Scientific management like ordinary management as a matter of fact does not want to cultivate initiative in the rank and file of workers; it would like to find more of it; and its eternal expectation is that enough of it will rise out of the oppressive atmosphere of the factory system to supply its limited needs.  Scientific management especially wants this, as it must have more foremen and teachers to carry forward its advanced schemes of organization.  But every manager will tell you that industry does not produce men with sufficient initiative to fill these positions.  Their estimates of the number of men found in industry who have initiative varies from one to five per cent.  The rest they believe are born, routine workers.  They speak of their limitations as native.  Managers do not stop to consider that their judgments are based wholly on the reaction of the mass of wage workers to the special stimuli which they offer.  They say also that high school and college boys show up very little if any better in respect to initiative than the lower school product.  The truth is that schools and colleges are more concerned with passing on the standards of an older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand inquiries.  That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry or curiosity.

Factory management like college and school management, instead of depending on the subject matter to interest the workers, instead of opening up to them the factors of interest in industrial enterprise, has adopted incentives for getting the required work done.  Enlightened school practice, out of long failure to get the children’s initiative by the artificial stimulus of rewards for work done, now depends upon the content of the subject matter and the children’s experiments with it, to develop their desire to do the work.  The practice of depending on school rewards instead of interest in subject matter is largely responsible for superficial knowledge and lack of ability to think as well as to act.  As schools fail to incite the interest of the children they train them to put through this and that task and reward them for it without having added to their power of undertaking tasks on their own account.  Indeed, as they fail to give them the chance to do that, they actually decrease whatever power they may have had.

The doing of tasks in factories for the sake of rewards, gives the workers experience in winning rewards.  As they are interested only in the reward, they carry away no desire or interest in the work experience.  As the method of doing the work is prescribed in every detail and their only requirement, under scientific management, is to follow directions with accuracy, they are trained to do their tasks as the children