Labor Looks at Education [2nd printing 1947. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674367272

Table of contents :
THE INGLIS LECTURESHIP
LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION
A NOTE ON RECENT BOOKS

Citation preview

INGLIS IN TRENDS

IN

LECTURES

SECONDARY AMERICAN

EDUCATION

SECONDARY

EDUCATION.

By

L e o n a r d V . K o o s . 1925. $1.00. OPPORTUNITY AND A C C O M P L I S H M E N T IN SECONDARY EDUCATION. B y P a u l H . H a n u s . 1 9 2 6 . $ 1 . 0 0 . Do AMERICANS REALLY V A L U E EDUCATION ? By A b r a h a m F l e x n e r . 1927. $1.00. T H E U N I Q U E CHARACTER OF A M E R I C A N SECONDARY EDUCATION. B y C h a r l e s H . J u d d . 1 9 2 8 . $ 1 . 0 0 . SECONDARY EDUCATION AND INDUSTRIALISM. By G e o r g e S . C o u n t s . 1 9 2 9 . Out of print. T H E GREAT INVESTMENT. B y T h o m a s H . Briggs. 1930. $1.50. T H E W A Y O U T OF EDUCATIONAL CONFUSION. By J o h n D e w e y . 1 9 3 1 . Out of print. R E A L I S M IN A M E R I C A N EDUCATION. By William S e t c h e l L e a r n e d . 1 9 3 2 . Out of print. T H E EVOLVING C O M M O N SCHOOL. B y H e n r y C . M o r rison. 1933. $1.00. T H E D I L E M M A OF D E M O C R A C Y . B y I . L . K a n d e l . 1 9 3 4 . $1.00. T H E CARE OF THE P U P I L . B y S a m u e l S. D r u r y . 1 9 3 5 . $1.00. T H E M O U N T I N G W A S T E OF THE AMERICAN SECONDARY SCHOOL. B y J o h n L . T i l d s l e y . 1 9 3 6 . $ 1 . 5 0 . T H E TEACHING OF CONTROVERSIAL SUBJECTS. B y E d w a r d L . T h o r n d i k e . 1 9 3 7 . $1.00. SCHOLARS, W O R K E R S , AND G E N T L E M E N . B y M a l c o l m S. M a c L e a n . 1938. $1.00. SECONDARY EDUCATION AND L I F E . B y C h a r l e s A l l e n P r o s s e r . 1939. $1.00. W O R K , WAGES, AND EDUCATION. By Aubrey W. W i l l i a m s . 1940. $1.00. EDUCATION IN A WORLD OF FEAR. B y M a r k A . M a y . 1 9 4 1 . $1.00. EDUCATION FOR T O D A Y AND TOMORROW. B y Floyd W . R e e v e s . 1942. $1.00. SECONDARY EDUCATION AS P U B L I C P O L I C Y . B y P a u l R . M o r t . 1943. $1.00. TERTIARY EDUCATION. B y G e o r g e D . S t o d d a r d . 1 9 4 4 . $1.00. T H E ROLE OF T H E FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN E D U C A TION. B y

George F. Zook.

1945.

$1.00.

LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION

LONDON : G E O F F R E Y C U M B E R L E G E OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

W b t

Зп^Ий Hectare,

1946

Labor Looks at Education BY

MARK STARR Educational

Director, International Workers' Union

Ladies'

CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1947

Garment

COPYRIGHT, 1 9 4 6 B Y T H E PRESIDENT AND F E L L O W S OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Second Printing

PRINTED AT T H E HARVARD U N I V E R S I T Y PRINTING OFFICE CAMBRIDGE, M A S S A C H U S E T T S , U.S.A.

T H E I N G L I S

T o

L E C T U R E S H I P

HONOR THE MEMORY OF ALEXANDER

INGLIS, 1 8 7 9 - 1 9 2 4 , HIS FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES GAVE т о THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, A FUND FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF A L E C TURESHIP IN SECONDARY EDUCATION.

TO

THE STUDY OF PROBLEMS IN THIS FIELD PROFESSOR INGLIS DEVOTED HIS PROFESSIONAL CAREER, LEAVING AS A PRECIOUS HERITAGE TO HIS

CO-WORKERS

AMPLE OF HIS INDUSTRY, INTEGRITY, CIAL VISION.

THE EX-

INTELLECTUAL

HUMAN SYMPATHY, AND SOIT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE

LECTURESHIP TO PERPETUATE THE SPIRIT OF HIS LABORS AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS IN THE FIELD OF HIS INTEREST. FOUNDATION

T H E LECTURES ON THIS

ARE PUBLISHED

BY THE SCHOOL.

ANNUALLY

LABOR LOOKS AT

EDUCATION

T

HERE is no such thing as bad booze to the alcoholic; there is only better. Often education is evaluated in the same undiscriminating fashion. Y e t we know that educators can be wolves despite their sheepskin diplomas. Education, as the tongues in the fable, can be the worst thing and the best thing in the world. T h e difference depends upon the purpose for which education is used. A knife in the hands of a maniac destroys life; in the hands of a skilled surgeon, it gives life. Education can be a curse or a cure. Education under Hitler perverted two generations; democratic education can protect this and successive generations from suicide if it is based on personal integrity, on majority rule with respect for minority opinion, and on cooperation. In the early struggle to attain public education for the people in the United States and in other countries, suspicions of education found effective expression. Thomas Hodgkin in Britain was afraid that public education for the workers meant "learning to bear the yoke." Another British radical, William Cobbett, in 1807 denounced the proposed education as "the indoctrination of the poor with the principles of submission to authority." Robert Coram, in early America, voiced suspicion from another angle when he, with Benjamin Franklin and others, advocated wider education. He wrote: Education should not be left to the caprice or negligence of parents, to chance, or confined to the children of w e a l t h y parents. It is a shame, a scandal to civilized society, that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges and universities, to learn to cheat the rest of their liberties.

LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION Even now, vested interests hire the best trained brains for their defense. Every social reform, from the prohibition of child labor in mines to the guarantee of full employment, has been met by learned jeremiads foretelling disaster. Economists have too often been the chaplains of the pirate ship of exploitation. Only when workers form trade unions can they hire lawyers to counter the legal representative of the insurance company who uses his college training to browbeat and trick a claimant out of his accident compensation. Most recently, a leader in the building trades, evaluating the newly created School of Industrial Relations at Cornell University, showed that the old suspicion would not down when he expressed the fear that trade unions were "creating a club which would be used to knock us down." Horace Mann did not believe in education for its intrinsic sake; he hoped that it would destroy the "dominance of capital" and the "servility of labor." In his Annual Report on Education (1848), pages 668-669, he wrote: Surely nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one ckss possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependants and subjects of the former. But, if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. . . . Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balancewheel of the social machinery. . . . It gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness

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of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.

Many conservatives, on the contrary, feared the revolutionary consequences of opening the school doors and shutting the factory gates to the workers' children. M y own father heard a Tory parson in the 8o's express the fear that the coming of the elementary school would mean that British workers' children would "lose all respect for their betters" and "refuse to be content in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call them." That same fear was expressed some sixty years later by an upper-class Negro who thought that compulsory education was a dangerous thing: Because as soon as you take a country boy and teach him something about the world and give him new ideas, you ruin him for the farm. And you make a Negro dissatisfied with his position. As long as you keep him ignorant, he's satisfied to work for some white man on the plantation, but as soon as he learns to want other things, he comes to the city to try to get them. When he gets here, he finds the white man has everything, and he can't get the kind of work or job he wants, and he is dissatisfied. And then you have a dangerous situation. "If you want to keep your present civilization, you've got to keep the poor people ignorant," I said to this man. And it's true. If you educate people and then try to treat them the same as if they weren't educated, you've got trouble on your hands. A man who's got nothing at all sees you or somebody else with everything and he's dissatisfied. Y o u can't blame them either. In our present civilization, a few people have everything, and all the rest have nothing. (Quoted in W. L . Warner, R. J. Havighurst, and Μ . B. Loeb, Who Shall Be Educated? New Y o r k : Harper and Brothers, 1944.)

Away back in Colonial America there was Governor Berkeley of Virginia who said: I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has

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brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both. (Report to the Committee for the Colonies, ιόγι.)

The opponents of Franklin, and later of Mann, maintained that education should depend upon the financial resources of the parents and that it was dangerous government interference to send youngsters to school at the taxpayers' expense. So from right and left, education was alternately espoused and opposed. It was not above the battle of conflicting views and interests. But those who feared and those who welcomed education were both in part mistaken. When workers won the right to vote and their children went to public school, vested interests learned how to "educate their masters." Education became a powerful agency to maintain the status quo because the majority of its products in self-delusion accepted the ads and editorials and the propaganda of the "kept press" as their main sources of ideas. But there was always a danger. Hannah More (1745-1833) anxiously assured her patrons that her aim was "that the poor be able to read their Bibles and qualified for domestic duties, but not to write or be enabled to read Tom Paine." Nevertheless, some of the poor did. Later they read Marx and Veblen, to name only two of the most effective intellectual commandos who utilized their own college training as bombs to blast away the intellectual girders supporting the modern economic system. Inevitably such individuals are rejected as heretics because the ideas which they espouse do not support things as they are. Changes and struggles in economic life are reflected by and in turn are made articulate and influenced by

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intellectual conflicts. The uncertainty of educators at the present moment reflects the disrupting influences of the depression and the Second World War, which has accelerated developments and extended our problems in an unprecedented fashion. Some educators endeavor to satisfy their consciences by suggesting that education with an aim is propaganda and that true education deals only in immutable, unalterable, fundamental truths — as if abstract ideals could be isolated from their daily changing content. After all, there is only a relative distinction between education and propaganda. Your education is always propaganda to the other fellow. A fair propagandist openly and confessedly acknowledges his aim. He consciously selects his facts to prove his point. He is a lawyer building up his brief, if sometimes he does not even believe that his client has the stronger case. Propaganda has fallen into disrepute because propagandists have had ulterior and secret aims which usually they disavow in order to deceive. The educator, on the contrary, does not usually acknowledge any bias, although obviously it is present and unavoidable in human beings. If he is a wise educator, however, he will examine with his students other points of view and they will arrive at the teacher's conclusion by their own choice and with a development of their own powers of judgment which will continue into new experiences and situations. And the good educator will also impress upon his students that both teacher and textbook may be wrong. Herbert Morrison, M.P. (in the New York Times, January 30, 1946) was reported to favor class room notices announcing: "The teacher may be wrong. Think for yourself." Surely no teacher worth his salt can mislead his students to think that finality

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has been achieved in any branch of human knowledge. Perhaps some of our current difficulties in mutual understanding between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. are traceable to two different approaches to education. "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage the continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found," wrote President Charles Kendall Adams of the University of Wisconsin in 1894. And that ideal is good, if sometimes honored only in the breach and not in the observance. In contrast is the opinion of Soviet-born Masha Scott in Talk about Russia edited by Pearl S. Buck: " I do not agree that your way is good to teach the people. For example, we would not find in our country two completely different points of view in our press, that is, one man says that this is true and another says it is not true. How can people know which is the truth?" Some educators think that their duty is finished when they have taught their students how to think, which would be just as incomplete an exhortation as urging people to "drink, drink," without remembering that both glasses and thought must have a content. The whole of our educational system is an attempt to make the kind of men and women that a given form of society thinks is best. The normal educator, like the propagandist, selects his facts in order to prove to the young child that cleanliness and honesty are the best policies. Plato in The Republic wrote: Youth is the time when the character is being molded and easily takes any impress one may wish to stamp on it. Shall we then simply allow our children to listen to any stories that anyone happens to make up and so receive into their minds

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often the very opposite to those we shall think they ought to have when they are grown up?

The basic trouble of our uncertainty about education at the present moment is that we are not sure what sort of citizens we want to produce. We are torn between education and money-grubbing. Do we want to prepare students for civic responsibilities and the wise use of leisure or is it enough to train them for making a livelihood? Do we estimate the value of a man by the richness of his thought, the breadth of his reading and his store of interesting experiences brilliantly described, or do we admire the "big shot" whose skills are strictly commercial and whose claim to fame is based upon the size of his bankroll? The first colleges aimed to produce preacher-teachers; now the Harvard Committee's Report (General Education in a Free Society, Harvard University Press, 1945) says that religious belief cannot be the basis for education. I quote from its chapter, "The Search for Unity" (p. 39): Sectarian, particularly Roman Catholic, colleges have of course their solution which was generally shared by American colleges until less than a century ago: namely, the conviction that Christianity gives meaning and ultimate unity to all parts of the curriculum, indeed to the whole life of the college. Y e t this solution is out of the question in publicly supported colleges and is practically, if not legally, impossible in most others. Some think it the Achilles heel of democracy that, by its very nature, it cannot foster general agreement on ultimates, and perhaps must foster the contrary. But whatever one's views, religion is not now for most colleges a practicable source of intellectual unity.

If we are not honest with ourselves, then we cannot be honest with our students. If society itself has no certain, conscious aim, how can the school whose function it is to support the status quo express that aim?

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Clarity about aims is inseparable from clarity about methods. If you aim to produce a yes-man patriot, your method will be goose-step training and mass recitation, with opportunities for initiative, originality, and scientific thinking reduced to a minimum. If a woman is to be a clothes model whereby her future husband can vicariously display his wealth at the country club, why bother to give her more than conversational chatter and a knowledge of cosmetics and beauty aids? Education perforce shares with our modern society a schizophrenic existence. It is too much to ask education to be logical and simple when our community is so full of contradictions. Social Psychology by Kimball Young thus sums up the basic education and individual development expected in the United States: Early training rather mild; not prodded toward adulthood. Much protective coloration by moral verbalisms. Importance of specialized skills and knowledge related to competitiveness. Money making and other external marks of success highly rewarded. At same time much emphasis on Christian love, sympathy, and good will. Tendency to develop split personality due to sharp divergence between Christian and democratic moral principles, faith in law and belief in fairmindedness, and the overt practices of intense competition, of class conflict, lawbreaking, and of struggle for power. This condition is evident in high degree of personal anxiety and lack of inner integration. Excessive individualism often leaves no central focus for individual with respect to group, be it family, class, political party, or nation. (From Social Psychology, Second Edition, by Kimball Young. Copyright 1944, F. S. Crofts & Co., Inc.)

When a society in wartime engages in a life-anddeath struggle, it is like a person who suffers a grievous shock or has undergone an operation. Society in such times as ours is driven back to examine fundamentals and to discover how the alleged eternal verities and the

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revered institutions such as education are standing up to the wear and tear of time. Originating before the war is the problem created by the fundamental change which has come in American society. Since 1870 America has been changing from agriculture to industry. The rural population has fallen. "In 1890 there was one farm to every 13.7 persons; in 1942 one to each 22." This has brought a tremendous change in the experience of the school children. In a less mechanized, less urban society, youth had plenty of opportunity to "learn by doing" in the chores which naturally fell to the lot of the child as soon as he could walk. Children tended the babies, chopped the wood, ran errands, herded the cattle, and scared the crows. The old-fashioned large-scale family formed its own youth club with a full activity program. The modern apartment house has no equivalent for this so that youth can find an outlet for its energies. The happy release and utilization of these energies constitute a problem for our modern educators. Meanwhile the society for which the school must prepare the student has grown much more complex and extensive. In place of, and competing with, the family, the farm, the village, and the church, there are the radio, the movies, the comics, and the pulp magazines — influences which cannot be ignored by education. There has been a huge increase in the school population. While in the years 1870 to 1940 the total population increased only three times, the high school population increased ninety times and the college population thirty times. This is the general background for the current controversies. Education is examining critically its aims, methods, and resources both in" equipment and in per-

ΙΟ

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sonnel. There has been an avalanche of books and articles, some dull and some scintillating with wit, some in specialist journals and some in the popular magazines. Some of the excesses of progressive education — which itself has never been applied to any considerable degree — have been made the point of fierce attack by parents who complained that their children could not read, write, and reckon. The swing from elective courses to prescribed courses has been marked. Nearly every college has revised its methods and courses after much soul searching. For example, Ben Fine in Democratic Education (New York: Thomas Y . Crowell Company, 1945, p. 106) describes the drastic reorganization of the Liberal Arts college at the University of Virginia: The new curriculum would be more concerned than in the past with subject matters which give the student a knowledge of himself as an individual and of the kind of world in which he as an individual will live and to which he will be called upon to make adjustment. While such a curriculum will seek to instil mental discipline, it will do much more: "It will seek to train free men for the responsibilities of participation in a free society. There should be increased attention to the foundation and evolution of our own civilization and of its institutions, and of America's place in and relation to a shrinking world."

Out of this ferment will come changes in our education system of importance to labor and the nation. It is our duty to understand and to assist in this process of adaptation so that the changes which will be made will come closer to the economic realities of the twentieth century. A new philosophy of education is striving to be born — a planned community to replace the jerry-built dwellings produced by the haphazard efforts of the past.

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One factor in influencing the relation of colleges and universities to labor and to the type of education which would facilitate necessary social changes by consent, is the role of the foundations. Educational activity in the United States cannot be fully studied without evaluating the effects of the foundations thereon. Many educators and those wishing support for new projects are so anxious to secure grants for their work that they seldom stand back and take a long-time view of the influence of these foundations. In the olden days the dying feudal baron, conscious of his misdeeds, paid his premium for fire insurance by granting rich acres to the local monastery. In the days when it was possible in America to make an immense individual fortune by processes involving an exploitation which robbed hundreds of thousands of people of the chance of a proper education, men like Carnegie and Rockefeller took advantage of the situation, then in their later years made available through their benefactions a variety of educational opportunities and facilities. Some foundations are attracted to the bizarre and novel. Other foundations are set up in these later days of high taxation to give representatives of big business and inherited fortunes a chance to direct the spending of their own money at the expense of Uncle Sam, who otherwise would take it in taxation. In the main, foundations stick to the safe projects. They may and do develop sinecures. That does not mean, of course, that medical institutions and research projects of great value are not carried through more completely, and sometimes more quickly, than would have been the case had they been accepted by a government agency. After all, millionaires themselves die of cancer and would benefit from research which would cure it. In

LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION many cases the well-established and well-endowed universities enjoy more independence than the state universities and colleges. But colleges too often have to go cap-in-hand and exploit personal contacts with the uncrowned kings and agents of philanthropy. They have to write up their projects in detail and spend much time and effort which may all be fruitless if the digestion of the officer in charge of the grants happens to function badly at a given moment. There are, of course, some foundations which delouse effectively the millions accumulated by monopolies and dynastic fortunes, but if one could choose a way for the longtime support of education, it would be done by community intelligence rather than by the caprice of the big shots of big business who wish to perpetuate their names in a spectacular fashion, a process which may not in all cases coincide with the real educational activity of the college. Jacques Barzun, in his provocative Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Company and Atlantic Monthly Press, 1945), makes the following comment upon business grants to colleges: No person or institution can hope for more respect than it pays to itself, and hitherto academic behavior in front of the business world has been excessively worm-inspired. There have been deception, self-deception, and reciprocal injury. Under the pretext that gift horses should not be orally examined, colleges have let themselves be burdened with buildings they could not afford, research departments they could not staff, and grants for "studies" they could not carry out. At the same time they have lacked funds for an adequate teaching staff, for working equipment, and for student scholarships. They were not land poor, but plant poor and grant poor. In spite of this, ever since Andrew Carnegie supplied the country with libraries, the public has thought of millionaire munificence as endowing learning. This has hardly been true

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for t w e n t y years. There have been vast outlays f o r brick and mortar — f o r memorial halls which could be named after the donor — but these were already anachronisms. T h e universities h a d physically expanded up to and beyond their legitimate size; w h a t they n o w needed was the means to support living talent. T h e y still need i t ; but unfortunately f o r higher learning, the typical bequest is one of thirty thousand dollars f o r cancer research. I have no l o v e of cancer and no jealousy of medical research, but it is plain that this sort of gift does nothing f o r higher learning. I t springs f r o m a s y m p a t h y grounded in animal fear, leaving untouched the duty to train young minds while they are still free f r o m the deadly scorpion. T a k i n g at random a recent announcement of gifts to one institution and analyzing it, I find that of $69,900 the bulk was earmarked for medicine, chemistry, engineering, and allied sciences; a small fraction went to history, public law, business, and occupational t h e r a p y ; and an anonymous donor assigned ten thousand dollars to research in syphilis. If w e count the subjects, the ratio is t w o to one in f a v o r of serving animal needs — and the distribution of cash makes it more like one hundred and fifty to one.

If the foundations are not frankly criticized, there is also another influence which receives only sub rosa comment. T h e case for federal aid to secure equality in educational opportunity has been advocated effectively on many occasions. Congress has voted millions to much less worthy causes. Everybody knows that the effective block to federal aid is the resolve of the parochial schools and Clerical influences to prevent any further subsidies for public education which do not include financial support for sectarian religious schools. There are many weasel words used to cover up the opposition of the Clericals to the spread of education, but no investigator can avoid the conclusion that federal aid to education has been successfully prevented by their efforts. T h e y are, of course, fiercely opposed b y those who

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insist that church and state must be kept separate and that religious instruction should be done out of school hours. A process of erosion has been operated against this principle through the so-called "released time" under which students are freed from school in order to attend denominational schools. In many of our cities and particularly in Boston and in the State of Massachusetts the school cannot give instruction in sex hygiene. Even the alarming increase in delinquency, in juvenile crime (in some categories over 350 per cent increase since Pearl Harbor), and the rapid growth of sex offences have not broken down the senseless taboos. The differences between progressive education and old-fashioned rote learning (that procrustean bed of my youth if not yours); the problem of how far the school should be child-centered or community-centered; the low status and pay of teachers; the rivalry between research and teaching and between vocational and liberal courses; the not unmixed blessing of foundation support; the need for federal aid as the only way of giving equal opportunity in education, and the nature of the opposition, which has again defeated the current federal aid bills — these are important problems demanding further thought for solution. Beneath them is the basic problem of how education can prepare men and women for civic rights and duties in their own community and then in the world community. Our frame of reference needs revision. Can the school help us to meet the changed world? Perverted and misused in the past, education can be a cure for many social ills and labor can help to make it so. Labor's consistent support of education in the past and its role as the largest organized unit of parents

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gives it the right to speak in constructive criticism. The C.I.O. and the A.F. of L . have supported bills for federal aid because they know that there is only an inverse correlation between birthrate and income in various states; and that many states lack tax revenue adequate to provide modern education. "The Myth of Educational Opportunity" by Dr. John K . Norton {American Mercury, Jan., 1946) shows a striking correlation between the low expenditures on education and the high illiteracy rate in Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi. On December 13, 1945, the Hearst press reported "Death of U. S. Aid to 3 R's Hailed." The story told how the federal aid to education bills had been rejected by the Committee on Education by a ten to nine vote. Representative Ralph Gwinn (R., Ν . Υ . ) , according to the Hearst report, said that the action was a rebuke to those groups who "would set up in this country a counterpart of the educational propaganda organizations abroad." Fortunately the case is not closed. At this writing a bill, reported to be of satisfactory character, has been filed by influential members of the Senate. Every investigation has shown that the income of parents and not the intelligence or scholastic record of the student has been the determining factor in the enjoyment of facilities for secondary education. The National Resources Planning Board (1943) explained that nearly two million young people of high-school age were not in school because their labor or their wages were needed to supplement the family income, or because their parents could not afford to meet the expenses of their schooling. In an abstract of remarks on "Science and the National Welfare" to the American Academy of Arts and

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Sciences, January 9, 1946, Dr. James B. Conant said: Those who believe that the national welfare demands a provision for more extended information for more of our young citizens, i.e., higher education for more of those capable of taking it, generally agree that some sort of scholarship aid is necessary. Unless a student lives and boards at home, the cost of college education is too great for most family incomes. Funds available under college budgets for scholarship awards cannot meet the need. On account of the cost of a college education a w a y from home — and this is the case for all non-residents of a college town — it appears that at least as many boys capable of becoming informed scientists do not now go to college as do go. The students lost to higher education for various reasons include those lost to higher scientific education, and begin at the secondary school level as shown by statistics presented in the appendix of the Bush report, "Science the Endless Frontier," as follows. Starting with 1000 pupils in the 5th grade Elementary school Fifth grade 1 9 3 0 - 3 1 Sixth grade Seventh grade Eighth grade

1000 943 872 824

High School First year Second year Third year Fourth year Graduated 1938

770 652 529 463 417

College First year Graduated 1942

146 72

Even in pre-war years, of these 72 college graduates only a few went on f o r Masters' degrees and even smaller numbers received doctorates. This loss from high school and failure to go on to college arises, among other reasons, from lack of provision f o r assisting

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needy students in high school w h o t a k e jobs to help support themselves or their families. T h e relation of parental income to full-time college attendance in a mid-west city is shown by the fact that f o r incomes of $5000 or more, 9 2 % were in full-time attendance, but f o r incomes between $1000 and $1499 only 25.5% attended full time.

Professor I. L. Kandel, in a lecture, "Education and Group Advantage" (reprinted in Civilization and Group Relationships, edited by R. M . Maclver, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945, pp. 87-88), thus sums up another investigation: Of these studies one of the most interesting is on " T h e Relation of Parental Income to College Opportunity" b y Miss Η . B . Goetsch (School Review, January, 1940, pp. 26 S . ) . Miss Goetsch made a study of 1,023 students w h o had graduated f r o m 12 Milwaukee high schools. Only 35 per cent were in part-time attendance; 19 per cent were enrolled in some posthigh-school institution; 42 per cent were not in any school at all. In other words, more than half of the students capable of profiting thereby were not in college. T h e most common reason for this w a s economic — either lack of finances or pressure to w o r k at home or add to the family income. There w a s obviously a close relation between attendance at college and parental income. T h e median parental earnings of those w h o attended college full-time were $1,988.46; of those w h o attended some other institution full-time the parental earnings were $1,894.58; where the earnings were $1,300, attendance at school was parttime; and where they were $1,285.21, there was no chance that school w o u l d be attended at all. Educational advantages were the greatest where parental earnings were highest and vice versa. T h e ratio of y o u t h in college decreased as parental incomes decreased; where parental incomes were $5,000 or over, only б per cent of the y o u t h were not in college, while 80 per cent were not in college where parental incomes were $500 or less. E v e n the choice of professional courses is determined b y parental incomes and, apparently, in the following order from the highest to the lowest: ( 1 ) l a w ; (2) medicine and dentistry; (3) liberal arts; (4) journalism; (5) engineering; (6) educa-

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tion; (7) commerce; (8) nursing; and (g) industrial trades. So too the length of the course taken is determined by parental income, ranging from less than four years for median parental incomes of $1,416.67 to more than four years for median incomes of $2,iso. Finally, a relation was found between parental income and the distance of the college attended.

Dr. Kandel's warning against the gradual stratification of American youth should be noted by both labor and education. Further proof of a strengthening stratification is shown by the table given in Who Shall be Educated? (p. 153). An increasing ratio of business leaders are the sons of major executives. "Pick your Papa properly" seems to be the slogan for success in life, all our frontier traditions to the contrary notwithstanding. The adequate provision of scholarships relative to family income and student potentiality appears as the indispensable antidote. Within the years 1945 and 1946, government aid to war veterans has increased the college enrollments and the demands of servicemen will be an important influence. As Ben Fine in Democratic Education (p. 168) puts it: The returning veterans, the men who have traveled and flown over the seven seas, want something more tangible than the classics or the great books of Western civilization. They want an education that will teach them to be better citizens, to provide for their families, to live at peace with their neighbors, to play and relax, to listen to good music, to discuss politics intelligently, to enjoy a good book — to appreciate the better things of life. They are not particularly interested, at this point, in the philosophy of Spinoza or the logic of Aristotle. Returning war veterans express an eagerness to go to college. They are far more serious than they were when they left, lightheartedly, three, four or five years back. They are tougher mentally as well as physically. They have seen a great deal, they have felt even more. They have had time to think, and they have come to the conclusion that an education is good for

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them. And they have also decided that their education will be the kind that will help them in their everyday living.

Allied to the need for federal aid, is the need for adequate wages for teachers. The most emphatic proof of the lowly status of the educator is the miserable wage paid to the majority of our teachers. Only the born teacher with ideals about his profession stayed teaching during wartime when high-school pupils earned in many instances twice as much as their teachers. Underpaid and intimidated teachers cannot make education a "great instrument of American democracy," which will "shape the future and secure the foundations of our free society." They cannot kindle the flame of knowledge because their own ill-nurtured candle dimly splutters near extinction. The trade unions have consistently cooperated with vocational training efforts by way of apprenticeship schemes. But a better relation between the demand and the supply of skilled labor would help. Too little is known by the general public about the many plans directly operated by the unions to improve the technical skills of their members. The textbook, "Labor in America," gives details of the classes and schools run by the barbers, the printing pressmen, the lithographers, the electricians, and other organized workers. The union journals feature technical articles. In most cities, the unions join with the organized employers and the education authorities to maintain vocational day and evening schools. For example, in New York City the needle trades, printing, and catering trades have well-equipped special schools operated under such cooperative auspices. If the suspicion of organized labor — completely justified in the past — that employers would like to

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use inexperienced youthful labor to undercut trade union standards of pay and hours, could be removed then there could be many more "corridor schools" and a much closer integration of theoretical studies with practical work experience. Education still suffers from an academic hangover from the time when schools were started to train white collar workers, teachers, and preachers. Parents still have a snobbish desire to see their children employed in professional and clerical occupations and not in manual labor. Normally, a child goes to the vocational school if he is not bright enough to take the academic high-school work. Yet by a fair measure, the man who makes a pair of candle-sticks is more important than the person who can write down their price in an account book, whether it is done in oldfashioned longhand or on a modern typewriter. In any impartial view, the garbage collector is as necessary to society as the doctor, with the qualification that the doctor owes much more to society for the long years of his training in school, college and hospital. Some jobs need more skill and training than others but all should be regarded as important if they are necessary. Equality of educational opportunity does not mean that every person will get an equal education. Obviously, there are differences in the capacities of human beings and also differences in the demands made by the jobs necessary to civilization. The Supreme Court justice could, with a few hours of training, learn to sweep the floor. But the janitor could not occupy the judicial bench with such comparative ease. However, that does not mean that the janitor should suffer from a social stigma and be at the mercy of unemployment and old age. He too, like the

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Supreme Court justice, should have security and a pension for service honorably performed. We have to make over our social attitudes and forget the old snobbish distinctions between labor of mind and of muscle. We have to learn how to measure the capacities of men and women in relation to given skills required. If the criterion of useful service for the community and not the size of one's income were to be adopted, we should not have the danger of class stratification in education or in the community. Another problem which faces even vocational training is the current gap between life and livelihood. What vocational teacher can assure his students that they will be employed in industry and that the skills which they are now painfully acquiring will produce recompense by way of wage and salary in later life? Half the jobs in modern industry require no previous training. Indeed, the present increase in the productivity of industry — and this even before atomic energy is applied to industrial uses — suggests that the only thing about which we can be certain is that education should prepare men and women for a wise creative use of increasing leisure. It is well to remember that in the prewar depression years the schools educated youths but could not find them jobs. There were about four million young men and women, fifteen to twenty-four years of age, unemployed. Education dressed them up but they had nowhere to go. However, with appropriate supervision and safeguards against the exploitation of juvenile labor, the trade unions should be prepared to cooperate with those colleges and schools which try to give students more than book learning, for which, indeed, some of

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them have small capacity. Experience in the C.C.C. and the N.Y.A., at Antioch College and Bennington College, has shown the possibilities of programs of combined work and study. Certainly youngsters who go into a modern workshop will understand much better the history of the early inventions — the screw, the wheel, etc. They will be able to appreciate the great changes which followed the conversion of energy into fire and heat, the reconversion of heat into energy by way of the steam engine, and the utilization of electricity, and all that this meant in changing modern industry. Currently, plans for training in administrative skills for trade unions themselves are providing opportunities for cooperation between higher education and labor. Elsewhere the writer has examined the experiments at Harvard, Cornell, and Michigan Universities and made evaluations and suggestions in relating these to the unions' efforts in self-education. I refer to "Education Discovers Organized Labor" (Current History, October 1944); "Cap and Gown Meets Overalls" {Guidance, Practical Arts and Vocational Education, January, 1945); "Higher Education for Labor Leadership" (American Federationist, January, 1945). Earlier general surveys are Workers' Education in the United States (Harper, 1941) and Workers' Education Today (League for Industrial Democracy, 1941). At its best, workers' education serves simultaneously as a discipline, a directive, and a dynamic to labor organizations. It emphasizes the study of group problems to the end of group action for their solution. It ranges from training in immediate skills for trade union administration to a formulation of ultimate aims arising from a study of the social sciences, the history,

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and the philosophy of American labor. The methods used include all the techniques known to education — lectures, discussion, radio, victrola records, movies, and dramatic skits (this last in one instance blossomed into "Pins and Needles," the musical revue wonder-child of Broadway and unfortunately the only successful example as yet of trade union activity in this field). Closely connected with study classes are recreational and cultural activities and more recently, health and safety education with facilities for medical care. The C.I.O. Department of Education and Research undertakes extensive activity in public relations among religious, educational, and civic groups in addition to education for its own membership. Its activity heads up politically into the Political Action Committee. The Workers Education Bureau, mainly supported by the American Federation of Labor, runs annual institutes on many college campuses. American Labor Education Service coordinates the summer schools, runs conferences, and publishes lesson outlines. Over five hundred labor papers, and other publications ranging from first-readers, colored comics, striking posters, and lively leaflets to ponderous tomes of union history and research use the printed word as an agency for education and propaganda. Some forty unions have their own research departments. A few have set up industrial engineering departments. Labor and Nation, most recent addition to the labor press, specifically addresses itself to the 100,000 national, regional, and local officers and technicians comprising the staffs of labor unions, which now have a total membership of nearly 14,000,000. Ten C.I.O. unions have educational departments

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and a smaller number in the A.F. of L., including the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which pioneered in this field in 1917. Most of the unions' education departments are shy on statistics because most of their activities do not easily lend themselves to tabular summation. In the war years there was a drop from the peak period, when the W.P.A. gave assistance. Fifteen states, reporting in 1941, listed about 2,000 teachers and group leaders maintained by W.P.A. Some 75,000 students had been reached each year and probably the total of workers' education participants went beyond 100,000. In the I.L.G.W.U., a drop was registered from the 1937-38 total of 22,050 students (in 309 study classes, 70 music, 37 dramatics, 84 gym and athletics, 37 dancing) to 11,878 students in 1943-44 (in 265 study classes, 45 music, 10 dramatic, 146 athletics and gym, 23 dancing). Wartime production brought its own urgencies. As part of the activities of the War Manpower Commission's Bureau of Training, with twenty-three offices in strategic towns, foremen and union stewards were given short courses in grievance procedures under collective bargaining through the Training-WithinIndustry Program. At the beginning of 1945, it was officially claimed that 10,000 stewards in the steel and rubber unions had been trained, 2,500 in central Michigan alone. This training, however, was largely an appendage of the joint labor-management committees. Normally the unions conduct their own steward training programs, using manuals especially adapted to the needs of each union. The United States Bureau of Labor Standards, which assisted in these activities, listed one hundred and sixty such manuals issued by forty unions. While union stewards were trained for

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in-plant difficulties, union counsellors were trained to tackle out-plant grievances and became referral agents in cooperation with social work agencies. In several instances professional social workers were employed by the unions. Some unions run new-members courses to help the recruits understand their rights and duties. Since 1937 all new candidates for paid office in the I.L.G.W.U. have had to meet an educational requirement and in New York 372 members have completed such officers' qualification courses. As part of this trend toward training for union service, a large number of universities, including Harvard, Cornell, Michigan, and Chicago, have set up schools and courses in industrial relations. In the college year 1945-46, the Harvard Fellowships were opened to women as well as men and two of the four I.L.G.W.U. nominees were Bernice Taylor (Easton, Pa.) and a Negro underwear worker, Mabel Durham. Wisconsin University has maintained since 1921 its Summer School for Workers in Industry with increasing support from trade unions. A second current trend leads from formal classes to activity programs in cultural and recreational work; to a wider use of films (in which the United Automobile Workers, C.I.O., with 200 projectors available, is outstanding); and to a closer integration with public libraries, museums, and art centers. Many local unions have their own libraries and assist their members to purchase books. The Book Division of the I.L.G.W.U. has maintained such a service for twentyfive years. Some unions run their own book stores and the U.A.W. bookshop in Detroit reports gross sales of over $50,000 in its first year of operation. This same

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union pioneered a book club. Other recent details of union activity are given in "Wartime Developments in Workers Education," Monthly Labor Review, August, 1945· In evaluating workers' education as carried on by the unions, historians will recall that control of natural science, on which our modern industrial system is based, did not come from medieval monasteries. New colleges and educational efforts heralded and later encouraged the rise to power of the modern merchants and industrialists. Workers' education in its various phases likewise connotes the increasing power and responsibility of organized labor. Not until trade union membership had soared to over 14,000,000 in the favorable climate of the New Deal was there available a high school text such as Labor in America (Harper, 1944) to enable the student on the threshold of industry to learn something about the industrial relations he would find therein. By contrast, the trade unions have fought for improved educational facilities; and by attention to the composition of school boards, the trade unions should see that classes in civics should include references to union activity in putting democracy into overalls. The composition of the school boards particularly deserves more attention because the quality of higher education often depends upon who does the hiring. According to the latest estimates on the composition of school boards, given in the ΝΕΑ Journal, February, 1946, and based upon an investigation of 3,068 school boards, 35 per cent of school board members are proprietors and executives and 18.8 per cent professional workers. The median personal income of the board members ranges from an average of $7516 in large

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cities to $3235 in the small towns. In the rural districts 42 per cent of the members are farmers, 21 per cent are proprietors and executives and 8.8 per cent professional workers. More than 90 per cent of the non-city boards are chosen by popular election. The Harvard Committee, in its justly lauded investigation into education, wrote (p. 135): ". . . the schools will not fulfill their duty to society unless they help their students understand the nature of the problems and responsibilities of the society in which they must live and which they should help govern." To do this means, among other things, a knowledge of functional democracy to be seen evolving in the trade unions. Financial aid from the government for training in grievance procedure and for shop-steward duties, instituted by wartime labor-management cooperation, may well be carried over into peace time. While the land-grant colleges were set up under a law which also provided for education of mechanics, that section was completely neglected. It is only within recent months that the United States Department of Labor is even considering the possibility of setting up an extension division analogous to the Extension Division of the United States Department of Agriculture. A wise government, in these days when collective bargaining {pace Sewell Avery) has become the law of the land, would surely accept the responsibility of helping workers to exercise their industrial civic responsibilities with wisdom. In the more general field of adult education, labor is on sure ground in joining with the Harvard Committee and many others in trying to make education a never-ending process, with the public schools and li-

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braries converted into full-time civic centers in which social illiteracy about national, intercultural, and world affairs can be eliminated. Labor does not want training to make men mere tools which can talk. M a n y trade union leaders would share the aim expressed b y Mortimer J. Adler in his attempted rebuttal of Ben Fine's criticism of the Hutchins group {Saturday Review of Literature, December 29, 1 9 4 5 ) : Like the aristocrats, we make a sharp distinction between general, or liberal and specialized, or vocational, education. We think that any program which aims to fit men for particular economic vocations is the training of slaves, not the education of free men. We think that education which is liberal in the sense of being for freedom must be general in the sense that it prepares for the one vocation common to all men — the political vocation of citizenship. Beyond that, we think that liberal education aims at learning; not earning; and that, since learning is a lifetime's task, college education is truly liberal only if it prepares for adult education, in which ail adults must participate as long as they have enough life in them to be actively engaged in citizenship.

In ancient Athens the philosophers, whose names are still household words, studied and thought, thanks to the leisure provided by their chattel slaves. N o w education is not needed to delude slaves and outwit the lower classes. N o w free men in a democratic society, thanks to the machine and harnessed power, have opportunities to use education of, by, and for the people. T o this end, it is essential that organized labor and the teachers of social studies, in the high schools especially, get to know each other better than they have in the past. Such mutual acquaintance can best be built upon a knowledge of the cooperation given b y organized labor to the public school system in the past and

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upon a recognition of the great assistance which both groups can give each other in the future. Every history of education asserts that in the early days, when public education was in its promotional stage, Horace Mann and other pioneers received more help from the labor groups than from any other section of the community. According to Helen L. Sumner, The first awakening of American wage-earners to their interests as a class did not occur until the late twenties [1820] . . . . The cause of the awakening was economic and political inequality between citizens of different classes, not primarily between employers and wage-earners, but between "producers" and "consumers." Around two chief grievances, both closely related to their status as citizens of a democracy, the working men of this period rallied. First was the demand for leisure, which furnished the keynote of economic movement. . . . Second was the demand for public education, which furnished the keynote of the political movement. Charity schools were held to be incompatible with citizenship, for they degraded the children of the workingmen and failed to furnish them with the requisite training and information for the consideration of public questions, thereby dooming them to become the dupes of political demagogues. . . . In 1829, public education took its place distinctly and definitely at the head of the list of measures urged by the Working Men's party. . . . And the candidates for the State Legislature [Pennsylvania] nominated by the Working Men's party were pledged to favour "a general system of state education." (From History of Labour in the United States, by John R. Commons and others, Macmillan, 1918, I, 169-170, 224.)

And from the Working Men's Party in Philadelphia in 1829 right down to the most recent conventions of the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O. organized labor has never forgotten the importance of education. In 1944 the C.I.O. issued an attractive pamphlet, "Labor and Education," in which it reiterates the case for better schools and textbooks and adequate pay for teachers. It is well to remember that organized labor, now over 14,000,000

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strong, is one of the greatest forces fighting to get equality of educational opportunity. No group of educators should overlook this powerful ally. While organized labor has done well by the schools, the record of the service of the schools to labor does not show so bright a picture. There are big improvements to be noted in current trends but much remains to be done to give labor the recognition that it deserves in the social studies. The labor unions have been, in part, at fault, because they have not endeavored to provide the schools and the textbook writers with the wealth of attractive material lavishly supplied by the National Association of Manufacturers and similar groups. That propaganda such as that of the N.A.M. and general misinformation sometimes make the high school teacher an example of the blind leading the blind is seen by the following quotation from a letter recently received from a high school teacher of my acquaintance in Montana: We are all waiting impatiently for the solution of labor and other troubles. N o t many can comprehend w h y laborers, who have been getting such luxurious wages, should need a 3 0 % increase right now when we all know we will have to retrench or upset the whole apple cart. When a plain common garden variety of laborer can get w a y more than a high school and college graduate, then something is wrong. There is great need of an education program and a religious program for a group with so much power. Such power and no balance wheel of reason or Christianity* is apt to lead us to serious trouble. I see the C.I.O. is going to enter into active politics. They made us join the National Teachers' Association (sic) this year. It doesn't look good to me.

The point was stressed in the opening paragraphs of this essay that any discussion of education must in-

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volve a recognition of its aim. Perhaps the most noncontroversial definition would be that education should prepare us for life which, while including a livelihood, is really something greater. The happiness of a nation does not depend exclusively upon the extent of its world trade or its production statistics. Surely we should agree with John Ruskin that "there is no wealth but life — life with all its opportunities for joy, admiration, and knowledge. That nation is the richest which has the greatest number of healthy, happy human beings." Education thus has a negative and a positive job to do. It should inform the individual about the dangerous poisons of racial hate and nationalist prejudice just as it warns youngsters about drinking from bottles labelled "Poison." As modern society becomes more complex, there is a greater danger that uninformed, uneducated individuals will throw dangerous boomerangs. The work of the high school and college teacher of social studies is indispensable in showing us how social life began and changed through the years. This in itself would equip the student with the dialectic view of society, as real as it is necessary in order to make imperative social changes by consent. But teachers cannot substitute knowledge about the past for action in the present. They must give each individual pupil information so that he can do something about the social problems of today. Such problems face him, not merely as an individual, but as a unit in an economic group and member of a community. The problem grows more difficult because today the world has become interdependent. During the war years we talked too glibly about global war without realizing what that meant in expanding our

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mental horizons. Technical developments in transport and communication — the tempo of whose application was so greatly intensified by the needs of war time — have hardly penetrated our minds. We have not adjusted our ways of thinking and our ways of life to face these changes with safety and satisfaction. We cling to national sovereignty when international cooperation to safeguard civilization from suicide by the atomic bomb becomes indispensable. We should not be too critical, for teachers of social studies have been handicapped in teaching all they knew. Any realistic approach to society always stirs up controversy and the teachers' search for truth is often vigorously resented by people who do not appreciate adverse publicity for the particular vested interest which they cherish. How can the school create the necessary social competency and give to the citizen of the future a sense of responsibility in our complex modern age? How can the forces of organized labor assist in that process? What I have to say must perforce be general and you, as the experts and technicians, will have the job of translating these suggestions to suit the relative ages, abilities, skills, and teaching situations which the teachers in this audience face in their daily work. If you will pardon a personal note, may I say that it is somewhat presumptuous for me to give this lecture on education, because my own marriage to learning was not blessed by the priests of orthodox education. M y public school education ended at 13 years of age and I have since learned mostly by self-study and trying to teach and explain ideas to other workers. However, to return to more general and important matters, there can be little doubt that human beings

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are not born with that respect for the rights of others which is the kernel of the democratic ideal. The school and all of us in the past took democratic rights for granted, as we take fresh air and health until we are menaced by their loss. Parrot-like repetition of the facts of social history or elephantine mental memories about dates are no substitute for an understanding of social change. Progress cannot be built upon a blind idolatry of the past. The real patriots in the United States will acknowledge with shame the existence of Jim Crow and other racial discriminations. They will not endeavor to cover up that one-third of a nation which does not have a chance for a decent education. Then too, the democratic ideal does not repose on velvet in a glass case. It has to be exposed to the hurlyburly of everyday life. It has to be translated into the problems of group living. All this will compel the intelligent teacher to study the ways of democracy as they influence not only the individual but trade unions, cooperatives, chambers of commerce, manufacturers' associations, and other functioning groups. At various levels, the textbooks of history are doing a much better job than hitherto in recognizing the existence of the labor unions. Among recent textbooks, for example, is The American Way of Life by Faulkner, Kepner, and Pratt (Harper, 1941), which gives good and attractive illustrations of union activity. The textbook, America's Economic Growth by F. A. Shannon (Macmillan), is also at pains to describe the activity of the labor unions. Those interested will also find some good material in American Democracy — Today and Tomorrow by O. and R. Goslin. There is the fourth-year high school text, Labor in America, already mentioned. The National

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Education Association investigation and report, Learning the Ways of Democracy, is also helpful and suggestive in this field. This book, as most of you will know, was published in 1940 by the Educational Policies Commission of the N.E.A. and the American Association of School Administrators. After describing some hopeful experiments, the N.E.A. investigators reported that apart from rare examples, economic instruction tends often to deal only with remote institutions and affairs. Writing later in School Life, December, 1941, Commissioner John W. Studebaker asserted: "Of the 7^2 million youth enrolled in our high schools only about 5 per cent receive any systematic instruction in economics. . . . The schools and colleges must do a much better job of teaching economics." The N.E.A. investigators also noted that modern problems are "usually discussed and studied in isolation" and made the general comment: Courses in economics are taught more and more commonly in the American secondary schools, b u t they are still, for the most part, elective. E v e n in most of the schools, only a relatively small number of students enroll in economics classes. A s long as economics and modern problems remain elective, it will unfortunately be possible for the m a j o r i t y of students to graduate f r o m high school w i t h o u t a n y systematic instruction in the economic foundations of American life. Study of the economic aspects of our civilization should be required no less than study of the political and cultural.

The production of new textbooks was slowed down by the war but wartime living strengthened the recognition for more emphasis upon economics. Most of us in the labor movement feel that the teacher simply cannot give a fair and adequate picture of social life in the United States if he does not show the great contribution made by labor to community welfare. Labor

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urges better teaching about how men and women have solved their bread-and-butter problems in the past, and an examination of how social life can be improved in the present and future. Labor's role as a social welfare agency is relatively unknown, although recognition, in view of the great services of the unions, has now come from the Red Cross, social work agencies, and community chests. Industry and Society (McGraw Hill) gives some details of this record. Because labor failed in the past to secure from the public school system the information and help desired, it has in some instances set up its own educational activities, mentioned earlier. Those active in the field of workers' education will testify that part of their job is to find an antidote for what has passed as education in many of our school systems. As children, we are given a cock-eyed view of history. The warrior who burned the wheat fields is given greater prominence than the reaper who labored therein and the baker who baked the bread. The captain who destroys a city is hymned, but the stonemason who built the city is one of the forgotten men. Our children are not taught the debt they owe to the unknown heroes who invented the first wheel and the needle and discovered fire. Few stories of the atomic bomb production note the cooperation of the unions which recruited the workers to face hazards to life and limb. The imposing rounded periods of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution are rightly known to students, but even in Massachusetts the school children have been told little about Daniel Shays and his fellow-rebels who had been cheated out of the lands for which they had fought against the British tyrants. You will recall Archibald MacLeish's lines in

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Land oj the Free (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1938): Dan Shays is a hole in the Pelham hills: His memory is a door stone in the pine trees: Boston taught him: Boston embalmer of history Blots his name out on the school book page.

The Negro boys and girls in school are seldom told about Nat Turner. Our children are told about Barbara Fritchie ("Shoot if you must this old gray head," etc.) but not about the dauntless courage of Mother Jones as she faced the thugs and the soldiers in the armed camps of the mining towns. Millions of children, sons and daughters of workers, do not even know her name, despite her heroism, which like that of other rebels in those company towns, was equal to that displayed at Valley Forge. It is chiefly in their own union classes that garment workers learn about the awful tragedy of the Triangle Fire in New York City (March 25, 1911), and the courage and daring of Clara Lemlich and her fellow waistmakers in 1909. Scant mention, if any, is given in the history books to trade unions and to men like Terence V. Powderly, Samuel Gompers, and Eugene V. Debs. It is easier to shout "Remember the Alamo" and "Remember Pearl Harbor" than it is to build the United Nations Organization. Only recently have attempts been made to rescue Tom Paine from the vile libels by which partisan religious sects befouled his record of service to the American Revolution. Very few history books quote the speeches of Abraham Lincoln on the right to strike, on the superior claims of the man above the dollar, or on Lincoln's dark foreboding of the coming of the trusts and the domination of big business.

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Peter Zenger's fight for free press also receives little attention in the schools. We have forgotten Horace Mann's hope, when he was fighting with labor's aid for free education, that thereby free men would be created. Professional patrioteering groups have tried to falsify history in order to fortify reaction; they have indulged in foolish idolatry of a drum-and-trumpet history. Each nation in this matter rushes to pull the mote out of its neighbor's eye and ignores the beam in its own. The teachers in the American Federation of Teachers and in other progressive groups have done their best to remedy past mistakes. We have to fill up the dangerous gaps left in our learning before we proceed to tell the truth about things as they are, things as they have been, and things as they should be, as we defend past advances and build for a better future here and abroad. Permit me to make some specific suggestions on what schools and textbooks should say about trade unionism. ( 1 ) They should give an explanation of the "closed shop" and the "union shop" to show that they are no more tyrannical or unfair than our system of public taxation under which the individual cannot escape his contribution to the public revenues from which he benefits, although in some instances he may not agree with the particular form of the expenditure. As a member of the minority, of course, he has the right to influence the city, state, and federal government to spend the money in a way which would meet with his full approval. Labor itself does not think that the "closed shop" is a blanket method suitable for immediate application to all industries. However, it does insist upon

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LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION the right of unionists to refuse to work with non-unionists in certain situations. With this explanation, the student should be given a sense of his responsibility in making internal democracy operate in any union he may join to prevent the possible degeneration of his elected officers into smallscale dictators. This would be better than any punitive regulations enforced by the courts. (2) The school and the textbook should be at pains to describe the actual functions of trade unions in improving wages, hours, working conditions and, additionally, the provision of sick and death benefits, unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, counselling, recreation, and education. They should give due and proper recognition to the apprenticeship system set up by the unions, their enforcement of standards of quality in workmanship, and their cooperation with enlightened employers to help stabilize the industry and to settle all disputed questions by effective mediation procedures. Comparison should be made to the work of professional groups, such as lawyers and doctors, in setting standards. Teachers in high schools and elsewhere should be able to see behind the headlines of newspapers which report strikes on page one and their settlement on page twenty, if at all. They should be able to understand the "lusty immaturity" of unions originating in the New Deal decade, which had to fight bitterly to keep alive in previous years and thus lack the experience of collective bargaining which many unions have built up through the years. All sections of the labor movement regret the jurisdictional disputes which, like other family quarrels, are often fought most bitterly. The labor problems

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class in school should, however, try to get statements from the groups involved. Education should provide the social intelligence and the larger, longtime view which should rule out such sectional disputes. (3) Textbooks should also make clear the record, already mentioned here, about the service given by labor in promoting and maintaining public education right from the time of its inception in the United States. They should also let the facts of experience speak concerning the results of technological unemployment upon the workers' standard of life and also the effects of the centralization of power in the hands of the banks and the big corporations, with the resulting dangers of monopoly prices as well as unemployment. (4) The textbooks and the school should also examine carefully the role played by the middleman and the speculator, who often escape the censure which falls on high wages as an alleged cause of high prices. The fallacy of the vicious circle in which wage increases are alleged to be the cause of price increases should be carefully examined in the light of the relative movements of wages and prices. The United Automobile Workers Union should be given credit for its attempt to make public the real cost and profits of General Motors production, and for its refusal to enter into a huddle to gouge the consumer. (5) The whole position of labor in society and the importance of its role should be treated with emphasis to help overcome the previous overemphasis upon bookish subjects and academic requirements. The aim would be to show the dignity, honor, and importance of both mental and manual labor. (6) The workers, as the largest group in society,

40 LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION constitute the greatest block of consumers. Hence, work in consumer education and consumer cooperatives would be helpful to the trade unions. They would welcome a greater growth in consumer awareness and a healthy skepticism about this cosmetic or that laxative as a source of irresistible "oomph" and professional or personal success. The school should be at pains to explain the need for, and the nature of, government checks on the qualities claimed for given commodities and also to explain the work of the Better Business Bureau. And let it not be forgotten that such teaching for consumers will be attacked by those vested interests which exploit the gullibility and artificial fears of the ignorant who are at the mercy of such advertisers. In civics courses, likewise, the good teacher will arouse antagonism when he diminishes the supply of uninformed voters who blindly follow the party leader and the precinct captain, or when he lessens in any way the patience of the poor in the face of potential plenty. It is often the fear of such teaching which motivates, under appropriate camouflage, attempts to reduce school budgets. The old Tory suspicions will not down. (7) In any examination of wages in the economics class, annual and life incomes should be stated, not merely hourly rates of pay received by individual workers. This should, of course, be supplemented by a description of the actual conditions under which the high sounding hourly wage is secured. The absence of social security as a cause of union restrictive rules and "feather-bedding" should be examined. Why should the musicians play their own funeral march by making recordings to be used as canned music in their stead? You do not expect the ice-man, argues Mr.

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Petrillo, to make refrigerators. Plans for a dismissal wage, for training in new skills, for adequate unemployment compensation, and for guarantees of full employment are the antidotes for the fear which produces anti-social restrictions and union opposition to new tools and methods. Opposition to new methods such as the paint-spraying machine, the electric coal-cutter, and the like, is sometimes motivated b y a praiseworthy objection to endangering the life of the workers. It is not comparable to the action of the company which buys a patent to suppress it because its use would supersede existing patents. T h e union leaders are far in advance of the Luddites and their machine-wrecking crews who in Britain forcibly prevented the use of the new machines in the textile facories. (See Ernst Toller's play, The Machine Wreckers, which includes Lord Byron's defense of those desperate displaced hand workers.) T h e majority of the unions, and outstandingly, the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, cooperate with the employers to apply new processes. T h e Printing Pressmen have a special school to train their members to operate new machines. T h e International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union has a staff of five industrial engineers to help employers solve production difficulties. Teachers should currently help their students to see the real factors behind the industrial unrest and strikes of 1946, namely, the strain of over-work and the accumulated grievances unexpressed, for patriotic reasons, in wartime; the disappointment of the unions because Congress failed to act in fixing a higher minimum wage and securing full employment; and the indignation against the greatly increased cost of living

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and huge wartime profits. The wartime record of the unions in practically eliminating strikes should be recalled to the student's memory, particularly when in these post-war years so much attention is given to the attempt on the part of the workers to make good for the time when their wages were frozen, and their desire to use their industrial bargaining position to help create the purchasing power without which industry cannot expand. (8) There should be classes in labor problems in all normal schools and teacher training courses and in the educational departments of all our universities, so that future teachers and writers of textbooks would be able to explain the law of the land concerning collective bargaining. The possibility of applying democratic rights and principles to the workshop should be explored in these courses. If representatives of industry are invited to address school assemblies, then labor people should also be brought in. The composition of local boards of education, as suggested earlier, should be improved by securing representation from all sections of the community. In looking at the future of labor-capital relations in the United States, it can be noted that there are three ways by which industry can be carried on, namely, paternalism, dictatorship, or industrial democracy. The last of these involves a recognition that collective bargaining is here to stay; that unions give to groups of otherwise weak individual workers an equality in bargaining strength which is necessary in industry. As we have seen, institutions of higher learning are coming to recognize that they should help the unions to train their own administrators. May I quote Morris L. Cooke on this point?

LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION On the assumption, then, that the unions are to be accepted as never before as part and parcel of our body politic, the theory of unionism — its promise as well as its shortcomings — should be taught in our schools so that the public m a y be led to correct appraisals. Of even greater importance, perhaps, in educating the public would be the adoption by press, radio, and m o tion pictures of more entertaining and realistic news about the labor world. Further, some arrangement can profitably be made f o r the admission of labor leaders to specially designed "shorthorn" courses in our higher institutions of learning — somewhat comparable to those given farmers and farmers' wives at practically all State universities. ( F r o m After the War, v o l . II, no. 3, p. S ; Institute on P o s t - W a r Reconstruction, N e w Y o r k University, August 1944.)

We have made some progress since President Charles William Eliot of Harvard made a public glorification of the strike-breaking scab and his defiance of the union. The comment of Selig Perlman and Philip T a f t in History of Labor in the United States, 18961932, vol. IV (Macmillan, 1935), is worth quotation upon the 41st anniversary of the Harvard President's pronouncement: T h e attack upon unionism and the union shop was echoed b y educators and preachers, m a n y of w h o m were moved to attack the organized workers by the employers' skillful appeal to patriotism and American ideals. A m o n g the more important idealistic opponents of labor was Charles W . Eliot, President of H a r v a r d University. He aligned his great prestige amongst the middleclass and professional groups on the employers' side of the argument, and glorified the strikebreaker as an "American hero." In an article, ["Employers' Policies in the Industrial Strife,"] in Harper's Magazine in March, 1905, he pleaded that employers should allow "no sacrifice of the independent American worker to the labor union." T h e independent American worker w a s none other than the non-union worker w h o remained on the j o b during a strike. Eliot insisted that "nothing is more essential to the preservation of individual liberty" than protecting this "independent w o r k e r . "

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However much American citizens differ from each other, they all agree that jobs for all are preferable to breadlines. They agree that unemployment means a tremendous loss to the community. Our veterans cannot eat medals, and disemployed workers are not a stockpile. Displaced workers, discontented veterans, and unwanted graduates of our high schools and colleges, finding that the community has made no provision for them, may create out of their frustration a dangerous parallel to the Fascist forces which were defeated at great cost in blood, sweat, and tears. It should not happen again. Our community should endeavor to provide fifty to sixty million people with full-time employment at decent pay. The war demonstrated that in industry labor-management cooperation can accomplish production miracles. Some four thousand labor-management committees, covering about seven million workers, played a major part in this achievement. If we can continue this cooperation, whatever temporary difficulties may arise, there should be no real obstacle to harnessing our labor force and our tools and workshops to the job of meeting the needs of our people and providing adequate employment for our population. However, to do this we shall have to re-tool our minds as well as our workshops, and social studies teachers and educators generally will have a hand in that process. There is the problem of adjustment, change, and reconversion in our attitudes as well as in our wartime airplane plants and munitions factories. It is significant that a man with a distinguished reputation for teaching by documentary films, John Grierson, has expressed most clearly the new orienta-

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tion which education requires. He wrote in Film October, 1945:

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News,

In my view, the basic problem of education lies not so much in the acquisition of literacy or knowledge of skills, as in the pattern of civic appreciation, civic faith, and civic duty which goes with them. They mean nothing — literacy, knowledge or skill, the whole lot of them — if they do not make for order in the world, and today they quite obviously do not. Where I think we have failed is that we have not sufficiently realized the implications of the change which the technological revolution has brought upon us. The objective nature of that new society we understand well enough but not its subjective implications. We know that the old self-contained, self-subsistent and relatively static community is dead and done with, and no more real in our conceptual life than the tattered friezes of the Parthenon. We have obliterated the obstacles of time and space and have made the world's riches of matter and of mind potentially available to everyone. We have become specialists, in the safe knowledge that we have the benefit of the specialization of others in a new and more complex system of creation and enjoyment. They used to ask in the school books if seven men took twenty-one days to build a house, how long does it take twenty-one men. We have discovered that the answer is not seven, but probably one. We have learned that two and two makes five of the corporate and the cooperative. But, on the other hand, we have become more and more citizens of a community which we do not adequately see. The knob of a wireless set switches in the voices and opinions and aspirations of our fellow men all over the globe, but not without the thought and work of thousands of people like ourselves, which we have not yet the habit of realizing. Under our feet go wires and pipes leading to complicated supply systems we blindly take for granted. Behind each counter of our modern buying lies a world system of manufacture, choice and conveyance. A simple weather forecast is a daily drama of complicated observation over a large part of the earth's surface, without which men could not safely fly or put to sea. We do not see it. Messages that roll easily from the local press may have come at six hundred words a minute from Moscow or may have been relayed south from London to Africa and by complicated

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steps north again to overcome an atmospheric problem we know nothing about. I t is worth a nickel buy, like an ice cream cone or a packet of chewing gum. Training Citizens — I suggest, in fact, that the crisis in education today lies in the realm of the imaginative training for modern citizenship and not anywhere else. I think we owe ourselves, as H . G. Wells once before observed, a thorough spring-cleaning, not of the facts we teach, nor of the techniques with which we teach them, but of the images and patterns of belief in which these facts are framed. I am not going to suggest, however, which images and patterns should be retained and which discarded and what new images and patterns are vital to our future. T h a t would be a larger task than any of us could pretend. What are the images which we associate with our country; are they the static images of forests, or dynamic images of afforestation ? Are they the static images of flat or rolling landscape or the dynamic images of soil conservation and cooperative marketing? Do we really see beyond our personal circle to the circle of the community in such a manner that that community is the deeper reality? Must our stories and dramas inevitably follow the shape of personal fortunes, or are we learning to find new dramatic patterns in a life rooted in scientific discoveries and based on inter-dependence? Are we still concerned with the romantic horizons of the old-time pioneer, or are we beginning to find imaginative sustenance in the new horizons of the researcher and the organizer? Do we still see the world in a rectangle, up and down and left and right, or do we really, in our heart and mind, see over the world and think over the world and feel over the world in the circles of common interest and actual inter-dependence?

Many of the plans for the future insist that all our activity must be run on the principle of "free enterprise" without any definition of what that phrase really means. Surely we should closely examine "free enterprise" if that means camouflage for corporate monopolies and cartels. A mixed economy, in which public corporations, private business, and collective operation of public services would all play a part, and in which

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labor, capital and government cooperate, would in m y opinion be more desirable. T h e government will have to use creative powers as it did in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Missouri Valley Authority and other areas. The controls and regulations of wartime cannot be scrapped completely without considerable disruption. Discussion of such problems in public forums and in the public press is vitally necessary to secure their solution. T h e y also deserve treatment in our high schools and colleges. Teachers in the social studies have an important role to play in making an analysis of social institutions, not forgetting the trade unions. We need the school and college to help in the pioneer job of securing social planning plus the Bill of Rights. T h e y cannot, if they would, evade preparing citizens to face without fear a changing, challenging world. Frederick J. Turner of "frontier" fame suggested that education should stress the "ideal of service to democracy rather than of individual advancement alone." Undoubtedly the schools will have to consciously develop new incentives for industrial, technical, and professional workers. In mine disasters and floods, in times of national defense, and in many voluntary activities, men do not work for money alone. There can be a moral equivalent for monetary gain. Education can be made to serve the interests of the community. Scholarship must aid the common people. In conclusion, may I remind you that Carl Sandburg in The People, Yes ( N e w Y o r k : Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1936), has suggested the ideal end-product of the educator: T h e free man willing to p a y and struggle and die f o r the freedom f o r himself and others

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LABOR LOOKS AT EDUCATION Knowing how far to subject himself to discipline and obedience for the sake of an ordered society free from tyrants, exploiters and legalized frauds — This free man is a rare bird and when you meet him take a good look at him and try to figure him out because Some day when the United States of the Earth gets going and runs smooth and pretty there will be more of him than we have now.

Education should be engaged in increasing that supply of such free men; at the moment the demand for them is urgent.

A N O T E ON R E C E N T B O O K S

The following books are valuable in explaining the various conflicts, points of view, etc., which have become articulate during recent months. The list is only a chance sampling of the outpouring of books which indicates recent tensions. The reader might well see the findings of the American Youth Commission and of the Educational Policies Commission and other studies. For Us the Living: An Approach to Civic Education, by John J. Mahoney (Harper, $3.00). The case for improved civic education in the high schools. Full of good suggestions to that end. Marred, in my opinion, only by its support for "released time" to the denominational sects and its advocacy of religious teaching in the schools. Democratic Education: A Report on the Colleges, by Benjamin Fine (Crowell, $2.50). Here the education editor of the New York Times surveys the struggle between what he calls the aristocratic trend and the democratic trend in education. He reviews the past development of the colleges of the United States and shows the various changes through which they have passed. Fine has been at pains to find out what veterans think they want and his book advocates college education for all to meet their needs both for a vocational and liberal education. The Chicago-St. John's proposals for education through reading the classic books are severely handled. One of the best evaluations of Mr. Fine's book appeared in the New Republic, Jan. 28, 1946, in a review by Willard Thorp:

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T h e present movement to require that a student should k n o w at least something about the main divisions of knowledge and the various modes of arriving at truth is an effort to correct the earlier corrective administered to the free-elective system. . . . M r . Fine seems to regard this college-to-be-desired not as an institution of higher learning at all but as a kind of reward or panacea f o r young men and w o m e n w h o have been academically underprivileged. . . . If a segment of American y o u t h is resentful because it is deprived of the glamor of college life, the best solution is not to give glamor to all, but to deglamorize the college. I wish M r . Fine were more concerned about the bright boys and girls — and w e k n o w h o w m a n y thousands of them there are — w h o do not have the wherewithal to get to Cornell or even to Alaska State Teachers. I t does not seem to me so criminally negligent as it does to him that "colleges and universities still place a high premium on the 'brilliant' student."

General Education in a Free Society (Harvard University Press, $2.00). This is the much discussed report made by the Harvard Committee in which they not only make an analysis of the Harvard curriculum but have much of interest and challenge to say about the role of education as an agency for the preservation and extension of our free society. American Education Under Fire, by V. T. Thayer (Harper, $2.50). Here the outstanding educator of the Ethical Culture Movement asks for education with a purpose and replies effectively to the many criticisms currently expressed against progressive education. Teacher in America, by Jacques Barzun (Little, Brown, $3.00). Entertaining criticism of what passes in some quarters for progressive education combined with a championship of scholarship and liberal education as distinct from vocational education. Enlivened by many felicitous wisecracks on