has extended the
amount of leisure which is possible even while one is at work. It is a
commonplace that the mastery of skill in the form of established habits
frees the mind for a higher order of thinking. Something of the same
kind is true of the introduction of mechanically automatic operations in
industry. They may release the mind for thought upon other topics. But
when we confine the education of those who work with their hands to a
few years of schooling devoted for the most part to acquiring the use of
rudimentary symbols at the expense of training in science, literature,
and history, we fail to prepare the minds of workers to take advantage
of this opportunity. More fundamental is the fact that the great
majority of workers have no insight into the social aims of their
pursuits and no direct personal interest in them. The results actually
achieved are not the ends of their actions, but only of their employers.
They do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of
the wage earned. It is this fact which makes the action illiberal, and
which will make any education designed simply to give skill in such
undertakings illiberal and immoral. The activity is not free because not
freely participated in.

Nevertheless, there is already an opportunity for an education which,
keeping in mind the larger features of work, will reconcile liberal
nurture with training in social serviceableness, with ability to share
efficiently and happily in occupations which are productive. And such an
education will of itself tend to do away with the evils of the existing
economic situation. In the degree in which men have an active concern
in the ends that control their activity, their activity becomes free or
voluntary and loses its externally enforced and servile quality, even
though the physical aspect of behavior remain the same. In what is
termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this
direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains
external and autocratic. Hence the split between inner mental action and
outer physical action of which the traditional distinction between the
liberal and the utilitarian is the reflex. An education which should
unify the disposition of the members of society would do much to unify
society itself.

Summary. Of the segregations of educational values discussed in the
last chapter, that between culture and utility is probably the most
fu