igence of the workingmen and brought them into
contact both with the raw material and the finished product. But the
problem of education, as any advanced educator will tell us, is to
supply the essentials of experience by a short cut, as it were. If the
shop constantly tends to make the workman a specialist, then the problem
of the educator in regard to him is quite clear: it is to give him what
may be an offset from the over-specialization of his daily work, to
supply him with general information and to insist that he shall be a
cultivated member of society with a consciousness of his industrial and
social value.

As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting to
make his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is a
workingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaning
into his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results.

Manufacturers, as a whole, however, when they attempt educational
institutions in connection with their factories, are prone to follow
conventional lines, and to exhibit the weakness of imitation. We find,
indeed, that the middle-class educator constantly makes the mistakes of
the middle-class moralist when he attempts to aid working people. The
latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the
specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtues
pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was
perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues
of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly
organized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If a
workingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must see
industry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that will
include not only himself and his immediate family and community, but the
industrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterity
of hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machinery
and subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the more
necessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should get
a sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine with
a material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totally
unrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing what
becomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course,
unquestionably deadening