Germany’s industrial supremacy was due, as Professor Veblen shows, to the fact that machine industry was imposed ready-made on a people whose psychology was feudal.  The schools of Germany, an essential part of her industrial enterprise, were organized on the servility of the people.  We now know what building as Germany has built her educational and industrial system on the weakness of a people means.  We are in the process of discovering whether in sacrificing the expansion of her people she can secure a permanent expansion of her Empire.  It would seem the better part of statesmanship in America after the war to build industrially on the strength of our people and not on the weakness of another.  It is the business of educators to point out the danger and to discover whether efficiency may not be gained in the country by giving children in their adolescent period the impulse for production and high standards of work, not for the sake of the state, but for themselves, for the sake of the community,—­out of love of work and for the value of its service.

CHAPTER IV

EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY AND ASSOCIATED ENTERPRISE

As capital and so far labor have failed to make industry an expansive experience it becomes, as Professor Dewey has pointed out, the business of educators concerned with the growth of individuals to cultivate the field.

If educators regard opportunities for growth with sufficient jealousy they will not wait for industry to emerge with a new program, or system of production; they will initiate productive enterprises where young people will be free to gain first hand experience in the problems of industry as those problems stand in relation to their time and generation.  Their alliance should be made with engineers and architects and the managers of industry who have made themselves, through experience and training, masters of applied science and the economics of production.  Engineers, not under the influence of business, are qualified to open up the creative aspects of production to the workers and to convince them through their own experience that that there are adventurous possibilities in industry outside the meagre offerings of payday.  Mr. Robert Wolf is one of the engineers who is ready for the venture.  He told the members of the Taylor Society that “scientific managers have not been scientific enough in dealing with this very important subject of stimulating the thinking and reasoning power of the workman, thereby making him self-reliant and creative.”  In describing the field in which practical engineers should operate, he laid stress on their giving large space to the originating, choosing, adapting power in men and the direction of it into positive constructive channels; to men’s self-consciousness of their place in the great scheme of things.