Creative Impulse in Industry Part 1

Creative Impulse in Industry.

by Helen Marot.

PREFACE

The Bureau of Educational Experiments is a group of men, and women who are trying to face the modern problems of education in a scientific spirit. They are conducting and helping others to conduct experiments which hold promise of finding out more about children as well as how to set up school environments which shall provide for the children's growth. From these experiments they hope eventually may evolve a laboratory school.

Among their surveys the past year, one by Helen Marot has resulted in this timely and significant book. The experiment which is outlined at the close seems to the Bureau to be of real moment,--one of which both education and industry should take heed. They earnestly hope it may be tried immediately. In that event, the Bureau hopes to work with Miss Marot in bringing her experiment to completion.

THE BUREAU OF EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS, 16 West Eighth Street, New York City.

INTRODUCTION

A friend of mine in describing the Russian people as he observed them in their present revolution said it was possible for them to accept new ideas because they were uneducated; they did not, he said, labor under the difficulty common among educated people of having to get rid of old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mind to say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind is filled with ideas which are inst.i.tutional. The ideas which come out of formal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas which have been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are, as they have proved their worth in service. But as they represent authority, they pa.s.s into a people's mind with the full weight of an accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books are not responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every established inst.i.tution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rules of action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them.

The movement for industrial education in the United States is an ill.u.s.tration of this.

The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or colleges but from industry. The inst.i.tution of industry, rather than the inst.i.tution of education, dominates thought in industrial education courses. It is the inst.i.tution of industry as it has affected the life of every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thought in conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No established system of education or none proposed is more circ.u.mscribed by inst.i.tutionalized thought than the vocational and industrial school movement.

Educators have opposed the desire of business to attach the schools to the industrial enterprise. They have rightly opposed it because industry under the influence of business prost.i.tutes effort.

Nevertheless, hand in hand with industry, the schools must function; unattached to the human hive they are denied partic.i.p.ation in life.

Promoters of industrial education are hung up between this fact of prost.i.tuted industry and their desire to establish the children's connection with life. They have tried to meet opposing interests; they have not recognized all the facts because the facts were conflicting, and their minds as well as their interests, inst.i.tutionally speaking, were committed to both.

This was the impa.s.se we had apparently reached when the war occurred; it is where we still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war will end and we shall be called then to face a period of reconstruction. The reconstruction will center around industry. The efficiency with which a worker serves industry will be the test of his patriotic fervor, as his service in the army is made the test during this time of war. All inst.i.tutions will be examined and called upon to reorganize in such ways as will contribute to the enterprise of raising industrial processes to the standard of greatest efficiency.

The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was one of refined brutality. During the progress of the war, the significance of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms. It is the industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human development that has made her victories possible. It is that efficiency which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive for over three and a half years. Germany's military strategy is, in the main, her industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in turning technology to the account of an imperial purpose.

But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to emulate the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength.

While it is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace to the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the significance of the methods is but vaguely realized. It is probable that after the war it will be said that it was not the German methods which were objectionable, but that it was their use in an international policy. Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope we shall discover how intrinsically false those methods are; and how untrue to the growth process is the sort of efficiency Germany has developed. I hope also that we shall realise that a policy of paternalism has no place in the inst.i.tutional life of our own country.

Before the war these German methods bore the character of high success, and they had a large following in this country. There are indeed many thousands of men and women in the United States, who, while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war against Germany still support industrial and political policies and dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian. The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved people.

The German educational system as much if not more than its other imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an industrial inst.i.tution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his early years, like a predestined fact.

American business men before the war appreciated the educational system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of their own. But the situation was embarra.s.sing as these business men were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest.

Their embarra.s.sment, however, will be less acute under the conditions of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially, they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted as a national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology in both England and America.[A]

[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen.--Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.]

First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the sort of education that America wants.

America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the heritage which industrial evolution has given the world. But what shall we use this efficiency for? For the sake of the heritage? For the sake of business? For the sake of Empire?

Business knows very clearly why it wants it, but as a rule most of us are not clearly conscious that we need, for the sake of our expansive existence, to be industrially efficient. We are not even conscious that industry is the great field for adventure and growth, because we use that field not for the creative but for the exploitive purpose.

It is the present duty of American educators to realize these two points: that industry is the great field for adventure and growth; that as it is used now the opportunities for growth are inhibited in the only field where productive experience can be a common one.

Shortly it will be the mission, of educators to show that by opening up the field for creative purpose, fervor for industrial enterprise and good workmanship may be realized; that only as the content of industry in its administration as well as in the technique of its processes is opened up for experiment and first-hand experience, will a universal impulse for work be awakened. It is for educators, together with engineers and architects, to demonstrate to the world that while the idea of service to a political state may have the power to accomplish large results, all productive force is artificially sustained which is not dependent on men's desire to do creative work.

A state as we have seen, may invoke the idea of service. It might represent the productive interests of a community if those interests sprang from the expansive experience of a people in their creative adventures.

In the reconstructive period educators may have their opportunity to extend the concept that the creative process is the educative process, or as Professor Dewey states it, the educative process is the process of growth. The reconstruction period will be a time of formative thought; inst.i.tutions will be attacked and on the defensive; and out of the great need of the nations there may come change. Educators will find their opportunity as they discover conditions under which the great enterprise of industry may be educational and as they repudiate or oppose inst.i.tutions which exclude educational factors.

It is for educators to realize first of all that there can be no social progress while there is antagonism between growth in wealth (which is industry) and growth in individuals (which is education); that the fundamental antagonisms which are apparent in the current arrangement are not between industry and education but between education and business. They must know that as business regulates and controls industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other purposes than production of goods, it thwarts the development of individual lives and the evolution of society; that it values a worker not for his potential productivity but for his immediate contribution to the annual stock dividend; or if, as in Germany where his productive potentiality is valued in terms of longer time, it is for the imperial intention of the state and not for the growth of the individual or the progress of civilisation.

CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY

CHAPTER I

PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT

As a human experience, the act of creating, the process of fabricating wealth, has been at different times as worthy of celebration as the possession of it. Before business enterprise and machine production discredited handwork, art for art's sake, work for the love of work, were conceivable human emotions. But to-day, a Cezanne who paints pictures and leaves them in the field to perish is considered by the general run of people, in communities inured to modern industrial enterprise, as being not quite right in his head. Their estimate is of course more or less true. But such valuations are made without the help of creative inspiration, although the functioning of a product has its creative significance. The creative significance of a product in use, as well as an appreciation of the act of creating, would be evident if modern production of wealth, under the influence of business enterprise and machine technology, had not fairly well extinguished the appreciation and the joy of creative experience in countries where people have fallen under its influence so completely as in our own.

It is usual in economic considerations to credit the period of craftsmanship as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker.

The craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative influence. There was opportunity then as there is not now for the worker to gain the valuable experience of initiating an idea and carrying the production of an article to its completion for use and sale in the market; there was the opportunity then also as there is not now, for the worker to gain a high degree of technique and a valuation of his workmanship. It is characteristic of workmanship that its primary consideration is serviceability or utility. The creative impulse and the creative effort may or may not express workmanship or take it into account. Workmanship in its consideration of serviceability oftentimes arrives at beauty and cla.s.sic production, when creative impulse without the spirit of workmanship fails. The craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the high rank which is given it is due in part to its historical relation to the factory era which followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship represented expansive development in workmanship, it is not generally recognized that the Guild organization of the crafts developed modern business enterprise.[A] Business is concerned wholly with utility, and not like workmanship, with standards of production, except as those standards contain an increment of value in profits to the owners of wealth. It was during the Guild period that business came to value workmanship because it contained that increment. In spite of business interest, however, the standard of workmanship was set by skilled craftsmen, and their standards represented in a marked degree the market value of the goods produced by them.

[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 211-212.]

While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of the owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse found a stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and ability of the worker. It was not until machine standards superseded craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production, the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their educational value for the worker. The discredits were psychological and economic; they revolutionized the intellectual and moral concepts of men in relation to their work and the production of wealth.

As machine production superseded craftsmanship the basis of fixing the price of an article shifted from values fixed by the standards of workers to standards of machines, Professor Veblen says to standards of salesmen. It is along these lines that mechanical science applied to the production of wealth, has eliminated the personality of the workers. A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his personality has pa.s.sed into the machine which has met the requirements of ma.s.s production.

The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete coordination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power and devices. The most important auxiliary factor is human labor. A worker is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to the time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning; as he supplements without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks, whatever imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its needs. If it lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is without legs; and he pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs arms. All of these things are done by the factory worker at the pace set by the machine and under its direction and command. A worker's indulgence in his personal desires or impulses hinders the machine and lowers his attachment value.

This division of the workers into eyes, arms, fingers, legs, the plucking out of some one of his faculties and discarding the rest of the man as valueless, has seemed to be an organic requirement of machine evolution. So commendable the scheme has been to business enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed, and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is required. The organization of technological laboratories, like the organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they work out their a.s.signed tasks without specific knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked.

Small technological laboratories are still in existence where the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and a.s.sociated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the problem or secure a free and voluntary partic.i.p.ation in its solution. Those who are interested in its solution are inspired by its economic value for them. In all technological laboratories, either where the problem is broken up and its parts distributed among the employees of the laboratory, or where it is given to them as a whole for solution, it is given not as a sequence in the creative purpose of the individuals who are at work on it, nor is its final solution necessarily determined by its use and wont in a community. Problems brought to the laboratory are tainted with the motive of industry which is not creative, but exploitive.

The tenure of each man employed in production is finally determined not by any creative interest of his own or of his employer but by whether in the last a.n.a.lysis, he conforms better than another man to the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to be one and the same thing, his place in an industrial establishment has some bearing on his intrinsic worth. Under such circ.u.mstances his interest in the creative purpose of the establishment would have a foundation, and he himself could value better than he otherwise would his own part in the enterprise.

The economic organization of modern society though built on the common people's productive energy has discounted their _creative potentiality_. We hold to the theory that men are equal in their opportunity to capture and own wealth; that their ability in that respect is proof of their ability to create it; a proof of their inherent capacity. It is a proof, as a matter of fact, of their ability to compete in the general scheme of capture; their ability to exploit wealth successfully. While the prevailing economic _theory_ of production takes for granted men's creative _potentiality_ there is no provision in our industrial inst.i.tution for the common run of men to _function_ creatively. There is no attempt in the general scheme for trueing-up or estimating the creative ability of workers. In the market, where the value of goods is determined, a machine tender has a better chance than a craftsman. The popular belief is that the ability of workers has native limitations, that these limitations are absolute and that they are fixed at or before birth. This belief is a tenet among those who hold positions of industrial mastery. Managers of industry for instance who control a situation and create an environment, demand that those who serve them meet the requirements which they have fixed. They do not recognize that industrial ability depends largely on the opportunity which an individual has had to make adjustments to his surroundings and on his opportunity to master them through experiment. A factory employee is required to do a piece of work; and he does it, not because he is interested in the process or the object, but because his employer wants it done.

In Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic countries, where people have fallen most completely under the influence of machine production and business enterprise, and where they have lost by the way their conception of their creative potentiality, work is universally conceived as something which people endure for the sake of being "paid off." Being paid off, it seems abundantly clear, is the only reason a sane man can have for working. After he is paid off the a.s.sumption is his pleasure will begin. A popular idea of play is the absence of work, the consumption of wealth, being entertained. Being entertained indeed is as near as most adult men in these countries come to play. Their Sundays and holidays are depressing occasions, shadowed by a forlorn expectancy of something which never comes off.

The capacity of the French people for enjoying their holidays is much the same as their capacity for enjoying their work. This, no doubt, is a matter of native habituation. But however they came by it, it has had its part in determining the industrial conditions of France. The love of the people for making things has resisted in a remarkable way the domination of machine industry and modern factory organization.

The French work shop, averaging six persons, is as characteristic of France as the huge factory organization with the most modern mechanical equipment is characteristic of American industry. As the workers in these shops partic.i.p.ate more intimately in the fabrication of goods they come more nearly to a real partic.i.p.ation in productive enterprise. This close contact with the actual processes of production gives the workers a sense of power. A sense of their relation to the processes and their ability to control them engenders courage. Indeed it is the absence of fear, rather than the absence of work, that determines the capacity of men for play.

It was not accidental that the movement of the French workers for emanc.i.p.ation emphasized a desire for control of industry. The syndicalism of France has expressed the workers' interest in production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory takes for granted the readiness of workers to a.s.sume responsibility for production, while the trade unionists of England, Germany and the United States ask for a voice in determining not their productive but their financial relation to it.

It is the habit of these other peoples to credit the lack of interest in work to physical hardships which the wage system has imposed. But the wage system from the point of view of material welfare has borne no less heavily on the French than on other workers. It is also difficult to prove that the physical hardships of modern methods of production are greater than the hardships of earlier methods. The truth is that neither hardships nor exploitation of labor are new factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor in its social position further than it had been carried, but this is merely a by-product of the discredit they cast on the skill and intellectual power which is latent in the working cla.s.s. In this connection the significant truth for civilization is that while exploitation of labor and physical hardships induce the antagonism between labor and capital, modern factory organization destroys creative desire and individual initiative as it excludes the workers from partic.i.p.ation in creative experience.