Helen Marot

“ 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 Cezanne who paints pictures and leaves them in the field to perish is considered by the general run of people, in communities inured to modern industrial enterprise, as being not quite right in his head. ”

“ If still servant, will it serve more efficiently than it has our dominant institution, industry? If the silent partnership between business and the state is strengthened, will not the promoters of industry be in a better position than before to appeal through the state, through the patriotism intensified by our newly acquired world position, for a more universal and a systematized adaptation of workers in industry? The schools in their disinterested capacity, disinterested, that is, in the profits of production, it would seem could be used most effectively toward this end. ”

“ It is because they labor under this obsession that they turn industrial education into industrial training whenever they include industry in their curricula. 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 content without reserving the right of such experience even for youth. They know, as we all do, that industrial problems carry those who participate in their solution into pure and applied science ”

“ I have said that industry was shorn of adventure 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 opportunity provided for such intention is negligible. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Neither fat incomes 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. Possibly 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 impulse, a real intellectual interest in the adventure of productive enterprise. ”

“ The ownership of many things, which mass production has made possible, the intensive cultivation of the desire to own, has added another 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 industrial life. ”

“ As the appeals of the governments at this time bear the stamp of a nation's will, its valuation and respect for common labor, there is the chance, it seems, that they may carry to the workers the energizing thought that all the members of the industrial group must assume, actually assume, responsibility for production, if production is to advance. Equally important in the interest of creative work is the power of these appeals to shift the motive for production from the acquisitive to the creative impulse. ”

“ The point in scientific management is that efficiency depends, wholly depends they believe, on centralizing the responsibility for setting and maintaining workmanship standards, on transferring 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 standards, a management nevertheless will fail to get the workers' full coöperation until it arouses their interest in maintaining them. ”

“ There is no progression from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in 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 opportunity to enrich their experience for their own reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid subject matter. ”

“ 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 undertaken to gather up whatever bits of initiative the machine had not already taken over and to hand back to the workers at the bench directions 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ The effort 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 coöperation in other fields has failed, as we distinguish between a puerile desire of individuals to express themselves and their impulses for creative enterprise. ”

“ The children's life in these schools is an experience in industry where there is nothing to hide, no trade secrets to keep back. The children have the full opportunity of seeing their work through to its completion and understanding its purpose and recognising its value and use. It provides more than any other school system a liberal field for productive endeavor. 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. ”

“ A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his personality has passed into the machine which has met the requirements of mass production.
The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete coördination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power and devices. The most important auxiliary factor is human labor. A worker is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to the time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning ”

“ Scientific management is sacrificing educational 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 resist these attempts to put something over on them, irrespective of their good or evil results. ”

“ As a school reflects the life of a community it enriches the experience of the children and endows them with the knowledge and power to deal with environment. When a school system disregards, as our established 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 individual life and development ”

“ If the promoters of industrial education had been observers of children from twelve to fourteen 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. ”

“ 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 represent the planning and the decisions, that they demand knowledge and experience, does not signify 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. ”

“ None of the advocates view the equipment of workers for industry in terms radically different from the terms in which they are viewed by business men; they offer them technique and matter of insignificance and indirection; they make no suggestion or move to open up the adventure of industry for the worker's actual participation in it; they accept the organization of industry which excludes their participation as an unalterable fact; even unalterable as an experience in the prevocational schemes of education. ”

“ 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 exploitive 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. ”

“ All they mean and what they expect to gain, is what employers have meant and wanted; that is labor's surrender of its assumed right to strike on the job, its surrender of its organized time standards and its principle of collective bargaining. But when officials speak in the name of a government what they mean is unimportant; what it means to the people to have them speak, and the people's interpretation of what they say, is the important matter. ”

“ 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, where people have fallen most completely under the influence of machine production and business enterprise, and where they have lost by the way their conception of their creative potentiality, 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. ”

“ Without question, it is the business of educators to determine whether such features of industry 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 account. ”

“ There is an integrity in the concern which evidently springs from experience and the suppressed interest in perfecting methods and the inter-relation of the workers in a shop. The vitality and intelligence of these machine tenders may well inspire the agitator who addresses 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. ”