3. Present Opportunities and Dangers.
—In the past, education has been much more vocational in fact than
in name. (i) The education of the masses was distinctly
utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather than education, or
else just learning from experience. The schools devoted themselves to
the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms of
reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all kinds of
labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the direction of
others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The two
supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal
character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as that
explicitly so termed.
(ii) To a considerable extent, the education of the dominant
classes was essentially vocational—it only happened that their
pursuits of ruling and of enjoying were not called professions. For
only those things were named vocations or employments which involved
manual labor, laboring for a reward in keep, or its commuted money
equivalent, or the rendering of personal services to specific persons.
For a long time, for example, the profession of the surgeon and
physician ranked almost with that of the valet or barber—partly
because it had so much to do with the body, and partly because it
involved rendering direct service for pay to some definite person. But
if we go behind words, the business of directing social concerns,
whether politically or economically, whether in war or peace, is as much
a calling as anything else; and where education has not been completely
under the thumb of tradition, higher schools in the past have been upon
the whole calculated to give preparation for this business. Moreover,
display, the adornment of person, the kind of social companionship and
entertainment which give prestige, and the spending of money, have been
made into definite callings. Unconsciously to themselves the higher
institutions of learning have been made to contribute to preparation for
these employments. Even at present, what is called higher education is
for a certain class (much smaller than it once was) mainly preparation
for engaging effectively in these pursuits.
In other respects, it is largely, especially in the most advanced work,
training for the calling of teaching and special research. By a
peculiar superstition, education which has to do chiefly with
preparation for the pursuit of conspicuous idleness, for teaching, and
for literary callings, and for leadership, has been regarded as
non-vocational and even as peculiarly cultural. The literary training
which indirectly fits for authorship, whether of books, newspaper
editorials, or magazine articles, is especially subject to this
superstition: many a teacher and author writes and argues in behalf of a
cultural and humane education against the encroachments of a specialized
practical education, without recognizing that his own education, which
he calls liberal, has been mainly training for his own particular
calling. He has simply got into the habit of regarding his own business
as essentially cultural and of overlooking the cultural possibilities of
other employments. At the bottom of these distinctions is undoubtedly
the tradition which recognizes as employment only those pursuits where
one is responsible for his work to a specific employer, rather than to
the ultimate employer, the community.
There are, however, obvious causes for the present conscious emphasis
upon vocational education—for the disposition to make explicit and
deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the
first place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
now expected to do something in return for their
support—intellectual and economic—by society. Labor is
extolled; service is a much-lauded moral ideal. While there is still
much admiration and envy of those who can pursue lives of idle
conspicuous display, better moral sentiment condemns such lives. Social
responsibility for the use of time and personal capacity is more
generally recognized than it used to be.
(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century
and a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and
local, and consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide.
They engage the best energies of an increasingly large number of
persons. The manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have
practically displaced a hereditary landed gentry as the immediate
directors of social affairs. The problem of social readjustment
is openly industrial, having to do with the relations of capital and
labor. The great increase in the social importance of conspicuous
industrial processes has inevitably brought to the front questions
having to do with the relationship of schooling to industrial life.
No such vast social readjustment could occur without offering a
challenge to an education inherited from different social conditions,
and without putting up to education new problems.
(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now
technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from
discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc. The
economic revolution has stimulated science by setting problems for
solution, by producing greater intellectual respect for mechanical
appliances. And industry received back payment from science with
compound interest. As a consequence, industrial occupations have
infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural
possibilities than they used to possess. The demand for such education
as will acquaint workers with the scientific and social bases and
bearings of their pursuits becomes imperative, since those who are
without it inevitably sink to the rôle of appendages to the machines
they operate. Under the old regime all workers in a craft were
approximately equals in their knowledge and outlook. Personal knowledge
and ingenuity were developed within at least a narrow range, because
work was done with tools under the direct command of the worker. Now
the operator has to adjust himself to his machine, instead of his tool
to his own purposes. While the intellectual possibilities of industry
have multiplied, industrial conditions tend to make industry, for great
masses, less of an educative resource than it was in the days of hand
production for local markets. The burden of realizing the intellectual
possibilities inhering in work is thus thrown back on the school.
(iv) In the fourth place, the pursuit of knowledge has become, in
science, more experimental, less dependent upon literary tradition, and
less associated with dialectical methods of reasoning, and with symbols.
As a result, the subject matter of industrial occupation presents not
only more of the content of science than it used to, but greater
opportunity for familiarity with the method by which knowledge is made.
The ordinary worker in the factory is of course under too immediate
economic pressure to have a chance to produce a knowledge like that of
the worker in the laboratory. But in schools, association with machines
and industrial processes may be had under conditions where the chief
conscious concern of the students is insight. The separation of shop and
laboratory, where these conditions are fulfilled, is largely conventional,
the laboratory having the advantage of permitting the following up of any
intellectual interest a problem may suggest; the shop the advantage of
emphasizing the social bearings of the scientific principle, as well as,
with many pupils, of stimulating a livelier interest.
(v) Finally, the advances which have been made in the psychology
of learning in general and of childhood in particular fall into line
with the increased importance of industry in life. For modern
psychology emphasizes the radical importance of primitive unlearned
instincts of exploring, experimentation, and "trying on." It reveals
that learning is not the work of something ready-made called mind, but
that mind itself is an organization of original capacities into
activities having significance. As we have already seen
(Ante, p. 239),
in older pupils work is to educative development of raw native activities
what play is for younger pupils. Moreover, the passage from play to work
should be gradual, not involving a radical change of attitude but carrying
into work the elements of play, plus continuous reorganization in behalf
of greater control.
The reader will remark that these five points practically resume the
main contentions of the previous part of the work. Both practically and
philosophically, the key to the present educational situation lies in a
gradual reconstruction of school materials and methods so as to utilize
various forms of occupation typifying social callings, and to bring out
their intellectual and moral content. This reconstruction must relegate
purely literary methods—including textbooks—and dialectical
methods to the position of necessary auxiliary tools in the intelligent
development of consecutive and cumulative activities.
But our discussion has emphasized the fact that this educational
reorganization cannot be accomplished by merely trying to give a
technical preparation for industries and professions as they now
operate, much less by merely reproducing existing industrial conditions
in the school. The problem is not that of making the schools an adjunct
to manufacture and commerce, but of utilizing the factors of industry to
make school life more active, more full of immediate meaning, more
connected with out-of-school experience. The problem is not easy of
solution. There is a standing danger that education will perpetuate the
older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the
newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of acquiescence in
the untransformed, unrationalized, and unsocialized phases of our
defective industrial regime. Put in concrete terms, there is danger
that vocational education will be interpreted in theory and practice as
trade education: as a means of securing technical efficiency in
specialized future pursuits.
Education would then become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the
existing industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of
its transformation. The desired transformation is not difficult to
define in a formal way. It signifies a society in which every person
shall be occupied in something which makes the lives of others better
worth living, and which accordingly makes the ties which bind persons
together more perceptible—which breaks down the barriers of
distance between them. It denotes a state of affairs in which the
interest of each in his work is uncoerced and intelligent: based upon
its congeniality to his own aptitudes. It goes without saying that we
are far from such a social state; in a literal and quantitative sense,
we may never arrive at it. But in principle, the quality of social
changes already accomplished lies in this direction. There are more
ample resources for its achievement now than ever there have been
before. No insuperable obstacles, given the intelligent will for its
realization, stand in the way.
Success or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything
else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental
disposition—an educative change. This does not mean that we can
change character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart
from a change in industrial and political conditions.
Such a conception contradicts our basic idea that character and mind
are attitudes of participative response in social affairs. But it does
mean that we may produce in schools a projection in type of the society
we should like to realize, and by forming minds in accord with it
gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult
society.
Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the
present regime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it
entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make
no appeal to them, which are pursued simply for the money reward that
accrues. For such callings constantly provoke one to aversion, ill
will, and a desire to slight and evade. Neither men's hearts nor their
minds are in their work. On the other hand, those who are not only much
better off in worldly goods, but who are in excessive, if not
monopolistic, control of the activities of the many are shut off from
equality and generality of social intercourse. They are stimulated to
pursuits of indulgence and display; they try to make up for the distance
which separates them from others by the impression of force and superior
possession and enjoyment which they can make upon others.
It would be quite possible for a narrowly conceived scheme of vocational
education to perpetuate this division in a hardened form. Taking its
stand upon a dogma of social predestination, it would assume that some
are to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the
present, and would aim simply to give them what is termed a trade
education—that is, greater technical efficiency. Technical
proficiency is often sadly lacking, and is surely desirable on all
accounts—not merely for the sake of the production of better goods
at less cost, but for the greater happiness found in work. For no one
cares for what one cannot half do. But there is a great difference
between a proficiency limited to immediate work, and a competency
extended to insight into its social bearings; between efficiency in
carrying out the plans of others and in one forming one's own. At
present, intellectual and emotional limitation characterizes both the
employing and the employed class. While the latter often have no
concern with their occupation beyond the money return it brings, the
former's outlook may be confined to profit and power. The latter
interest generally involves much greater intellectual initiation and
larger survey of conditions. For it involves the direction and
combination of a large number of diverse factors, while the interest in
wages is restricted to certain direct muscular movements. But none the
less there is a limitation of intelligence to technical and non-humane,
non-liberal channels, so far as the work does not take in its social
bearings. And when the animating motive is desire for private profit or
personal power, this limitation is inevitable. In fact, the advantage
in immediate social sympathy and humane disposition often lies with the
economically unfortunate, who have not experienced the hardening effects
of a one-sided control of the affairs of others.
Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure
from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and to
perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an
instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.
Those who are in a position to make their wishes good, will demand a
liberal, a cultural occupation, and one which fits for directive power
the youth in whom they are directly interested. To split the system,
and give to others, less fortunately situated, an education conceived
mainly as specific trade preparation, is to treat the schools as an
agency for transferring the older division of labor and leisure, culture
and service, mind and body, directed and directive class, into a society
nominally democratic. Such a vocational education inevitably discounts
the scientific and historic human connections of the materials and
processes dealt with. To include such things in narrow trade education
would be to waste time; concern for them would not be "practical." They
are reserved for those who have leisure at command—the leisure due
to superior economic resources. Such things might even be dangerous to
the interests of the controlling class, arousing discontent or ambitions
"beyond the station" of those working under the direction of others.
But an education which acknowledges the full intellectual and social
meaning of a vocation would include instruction in the historic
background of present conditions; training in science to give
intelligence and initiative in dealing with material and agencies of
production; and study of economics, civics, and politics, to bring the
future worker into touch with the problems of the day and the various
methods proposed for its improvement. Above all, it would train power
of readaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would not
become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to
contend not only with the inertia of existing educational traditions,
but also with the opposition of those who are entrenched in command of
the industrial machinery, and who realize that such an educational
system if made general would threaten their ability to use others for
their own ends.
But this very fact is the presage of a more equitable and enlightened
social order, for it gives evidence of the dependence of social
reorganization upon educational reconstruction. It is accordingly an
encouragement to those believing in a better order to undertake the
promotion of a vocational education which does not subject youth to the
demands and standards of the present system, but which utilizes its
scientific and social factors to develop a courageous intelligence, and
to make intelligence practical and executive.
