Creative Impulse in Industry by Helen Marot
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8 CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY
_A Proposition for Educators_
BY
HELEN MAROT
1918
TO
CAROLINE PRATT
WHOSE APPRECIATION OF EDUCATIONAL FACTORS IN THE PLAY WORLD OF
CHILDREN, INTENSIFIED FOR THE AUTHOR THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GROWTH
PROCESSES IN INDUSTRIAL AND ADULT LIFE.
PREFACE
The Bureau of Educational Experiments is a group of men, and women who
are trying to face the modern problems of education in a scientific
spirit. They are conducting and helping others to conduct experiments
which hold promise of finding out more about children as well as how
to set up school environments which shall provide for the children's
growth. From these experiments they hope eventually may evolve a
laboratory school.
Among their surveys the past year, one by Helen Marot has resulted in
this timely and significant book. The experiment which is outlined at
the close seems to the Bureau to be of real moment,--one of which both
education and industry should take heed. They earnestly hope it may be
tried immediately. In that event, the Bureau hopes to work with Miss
Marot in bringing her experiment to completion.
THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS, 16 West Eighth Street, New York
City.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT
II. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE AMERICAN WAY
III. ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY. THE GERMAN WAY
IV. EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY AND ASSOCIATED ENTERPRISE
CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY
INTRODUCTION
A friend of mine in describing the Russian people as he observed them
in their present revolution said it was possible for them to accept
new ideas because they were uneducated; they did not, he said, labor
under the difficulty common among educated people of having to get rid
of old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mind
to say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind is
filled with ideas which are institutional. The ideas which come out of
formal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas which
have been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are,
as they have proved their worth in service. But as they represent
authority, they pass into a people's mind with the full weight of
an accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books are
not responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every established
institution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rules
of action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them.
The movement for industrial education in the United States is an
illustration of this.
The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or colleges
but from industry. The institution of industry, rather than the
institution of education, dominates thought in industrial education
courses. It is the institution of industry as it has affected the life
of every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thought
in conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No established
system of education or none proposed is more circumscribed by
institutionalized thought than the vocational and industrial school
movement.
Educators have opposed the desire of business to attach the schools
to the industrial enterprise. They have rightly opposed it because
industry under the influence of business prostitutes effort.
Nevertheless, hand in hand with industry, the schools must function;
unattached to the human hive they are denied participation in life.
Promoters of industrial education are hung up between this fact of
prostituted industry and their desire to establish the children's
connection with life. They have tried to meet opposing interests; they
have not recognized all the facts because the facts were conflicting,
and their minds as well as their interests, institutionally speaking,
were committed to both.
This was the impasse we had apparently reached when the war occurred;
it is where we still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war will end
and we shall be called then to face a period of reconstruction. The
reconstruction will center around industry. The efficiency with which
a worker serves industry will be the test of his patriotic fervor, as
his service in the army is made the test during this time of war. All
institutions will be examined and called upon to reorganize in such
ways as will contribute to the enterprise of raising industrial
processes to the standard of greatest efficiency.
The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was one
of refined brutality. During the progress of the war, the significance
of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common
people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms. It is the
industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human
development that has made her victories possible. It is that
efficiency which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive
for over three and a half years. Germany's military strategy is, in
the main, her industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in
turning technology to the account of an imperial purpose.
But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who
believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America
will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to
emulate the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength.
While it is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace
to the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the
significance of the methods is but vaguely realized. It is probable
that after the war it will be said that it was not the German
methods which were objectionable, but that it was their use in an
international policy. Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope
we shall discover how intrinsically false those methods are; and how
untrue to the growth process is the sort of efficiency Germany
has developed. I hope also that we shall realise that a policy of
paternalism has no place in the institutional life of our own country.
Before the war these German methods bore the character of high
success, and they had a large following in this country. There are
indeed many thousands of men and women in the United States, who,
while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war
against Germany still support industrial and political policies and
dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian. The professional
Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German
paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved
people.
The German educational system as much if not more than its other
imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German
brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its
technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country
has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this
perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute
their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an
industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each
person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his
early years, like a predestined fact.
American business men before the war appreciated the educational
system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of
their own. But the situation was embarrassing as these business men
were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the
people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of
the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest.
Their embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions
of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as
patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially,
they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial
education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted
as a national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its
methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have
played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of
industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for
patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German
system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could
deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed
in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a
comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children
into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen
explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal
when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic
enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people
unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of
the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology
in both England and America.[A]
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen.--Imperial Germany and the Industrial
Revolution.]
First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial
education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the
sort of education that America wants.
America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if
it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their
efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the
heritage which industrial evolution has given the world. But what
shall we use this efficiency for? For the sake of the heritage? For
the sake of business? For the sake of Empire?
Business knows very clearly why it wants it, but as a rule most of us
are not clearly conscious that we need, for the sake of our expansive
existence, to be industrially efficient. 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.
Shortly it will be the mission, of educators to show that by opening
up the field for creative purpose, fervor for industrial enterprise
and good workmanship may be realized; that only as the content of
industry in its administration as well as in the technique of its
processes is opened up for experiment and first-hand experience,
will a universal impulse for work be awakened. It is for educators,
together with engineers and architects, to demonstrate to the world
that while the idea of service to a political state may have the power
to accomplish large results, all productive force is artificially
sustained which is not dependent on men's desire to do creative work.
A state as we have seen, may invoke the idea of service. It might
represent the productive interests of a community if those interests
sprang from the expansive experience of a people in their creative
adventures.
In the reconstructive period educators may have their opportunity to
extend the concept that the creative process is the educative process,
or as Professor Dewey states it, the educative process is the process
of growth. The reconstruction period will be a time of formative
thought; institutions will be attacked and on the defensive; and out
of the great need of the nations there may come change. Educators will
find their opportunity as they discover conditions under which the
great enterprise of industry may be educational and as they repudiate
or oppose institutions which exclude educational factors.
It is for educators to realize first of all that there can be no
social progress while there is antagonism between growth in wealth
(which is industry) and growth in individuals (which is education);
that the fundamental antagonisms which are apparent in the current
arrangement are not between industry and education but between
education and business. They must know that as business regulates and
controls industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other purposes
than production of goods, it thwarts the development of individual
lives and the evolution of society; that it values a worker not for
his potential productivity but for his immediate contribution to the
annual stock dividend; or if, as in Germany where his productive
potentiality is valued in terms of longer time, it is for the imperial
intention of the state and not for the growth of the individual or the
progress of civilisation.
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. Their estimate is
of course more or less true. But such valuations are made without the
help of creative inspiration, although the functioning of a product
has its creative significance. The creative significance of a product
in use, as well as an appreciation of the act of creating, would
be evident if modern production of wealth, under the influence of
business enterprise and machine technology, had not fairly well
extinguished the appreciation and the joy of creative experience in
countries where people have fallen under its influence so completely
as in our own.
It is usual in economic considerations to credit the period of
craftsmanship as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was
rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker.
The craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative
influence. There was opportunity then as there is not now for the
worker to gain the valuable experience of initiating an idea and
carrying the production of an article to its completion for use and
sale in the market; there was the opportunity then also as there is
not now, for the worker to gain a high degree of technique and a
valuation of his workmanship. It is characteristic of workmanship that
its primary consideration is serviceability or utility. The creative
impulse and the creative effort may or may not express workmanship
or take it into account. Workmanship in its consideration of
serviceability oftentimes arrives at beauty and classic production,
when creative impulse without the spirit of workmanship fails. The
craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the high rank which is given
it is due in part to its historical relation to the factory era which
followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship represented expansive
development in workmanship, it is not generally recognized that
the Guild organization of the crafts developed modern business
enterprise.[A] Business is concerned wholly with utility, and not like
workmanship, with standards of production, except as those standards
contain an increment of value in profits to the owners of wealth. It
was during the Guild period that business came to value workmanship
because it contained that increment. In spite of business interest,
however, the standard of workmanship was set by skilled craftsmen, and
their standards represented in a marked degree the market value of the
goods produced by them.
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 211-212.]
While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of
the owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing
and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse
found a stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and
ability of the worker. It was not until machine standards superseded
craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production,
the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their
educational value for the worker. The discredits were psychological
and economic; they revolutionized the intellectual and moral concepts
of men in relation to their work and the production of wealth.
As machine production superseded craftsmanship the basis of fixing
the price of an article shifted from values fixed by the standards of
workers to standards of machines, Professor Veblen says to standards
of salesmen. It is along these lines that mechanical science applied
to the production of wealth, has eliminated the personality of the
workers. 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
cooerdination 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; as he
supplements without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks,
whatever imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its
needs. If it lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is
without legs; and he pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs arms. All of
these things are done by the factory worker at the pace set by the
machine and under its direction and command. A worker's indulgence in
his personal desires or impulses hinders the machine and lowers his
attachment value.
This division of the workers into eyes, arms, fingers, legs, the
plucking out of some one of his faculties and discarding the rest
of the man as valueless, has seemed to be an organic requirement of
machine evolution. So commendable the scheme has been to business
enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the
machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where
experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed,
and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is
required. The organization of technological laboratories, like the
organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is
based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory
for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen
are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific
knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked.
Small technological laboratories are still in existence where
the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole
engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and
associated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological
content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the problem
or secure a free and voluntary participation in its solution. Those
who are interested in its solution are inspired by its economic value
for them. In all technological laboratories, either where the problem
is broken up and its parts distributed among the employees of the
laboratory, or where it is given to them as a whole for solution, it
is given not as a sequence in the creative purpose of the individuals
who are at work on it, nor is its final solution necessarily
determined by its use and wont in a community. Problems brought to
the laboratory are tainted with the motive of industry which is not
creative, but exploitive.
The tenure of each man employed in production is finally determined
not by any creative interest of his own or of his employer but by
whether in the last analysis, he conforms better than another man to
the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to
be one and the same thing, his place in an industrial establishment
has some bearing on his intrinsic worth. Under such circumstances his
interest in the creative purpose of the establishment would have a
foundation, and he himself could value better than he otherwise would
his own part in the enterprise.
The economic organization of modern society though built on the
common people's productive energy has discounted their _creative
potentiality_. We hold to the theory that men are equal in their
opportunity to capture and own wealth; that their ability in that
respect is proof of their ability to create it; a proof of their
inherent capacity. It is a proof, as a matter of fact, of their
ability to compete in the general scheme of capture; their ability to
exploit wealth successfully. While the prevailing economic _theory_ of
production takes for granted men's creative _potentiality_ there is no
provision in our industrial institution for the common run of men to
_function_ creatively. There is no attempt in the general scheme for
trueing-up or estimating the creative ability of workers. In the
market, where the value of goods is determined, a machine tender has a
better chance than a craftsman. The popular belief is that the ability
of workers has native limitations, that these limitations are absolute
and that they are fixed at or before birth. This belief is a tenet
among those who hold positions of industrial mastery. Managers
of industry for instance who control a situation and create an
environment, demand that those who serve them meet the requirements
which they have fixed. They do not recognize that industrial ability
depends largely on the opportunity which an individual has had to make
adjustments to his surroundings and on his opportunity to master them
through experiment. 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. After he is paid off the assumption is his pleasure
will begin. A popular idea of play is the absence of work, the
consumption of wealth, being entertained. Being entertained indeed
is as near as most adult men in these countries come to play. Their
Sundays and holidays are depressing occasions, shadowed by a forlorn
expectancy of something which never comes off.
The capacity of the French people for enjoying their holidays is much
the same as their capacity for enjoying their work. This, no doubt, is
a matter of native habituation. But however they came by it, it has
had its part in determining the industrial conditions of France. The
love of the people for making things has resisted in a remarkable way
the domination of machine industry and modern factory organization.
The French work shop, averaging six persons, is as characteristic
of France as the huge factory organization with the most modern
mechanical equipment is characteristic of American industry. As the
workers in these shops participate more intimately in the fabrication
of goods they come more nearly to a real participation in productive
enterprise. This close contact with the actual processes of production
gives the workers a sense of power. A sense of their relation to the
processes and their ability to control them engenders courage. Indeed
it is the absence of fear, rather than the absence of work, that
determines the capacity of men for play.
It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for
emancipation emphasized a desire for control of industry. The
syndicalism of France has expressed the workers' interest in
production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress
exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory
takes for granted the readiness of workers to assume responsibility
for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the
United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but
their financial relation to it.
It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest
in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed. But
the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne
no less heavily on the French than on other workers. It is also
difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of
production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods. The
truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new
factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying
degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in
productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the
introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish
these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw
around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor
in its social position further than it had been carried, but this
is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and
intellectual power which is latent in the working class. In this
connection the significant truth for civilization is that while
exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism
between labor and capital, modern factory organization destroys
creative desire and individual initiative as it excludes the workers
from participation in creative experience.
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