Industrial Education
John R. Commons
[Reprinted from Chapter XX ("Industrial
Education in Wisconsin")
from the book, Labor and Administration, 1913]
What is the part, that industrial education should perform in
preventing vagrancy, irregular employment, and pauperism?
Before we can answer the question we need to know what kind of
industrial education we mean, and what kind of industry it is that
needs this education.
If we want to see the industries of Wisconsin, let us begin, not
at the factory or shop or farm, but at the Free Employment office in
Milwaukee. Stand for an hour in that office and see the hundreds of
men and boys waiting for jobs to turn up. There is the spot in the
state where you can see passing before you, in miniature, the
panorama of modern industry. For, industry is not merely the
machiner and shops, nor even the commodities turned out in amazing
quantities, but it is mainly the boys and girls entering the shops
and the men and women coming out. These are the commodities that the
state is interested in. These are the machines that the state must
depend upon for its future food, clothing, and shelter, for its
politics, its prosperity, and its power of endurance.
We are accustomed to measure prosperity by the millions of
dollars' worth of cheese and butter and machinery and leather put
out and placed on the market. Let us measure it by the thousands of
men and women turned out and placed upon the labor market. What
shall we say of a factory that hires and discharges a thousand men
and boys in one year in order to keep up a steady force of three
hundred? Modern industry must employ a hundred and fifty to five
hundred men every year in order to keep a hundred positions steadily
filled. Here is a kind of raw material taken in every day and a kind
of half-finished product poured out, that means more for the state
of Wisconsin than its inflow of pig iron and its outflow of
machinery. As you look at the panorama passing through the
employment office you see the human products of Wisconsin's
prosperity.
You are astonished at seeing the crowds of boys and young men--the
army of the semi-skilled. You offer them a position at a dollar or a
dollar and a quarter a day, where they can learn a trade or get
promotion, and they laugh at you. They have been spoiled. They could
earn that much before they were sixteen years old! At the age of
seventeen or eighteen they have been earning eighteen to twenty
cents an hour--twice as much as you offer them. To the boy of
sixteen, twenty cents an hour, at a two-months job, looks bigger
than the fifty cents or a dollar an hour and steady work at the end
of a ten-year line of future promotion. He has suddenly found
himself earning more than his immigrant father.
Why is it that these boys do not look ahead? Why do they not know
that twenty cents is the highest they will ever earn? That they will
scarcely hold such a job more than four or five months? That ten
years from now they will be loafing in the back part of the
employment office with the flotsam and jetsam that they already see
behind them, vainly waiting for a twenty-cent job of two or three
days, or else hopelessly accepting, for the rest of their lives, an
old man's job at a dollar or so a day, long hours and Sundays thrown
in?