We apparently believe that the workingman has no chance to realize life through his vocation.  We easily recognize the historic association in regard to ancient buildings.  We say that “generation after generation have stamped their mark upon them, have recorded their thoughts in them, until they have become the property of all.”  And yet this is even more true of the instruments of labor, which have constantly been held in human hands.  A machine really represents the “seasoned life of man” preserved and treasured up within itself, quite as much as an ancient building does.  At present, workmen are brought in contact with the machinery with which they work as abruptly as if the present set of industrial implements had been newly created.  They handle the machinery day by day, without any notion of its gradual evolution and growth.  Few of the men who perform the mechanical work in the great factories have any comprehension of the fact that the inventions upon which the factory depends, the instruments which they use, have been slowly worked out, each generation using the gifts of the last and transmitting the inheritance until it has become a social possession.  This can only be understood by a man who has obtained some idea of social progress.  We are still childishly pleased when we see the further subdivision of labor going on, because the quantity of the output is increased thereby, and we apparently are unable to take our attention away from the product long enough to really focus it upon the producer.  Theoretically, “the division of labor” makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them together into a unity of purpose.  “If a number of people decide to build a road, and one digs, and one brings stones, and another breaks them, they are quite inevitably united by their interest in the road.  But this naturally presupposes that they know where the road is going to, that they have some curiosity and interest about it, and perhaps a chance to travel upon it.”  If the division of labor robs them of interest in any part of it, the mere mechanical fact of interdependence amounts to nothing.

The man in the factory, as well as the man with the hoe, has a grievance beyond being overworked and disinherited, in that he does not know what it is all about.  We may well regret the passing of the time when the variety of work performed in the unspecialized workshop naturally stimulated the intelligence 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.