Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators by Helen Marot
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page 6 of 106 (05%)
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while giving all they most care for, for the prosecution of the war
against Germany still support industrial and political policies and dogmas which are in spirit essentially Prussian. The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved people. The German educational system as much if not more than its other imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute their children freely to an educational system which fits them into an industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his early years, like a predestined fact. American business men before the war appreciated the educational system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of their own. But the situation was embarrassing as these business men were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest. Their embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially, they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted as a national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its |
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