Creative Impulse in Industry eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 108 pages of information about Creative Impulse in Industry.

Creative Impulse in Industry eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 108 pages of information about Creative Impulse in Industry.
a respect for productive enterprise that should be invaluable later in effecting their resistance to the prostitution of their creative power.  They do not give them experience in the administrative side of industry for which the children of high school age are ready and in need.  But in an admirable way they subordinate training in technique to purpose and give the children the experience of exercising control over their own industrial activity.  As an industrial experience for children of grammar school age, it is richer than any other school system which has been developed.

The industrial education of Germany which was recommended for our adoption and which we have emulated to an alarming degree in our industrial towns, imposes prevailing methods of industry and technique of factory processes as final and determined.  As industrial history and technique are taught in the schools, in effect they bind the children to the current industrial practice and to the current conditions.  They stifle imagination and discourage the concept that industry is an evolving process.  The effect of technical training in the German continuation schools (and the tendency is the same in our own industrial education courses) is to teach the children that the methods and processes as they are carried forward in the shop are right.  No question of their validity is raised in the school.  They are accepted by the children in the spirit of authority which the school carries, as they would not be so finally accepted by them in the shop.  The impress of a developed curriculum, connected with an active trade experience, that is, a trade in which the children are at work, like the curriculum of a continuation school, is greater than the curriculum which has been evolved for its abstract cultural values.  As the curriculum cooerdinates shop and school activities and as it fails at the same time to stimulate inquiry on the part of the pupil into industrial or special trade processes as they are practiced in the shop, it becomes a positive, inhibiting factor in the intellectual life of the children.  The perfection of an industrial school room equipment with its trade samples, its charts and maps, its literature, relating to the extension, of trade and of commerce, has the tendency like the curriculum to impose on the children the weight of accomplishment, if this equipment is not used to stimulate inquiry and experiment in industry as the ever fresh field for adventure that it is.  But the intention of these industrial schools is to train the children in the acceptance of processes and methods which are established.  Nowhere, in no country, has this intention been so successfully realized, because nowhere has it been so successfully organized as in Germany through its continuation school system.  And nowhere as in Germany are the people so successfully subjected to an institutionalized life as it has been worked out in the light of modern technology and business.

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Creative Impulse in Industry from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.