Industrial and vocational education, universal and self sustaining (Pagan versus Christian civilizations)

Front matter

Class Book.

GopiyriglitN

„ IHI?

Introduction to Second Edition

I HAVE been asked to write an introduction to this reprint of Mr. Comings' little book on Industrial Education. I do so very willingly. In the first place, I had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Comings personally, and the discrimination to esteem him very highly. Through a certain community in our educational ideas Mr. Comings was moved to write to me and later to invite me to visit him at Fairhope. This must have been at least eight years ago, that is to say, in 1907. In November of that year I found it possible to accept the invitation. I spent a happy week with Mr. and Mrs. Comings at The Gables. The visit was timely — a little later, and my host would not have been there to welcome me, and the opportunity of knowing him would have been lost. As it was, his health was already failing. But his mind was alert, and his interest in the possibility of self-supporting industrial schools and colleges was eager and intelligent. And the visit was timely for a second reason. During the week of my visit, Mrs. Johnson began the Organic School. She had only three pupils, if I remember rightly, but her equipment was superb — it consisted of all outdoors !

And in the second place, my willingness to write springs from the fact that with Mr. Comings' major thesis, that self-supporting institutions are vastly more desirable than endowed institutions, I so heartily agree. Given the choice, I should hardly have used his title, Pagan versus Christian Civilizations, for it seems to me unduly to indict the one, and quite as unduly to overpraise the other. I recall, as every student must, the cheer and courage so freely given by many a sturdy old pagan writer. But the contrast which he implies, as between industrial exploitation on the one hand, and a moral bread-labor on the other, seems to me very well taken. It marks a genuine and just distinction. It is the charge which socialism brings against every capitalistic order.

In turning to Mr. Comings' little book, the reader must value it for what it is, and must not allow himself to dwell upon what it is not. It is not, for example, systematic. It could not easily claim to be well arranged. It is all too full of repetitions. The literary style is not always good. But when all these defects have been freely admitted, it still remains true that the book has a vital message and that it is well worth reading.

In advocating Industrial Education, Mr. Comings kept always in mind the sane injunction that those who work should think and those who think should work. It is in this union of action and thought that moral health resides. He advocated such an education not alone on the utilitarian ground that every man should be prepared to earn his own living, but on the larger and more immediate ground that hand work is itself an integral part of any true education, and that only by making education self-supporting can it be made universal and can the burden of its support be lifted from the bent shoulders of those whose labors now make educational endowments profitable. Mr. Comings was not averse to endowments of a wholesome sort, but to be wholesome he felt that the endowment should be spent in creating a practical industrial plant through whose operation the students could earn their own living, rather than that the endowment should be hoarded in the shape of dividend-paying investments. And he urged this more immediate use of educational funds because, as I have said, he had the insight to see that young peo* pie are not truly educated unless they are taught to combine purposeful activity with constructive thought; and because he had the humanity to realize that it is a very unideal arrangement to educate one set of people while another exploited set unwillingly pays the bills. I am not sure that Mr. Comings would have called himself a socialist, or even, though he lived in Fairhope, a single-taxer, but I am very sure that his educational teaching is very sound socialism. This scheme of a self-supporting education has never been realized. It may be that in the secondary schools it would not be possible to realize it. The labor ot children under conditions at all ideal is not highly productive. But I am led to believe from my own lo INTRODUCTION

large experience with well-to-do children that the current plan of doing everything for them is out-and-out unkindness. There is a wholesome compromise between this extreme and the other extreme represented by child labor. It lies, I think, in having children do everything they possibly can for themselves, and then every day something of real service for the general good of the household. The economic gain would not be large, but the moral gain would be tremendous. Even the economic gain, however, would not be negligible. It would be the negative gain of keeping down expenses, of reducing the number of servants, of lessening destruction. All that is needed is to mix a little very elementary psychology with the plan of work. Children hate to do things alone, hate to be told to do things that they do not quite know how to do. But in the company of a merry, sympathetic grown-up, who both shares and explains the work, a child not wholly spoiled becomes an eager and efficient worker.

My own boys vary in age from ten to eighteen years. Many of them are wealthy, all have moderate means. I am preparing them for college. But if I were asked to name their greatest need, I would say unhesitatingly, an increased sense of service. Too much has been done for them, too little has been required. If I return to the planet earth in another incarnation I pray the gods to send me into a family

INTRODUCTION ii

of such modest means that I shall be required to do my full share ; or of such unusual wisdom that I shall be allowed to !

The work of children can hardly be utilized economically in the ordinary secondary school. It can helpfully be used in the negative way already indicated, to keep down expense, — used in tidying up the rooms, attending the fires, making minor repairs, binding old books, maintaining and beautifying the school grounds. If the teacher will lead, the children will follow. The better field for children's work is at home, or in those simple residence schools which are really schools, and not merely money-making hotels. It is even possible to have children work gainfully and to do it wholesomely, if the work is suited to their strength and is carried out in the love and shelter of a family group. Many of the operations of farm and garden are within a child's strength. The objection to child labor is not to child labor as such, — labor is wholesome for all of us,— but to the fact that the conditions are extremely bad and the hours cruelly long. But one must not imagine that the cotton mills are the only sinners against childhood. Here in the South practically every plantation is guilty of the same wrong. Boys much too young are doing heavy plowing and other farm work far too severe for their strength ; girls still mere children themselves are turned into household drudges. In dealing with the problem of child labor, we need heart and imagination, or the desired golden mean quite escapes us.

The secondary schools, by emphasizing the value of self-help might easily constitute a desirable stepping-stone between the entire irresponsibility of early childhood and the proper economic burden of youth. The secondary school might be made a fitting vestibule to the self-supporting industrial college. In advocating such institutions Mr. Comings has been an unconscious follower of Tolstoy. In our conversations I do not remember that we ever touched upon Tolstoy; and in the little book before me I do not find any use of Tolstoy's favorite phrase, bread-labor. But the spirit is the same. It is that all shall labor in order that all shall have the sanity which comes with wholesome labor, and none shall bear the deadening burden of overlabor. Mr. Comings' scheme of a self-supporting colleges is entirely feasible. It has already been realized in part. That it has not been more fully and more generally realized is largely the fault of the teachers themselves. As Emerson long ago said, men are as lazy as they dare to be. And teachers are quite as lazy as the rest. Mr. Shaw's biting epigram — Those who can, do ; those who can't, teach — might well be amended to read : — Those who will, do ; those who won't, teach. It is an unfortunate attitude for it poisons our social life at its very source, — in the schools. The propaganda for the social mind can never be very effective when preached to adults whose sedentary habits are already formed. It must be preached by deed as well as by word to the young and plastic, whose habits are now in the making. The moral effect, that is to say, the social effect of a self-supporting college would be extraordinary. We may well advocate it, with Mr. Comings, on the triple grounds that only by making our colleges self-supporting can we make college education universal ; that only by spending endowments on productive industrial plants can we support our colleges without exploiting the labor power of unwilling non-collegians, and finally that only by mixing prodtictHve labor with constructive thought can we truly educate this or any other generation of young people. These are telling arguments. But overshadowing them and including them, as the whole includes the parts, is the major argument of all that it is only in our schools and colleges that we can hope to inculcate the right attitude towards labor and thought, can show their unescapable interdependence and can so lend a hand in the inauguration of the Social State.

The events of the past year have depressed no class of persons so profoundly and bitterly as our teachers and preachers. That the most highly educated nation in Europe should plunge the world into a hideous, unnecessary war marked by unprecedented brutality and suffering, calls in question all the praise which we have been accustomed to lavish upon education. The very science which we have extolled has become the agent of a fiendish inhumanity. Personally I was gravely tempted to give over teaching. It did not seem worth while to educate boys if when you got through they were capable of such profound infidelity to the human spirit. But now I begin to feel the inevitable reaction. These tragic events do not discredit education. They only reaffirm with titanic emphasis what I have so long known and tried to proclaim, that education is only education, is only the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit, when it rests upon the essential foundations of Religion and Economics. These are the two things that count, — a man's attitude towards life, his religion, and the method by which he gains his daily bread, his economics. Industrial education is not a thing to take or leave. We have no choice. Nor can it be successfully handled without ample recognition of all its social and spiritual implications. Mere knowledge, a scientific mastery of matter and force, has been shown by this terrible war to be a thing of possible evil, the possible enemy of civilization. It becomes beneficent only when enlisted in the service of the human spirit. Without this devoir, this divine guidance, it may as easily lead to perdition as to Heaven.

The quality of a human life depends upon the spiritual ideals which it embodies. It is the same with education.

C. HANFORD HENDERSON.

Introduction to First Edition

I approve in the strongest terms your proposal to add to the American system of education a department of Industrial Schools and I would extend this department to the entire system.

The hand and brain should be educated in close companionship and no class of the students should be denied the inspiring luxury and benefit of appropriate tool using.

I have no doubt that a well conducted department of Industrial Education would prove more than self-supporting, but if otherwise, the needful expense should be cheerfully provided as demanded by every just consideration.

The marvelous success of the early public school system of the Eastern and Middle states was largely due to the fact that the learners' time waslairly well divided between the school, the shop, and the farm. The concurrent education of the hand does not hinder but greatly helps the culture of the brain.

I believe we are on the eve of great improvements in the whole system of education and that one of the foremost of these improvements will be free industrial education.

Sincerely yours,

CHAS. C. BONNEY.

i8 INTRODUCTION

We extract the above, a most fitting introduction, from the last kindly letter received a few months before the death of the great souled man, whom we dare presume to call one of the most pleasant and most profitable friends of a lifetime; a man who had attained to the highest aristocracy of character while retaining the most democratic sympathy and deepest interest in all that tended to uplift humanity. A former educator himself, he was keenly alive to plans for progress along all lines that shall prepare the people for a higher social order.

His last great work was originating, presiding over and being the moving spirit of the famed World's Congress of Religions in 1893 ^t the great Exposition in Chicago, a work that set a new pace for the growth of the ideals of human unity, and his elaborate history of that wonderful school of progress is a gospel of highest interest to the race.

S. H. C.

Foreword

"The man is tho't a knave or fool,

Or bigot, plotting crime.

Who for advancement of his race

Is wiser than his time."

The old idea of human progress was that only by slow and almost imperceptible steps can civilization evolve to its highest forms, or the inherent evils of human nature be overcome and a highly civilized society be developed from the rudeness of barbaric ages. Today science has so revolutionized most of our early concepts that we find many of the things we have known for a long time are not so.

The science of society and of human progress are now well enough known, though only very imperfectly as yet, to warrant us in the statement that the evolutionary progress in social growth can be, and has been, most tremendously accelerated by well-known means. It has been so visibly hastened through the influence of the common school system, aided by the mechanical and industrial training of frontier necessities, that greater progress was made in two generations after its adoption than for ten centuries before.

The times demanded the common school. Today the times demand another equally important step to accelerate the evolution of social progress, to pre-

20 FOREWORD

vent decadence and to keep up with mechanical progress. The people need a deeper, broader, more complete education, made universal. To decree today that every child shall go through college, an industrial college, and as much further as he may choose, is not as radical or difficult a step as was the decree of the common school by our fathers, and it will accelerate social advance and the development of character fully as much as that did and relatively will not cost as much effort.

From the data we now have, there can be no question but the dominant race could be so elevated, so freed from tendency to crime and degeneracy, so exalted morally, so increased in industrial efficiency, so raised in average intelligence, that within a very few generations all would be fully equal to the very best of the present citizens that could be selected while the geniuses and superiors would tower to unheard-of heights of moral and intellectual worth, a progress that is now only thought of as the result of centuries of slow, continuous growth.

The unfortunate colored race could under proper conditions, which have now been well tested and which have led a portion to such striking and marked advance in the forty years of freedom, be raised to a very fair degree of civilization, with their superiors attaining to high positions in social growth in a comparatively short period.

S. H. COMINGS.