which, having their origin in the folkways and the daydreams of the masses, are very sympathetic to the poor toilers of earth. Yet we are told that to keep the Sabbath holy, the day must not be defiled with labor. There is no mention of the blessedness of labor in the Beatitudes; the command to consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field which toil not neither do they spin and yet are clothed and fed, reveals a spirit very remote from that of industry. Heaven is thought of as a place of eternal rest.

A similar popular valuation of labor is revealed in the myths of antiquity. The gods do not work. Vulcan, the exception to this rule, is always made to appear ridiculous among the gods; they are said to laugh at his awkwardness. The “labors” of Hercules are not really toil but exhibitions of miraculous strength. For the most part in the legends which have expressed the wish-fancies of mankind, the hero does everything but work; he fights, makes love, kills dragons, goes on strange voyages, wins a kingdom, in fact, his adventures may be interpreted as symbolic expressions of the wish of mankind to escape the common burden of toil.

I think, moreover, men belittle their work when they accept the broad distinction between the “brain” worker and the “hand” worker. Psychologists say that thinking is as truly bodily activity as is any other form of labor, and there is very little so-called work that does not require thought. There is every conceivable gradation from that labor which is almost wholly routine, to that which consists of nothing but solving problems. No one knows the point where labor ceases to be brain work and becomes manual. The world’s work requires of men many kinds of activity, some of great importance, some of little. There is no use either of idealizing it or in despising it. Men do their work because they have to and are neither noble nor ignoble because of it.

The problem is how can I in my situation make my position a place where a man has really lived and toiled and thought and realized values through his effort, and has not permitted himself to become an automaton or a fool. The labor problem however tends to become one primarily not of the significance of work at all, but of improving the material conditions of those who toil. This latter problem is wholly justifiable. But because of the prevailing mental confusion about labor itself, it is generally assumed that if a man works he should receive a different sort of “education” from that of other educated people, and that his training should be the means to ends that have little to do with interest in education as such.

There are those who always view the education of workers strictly from the standpoint of its value for social security. Just as a well-known statistician not long ago advised the American investor to support the Church, whether or not he agreed with its doctrines, because the influence of the Church upon the masses, he said, was on the side of invested capital, so there are those who believe that giving educational opportunity to working men is a sort of premium paid upon a general policy of social insurance.

The fear of the menace of labor often inspires efforts for the education of workers in the hope that with better knowledge labor will become safe and sane. There is a wide-spread belief that education like religion is a conservative influence. If working men were only better informed they would have a more sympathetic understanding of the intentions of their employers; they would show some appreciation of their economic opportunities under our free institutions; they would know better than to go on strike, or listen to their union leaders, or dally with socialistic ideas. Perhaps so, but I have yet to see an educational effort which was consciously directed to these ends that was either sincere or intellectually respectable.

From a wholly different point of view, the relation of education to work would seem to present no problem at all. Work itself is said to be the only genuine method of education. A popular writer who holds advanced ideas on this subject, says that the four years at college are wasted, that “as early as fifteen or sixteen a youth should be brought into contact with realities and kept in contact with realities from that age on. That does not mean that he will make an end of learning then, but only that he will henceforth go on learning--and continue learning for the rest of his life--in relation not to the ‘subjects’ of a curriculum, but to the realities he is attacking.” In this passage one detects the odor of Rousseau. We discussed this theory when we were considering liberal education as animal training. At best it is but half true. If learning necessarily came from contact with realities, every one would be educated. But there is no assurance that people will see the significance of the realities they “attack.” The importance of experimental study is not a new discovery. Science has long employed the laboratory method. And even laboratory work, work done in an environment which is carefully arranged to stimulate discovery, does not always develop habits of independent judgment.

The notion that experience is necessarily the best teacher is popular. The newspapers encourage it. If a man makes a success in business, interviewers seek his opinion on every conceivable subject. In worker’s classes there is occasionally a student who has no doubt that his experience in the shop is a better education than that which people get from books. Such students do not as a rule gain much from study, for no matter what subject is under discussion, they always know more about it than the instructor.

Experience as such teaches just what is experienced and nothing more. Few minds are able to reflect judiciously upon experience or to draw correct conclusions from it. Labor is something that can be known only by one who has experienced it, and this experience is important for anyone who desires a broad knowledge of human life. But it is with work as it is with travel: each is an aid to education only as it quickens insight. The man on the Bowery who boasts that he has traveled over America from coast to coast may really never have left the Bowery; in each place he has visited, he finds himself in the same sort of lodging house, in the same environment, among the same sort of companions, all with the same interests.

So with many kinds of work. Much of it is mere routine. He who from day to day does the same thing, until he is able to perform the movements with a minimum of effort and attention, is certainly acquiring a habit, but we have seen that not all habit formation is education. Those who work with certain kinds of machinery frequently complain of the monotony of their work. I think that one of the serious objections to such work is that it has so little educational value. Perhaps this objection may be offset by the fact that machine production makes possible a shortening of the working day and hence gives the worker more leisure time. Some think that adult education is important because it gives people something to do in their unemployed hours. But people do not always improve their minds during the time when they are free from labor, and many whose work is routine, possess by nature or develop routine habits of mind which interfere with their education. They become victims of fixed ideas, of slogans and catchwords.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a real integration of education and work is vocational training. This is the “education” which most people seek. Universities offer an increasing number of courses in practical subjects such as engineering, mining, business methods. Various trades are taught in public schools. By far the greater number of courses offered to adult students are sold with the promise that they will increase the purchaser’s efficiency and “put more pay in his envelope.” I have already discussed this useful knowledge. Both the individual and society profit by it. And in addition to its practical advantages, there is a sincerity and lack of pretense about such education which distinguish it from much of the traditional education. It must be thorough or it cannot meet the test of practical experience. If men learned mechanics with no more thoroughness than that which characterizes the study of the classics, the country would go into bankruptcy.

But as I have tried to show, this training for practical efficiency is too narrow. It does not necessarily widen the student’s interests or deepen his insight or improve his judgment concerning matters that lie outside the range of his technical information. Advocates of this type of education often become partisan and declare that it alone is education.

It is doubtless too soon to speculate upon the effects of our new policy of reducing immigration to the point where it is almost negligible. Whether the effect is to intensify competition among working people, or to lessen it because of a labor shortage, in either case the result is obvious. Somebody must do the actual work of the country. We shall soon have a working class in America that is more than one generation old. That is, we are now for the first time in our history tending toward a relatively fixed and permanent working class. The various national strains in it will be held together long enough to become acquainted with one another, long enough to find more in common than a common opposition to capital, long enough to develop a working class tradition which is American. Workers will not only strive individually to become middle class; they will be obliged to improve their condition as a class. To the economic struggle there will be added efforts for culture. Many workers are already beginning to seek education as an aid to a more satisfactory and less sordid existence while working at their tasks. Sooner or later education must cease to be the distinguishing mark of a privileged class, or a device which aids a man to the goal of his ambition; it must become a universal practice of learning how to live like a civilized being in any occupation.

I have said that people’s ideas of the relation of education to work are for the most part confused and fantastic, and that among the causes of this confusion was a misconception of the meaning of labor. We saw that the older romantic idealization of labor gives way to the idealization of Labor not as work but as an organized movement. There are “friends of Labor” who think of workers’ education as class education. And by class education they do not mean the extension of the opportunity for liberal education to people who toil for their daily bread. They are not interested in liberal education, any more than they are interested in work. They wish working men to be given such instruction as will be useful in the “class struggle.” Labor is to have its own kind of education.

It is said that educators are but the retainers, the “high-brow” policemen of the vested interests and must always teach what the masters require. The educators’ task is to train the masses to be more productive and willing servants of the masters, to train the sons of the owners in the idealogy so that they may work it to advantage, to mould them to the type of the most successful and provide them with the insignia and passwords of culture which will show that they belong to the fraternity of the privileged. Traditional education, being nothing but a weapon of the ruling class, is not for the workers. The workers are now passing through a period of discipline which is preparing them to be the future masters of the world. As the old education was for the old master class, the new must likewise be the ideology of the future master class, the organized proletariat. The workers must educate themselves, for any education that capitalists provide for them will be the capitalist education which enslaves the worker. The new education in proletarian ideals must be wholly different from the past. Its aim is not to provide useless and ornamental knowledge, or escapes and consolations, but to equip labor to emancipate itself from the rule of capital and to conquer and control industrial society. Thus labor education is sometimes little more than old fashioned radical propaganda. Where this is not the case, workers may still be urged to the pursuit of knowledge by militant appeal. The following is quoted from a bulletin issued by a state director of labor education in the West:

“He (the worker) lives in a society committed to the practice of buying his labor cheap and selling its product dear, to the theory that property is sacred and life of little value. In support of this position toward labor, the press, the pulpit, and too often the school lend their aid....

“All this passion for justice will accomplish nothing, believe me, unless you get knowledge. You may be strong and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may effect a revolution, but you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge unless you get it for yourselves. Even if you should win that victory, you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win over ignorance.”

If as an individual a man is interested in his education only in so far as it may be to his economic advantage, we regard him as a rather stupid materialist. It is no less stupidly materialistic to urge a class to seek knowledge merely for the sake of a common economic advantage. As a rule, ignorant men place a strictly material valuation upon education. If education is nothing but the training of certain groups of animals in the best methods for taking material advantage of one another, it makes little difference which group wins in the class struggle. This theory means that the belief that education can make a difference in the kind of living is a delusion, and that the only significant differences in human life are the results of economic forces.

Have we, in the notion of a special type of education for the working class, a correct view of the relation between education and work? Let us admit for the sake of argument, that traditional education is class education, elaborated in the interest of the dominant elements in society. Even then it might have a function other than that of an aid to systematic exploitation. It might serve as a guide to the use of leisure time. It might aid men in discriminating between ends which were worthy of effort and those which were not. It might be necessary for the development of personality, and to enable people to discover that which would give some intelligible meaning to their existence. Hitherto the privilege of the fortunate few, it might conceivably be a good which may now be the possession of the many.

I cannot see that the interests I have just mentioned are necessarily those of any particular class. And it would seem that insofar as traditional education has failed, the failure has been the result of subordinating these very universal human interests to the special economic advantages of a particular class. Along with the class spirit, irrelevant factors enter into education. Education becomes illiberal and propagandist, a drill in herd opinion. Prejudice is not removed; it is intensified. A spirit of intolerance is bred concerning anything which might effect class interest.

And now it is argued that since liberal education has been spoiled by one class in making it the servant of its class interests, the working class is justified in again spoiling it for its own special interests. If men prefer a substitute to the real thing, it is their own affair. But a person is either being educated or he is not, and whether he is or not is a matter quite independent of his particular occupation. Of course a man’s education will make a difference in the spirit in which he works and in the quality of his workmanship, for it changes the man. If traditional education is unfit for the working man, it is not fit for anyone. I can see no reason why economic differences should be made the basis of cultural differences. The knowledge that has value should be accessible to all regardless of their economic interests, or the profession they practice. If a bad education should not be given to a worker, it is not because he is a working man but because he is a man. Anything that it is good for one class to know is good for another. A banker may appreciate Shakespeare’s sonnets, so may a tailor; but there is not one Shakespeare for the first and another Shakespeare for the second. If biology is worth knowing, its value is not changed because a machinist studies it. If a philosophy is true, it is true for the man who can understand it, whether he be a railroad president or a coal miner. There is no proletarian arithmetic or capitalist algebra or Marxian astronomy.

To be sure, a worker’s education should take account of the economic situations in his environment. So should the education of all men. It is sometimes said that within the ranks of labor there is a new civilization in the making. Working men are said to have ideals and standards, an ethic and culture of their own which are now manifest as working class “idealogy.” I have not noticed it. From the time I was a small boy, I have had somewhat unusual opportunities to know the labor movement, and during the last twenty years have sought to make a psychological study of it. The “labor point of view” is commonly that which propagandists wish the worker to have. In America the “revolutionary class-conscious proletariat” exists only on paper. If we consider the ideals, habits and ambitions of working people, it is difficult to conclude that they form a culture group apart. The working man votes for Al Smith and Calvin Coolidge, dresses like the grocer and the bank clerk, drives a motor car if he can afford it, reads the popular journals, has about the same ideas of patriotism, morals, government, and success in life as his employer, and tends in every way to become more and more “middle class.”

Suppose the change contemplated by many radicals should occur and that there should be a “social revolution.” What of the education of workers then? The worker would still spend his days at the machine or bench. Is it not conceivable that men might then in their pursuit of knowledge have some interests other than the economic? Under no system should people permit their entire personalities to be drawn into and used up by industry. Industry is a means, not an end. It is in its proper place when it makes possible the achievement of culture. As a man becomes educated, he should learn so far as circumstances permit, to put his work in its proper place. The relation of education to work is no different from its relation to all the interests and activities and demands which life makes of us. A community may be said to have a culture only when all men--each in his own way,--cooperate in the realization of certain values, which give to all their actions and strivings a perspective, an order, a meaning. It is in this sense that Europe in the thirteenth century may be said to have had a culture. In discussing the cultural values of any period of history, there is danger of over-simplification. The picture which I have of that century may not be historically correct, but it will serve to illustrate my point. Catholic Christianity at the close of the Middle Ages possessed a set of values which entered into everything that people did or thought and gave it meaning. The secular did not really exist for the men of that age. All work was religious work. Everywhere there was ceremony, the shrine, sacredness. The fields were blessed before plowing; harvest was a gay religious festival. Every labor process and every station in society was brought to the service of the common ideal, and from it gained added significance. For it the peasant tilled the ground, its themes were the inspiration of the sculptor, the painter, the musician, the builder. In the service of this valuation of the experiences of life the King ruled, the soldier fought, the monk said his prayers, the philosopher meditated.

The cultural ideal of an age is revealed in the type of man for whom the people have greatest reverence. Such a man is the meaning of living for the men of that age. Inquire of the thirteenth century in whom is its ideal realized, and the answer is clear. It is realized in the saints. I do not mean to suggest that everybody in those days was saintly. But there was common agreement that human life existed for the achievement of sainthood. People achieved it in varying degrees and by methods which appear strange to us of the twentieth century. But all men hoped to achieve it in the next world if not in this. The existence of the saints in Heaven was a storehouse of merit upon which all could draw. And one living saint was held to be enough to justify the existence of an entire age.

I trust it is not necessary for me to add that the saint is not my ideal of the meaning of life. Ideals of asceticism and other-worldliness have no interest for me. But I wonder what would happen if people should “go in” for education with the unanimity of agreement as to its value that they once showed with regard to religion. I hesitate to make the suggestion lest I appear to suggest something solemn, sanctimonious, pious and official. We have enough of that sort of thing now among professional educators.

If instead of the attainment of sainthood the attainment of wisdom could be made the commonly accepted goal and meaning of the activities of modern men, we should again have a culture in which industry would take its proper place. We have for it now no other goal than the making of money, and hence industry runs amuck while the spirit of commercialism crushes out all our values. We keep the wheels going round, but the quality of living and the meaning of our work decline. Cooperation in the service of the ideal gives way to a competitive struggle for material possession and power and our lives are used up in making a living. Only the peoples that have achieved a culture have a goal for which to labor.