Labour and Childhood/The Projection of Moving Powers
CHAPTER VII
THE PROJECTION OF MOVEMENT, OR MOTOR POWER
WE come now to the projection, not of a hand merely, or even of a fist, but of muscle and movement.
Certainly the fist will not be forgotten! At Krupp's works in Essen there is a hammer head that could literally crush a mountain. There are iron arms to-day that can laugh at storms, steel hands that can tear the rocks. The originals of these were not very powerful, and yet there is nothing so hard and unyielding that they cannot rend it. And they can thread a hair and sheer an invisible thread. How did all this begin?
It began long ago, for long ago people must have wanted, not only to strike, cut, and carry, but also to lift and to draw.
They wanted levers.
So we have now to consider a kind of projection that has gone on for ages, and then after ages halted, and finally in modern days appeared to find a soul and to develop in a way that must either lift us up into a higher kind of life or destroy us for ever.
Every school boy knows that there are three kinds of levers in the body. The first is that in which the moving point is between the power and the weight —as, for example in the head, or rather in the skull, which is placed so that the face can be raised freely at one end, and the back of the head at another. Among levers of this order are the see-saw, the balance and some kinds of crowbar, and many examples of this kind of lever are, as we should expect, to be found in very old mechanisms— such as the "shadoof"—a pillar of Nile mud with a swing beam and a bucket which a man dipped into the water. A lever of the second order is to be found in the lifted foot, and its projection in the homely wheelbarrow or in a crowbar when used for lifting a weight while one of its ends rests on the ground.
There is yet one other order of lever which may be studied in the lifting of the forearm, in the straightening of a limb after bending, and in the treadle of a machine. All these were projected long ago. But the body did not yield up all its secrets— and will never do so, since it is always creating a new mystery.
What is the ideal for all kinds of moving things? It is to have a perfect power of stopping or controlling the movement. That is true in all work—and in conduct. It is true in mechanics and in morals. In work it was for ages the hand that was the great controlling agent—and almost the only one. But the hand cannot be in many places at once. It cannot be active and controlling many things at once. And so the power of man, though very beautiful in work, was also very restricted. It was also very uncertain. This did not matter so much when one was dealing with inert things, with wood that lay still on the bench, and metals that were under the power of the moulder every moment. But when motor power itself was projected, it was a very different matter. To give oneself up to the mercy of steam is not a thing that even the most confiding would care to do.
Our fathers did not give themselves up entirely even to wind and tide. At first, as we have seen, they were so wary of the sea that they went afloat only in fair weather. Later they coaxed it, as it were, with sail and oar. The miller, too, risking less, took favours from wind and wave, and was thankful. That was the age of complete force-closure, as it is called in mechanics—an age when humanity still looked on the forces of nature, as powerful and helpful, but when it was still quite helpless to guide or control them to any great extent for its own purposes.
However, there was in the muscular system even of the human body something very different to this system of "laissez-faire." "After a bone has been moved by a muscle," says the elementary physiology book, "it is brought back to its former position by the action of a second muscle on its opposite side." Hence we find that muscles are generally arranged in pairs, each muscle of a pair being antagonistic in its action to the other. Rouleaux, the great authority on mechanics, says that the present day ideal of the great mechanic is to advance from force-closure to pair-closure. In force-closure, as we have seen, the forces of nature are used to stop some movement of a machine, but in pair-closure the machine itself can stop itself—like a moral person! The ideal of the mechanic, as well as of the saint, is self-control. This ideal then which is being slowly realized by the mechanic, and more slowly yet by all civilized men in the moral sphere, had yet been for ages illustrated in every part of the muscular system.
Why (since it is the open secret of the muscular system) was not this ideal realized quickly in machinery? All kinds of reasons may be given, but there is one that seems to deserve a good deal of respect. It is the fact that for ages labour had been despised, and the labourer degraded, to be a mere chattel of others, not his own man. Charles Ham recalls this fact very often, and every one who writes on education through work recalls it. For at every point he is reminded of it as of a blight that destroyed a great seed field. "For ages," said Horace Mann (whom Ham quotes), "the labour of the world has been done by ignorant men—by classes doomed to ignorance from sire to son—by the bondsmen and bondswomen of the Jews, by the helots of Sparta, by the villeins and slaves of modern times. …" These were never free men in any real sense, and so their power halted at the projection of mere limbs and organs. It halted before it reached the projection of vital function, before it reached the outskirts of the kingdom of will—that is, motive power and all its possibilities. It was a pretty halting place, and a safe one. The workers strewed it with flowers. They decked it with ornament. It is wonderful to see the delicacy of the work—also its radiance, its beauty and exuberance. It is the work of a glad and gifted child free in a garden, bathed in morning light, sweet with the perfume of young flowers and holding still the hush of dawn! Such work should be done in all elementary schools.
For it is the gift of morning—the work of childhood. How free it seems, as well as lovely—and how irresponsible! But this is the freedom of children, not of men and women. One may fall in love with such freedom, but one should not be content with it too long, on pain of becoming grown-up children—that is, semi-slaves. For though Ruskin said that these craftsmen of yesterday were more than the factory hand of to-day, because they were free to do beautiful work, that is not all the truth. It is true the hand was free to project itself; but not the muscles—else the hammer of a Thor might have fallen on the master.
The serf age ended when the workman, ignorant as he was, began to project the muscular system freely. It was then that the new era began (after a long halt) in the workshops of England.
The history of that awakening is, in reality, the history of modern England. All the political struggles of the last two hundred years are a part of the travail through which the genius of the race gave birth to a new order of life, and carried self-realization through work into an entirely new field. Henceforward it reproduced life, not in forms merely, but in forces. It did not simply mould the inert. It gave it a kind of soul, a soul hardly more relentless than its own primitive soul, and harnessed and held it with brake and counter forces. The men who did all this were not learned men. They were not the heads of colleges, nor did they hold degrees. One cannot say that they were more than vigorous workmen, whose vigour and eager life, stimulated by labour, demanded new tools. It was they who struck off the fetters of feudalism. Watt, the instrument maker, Stephenson the brakesman, Telford the mason, Rennie the wheelwright, Dudley the artisan, Brindley, and Cartwright, and a host of other practical men, made the great projections, which were, among other things, an enfranchisement (in some small degree at least) of the human will. Their work well begun, the whole problem of human existence presented itself in a new light. The gaiety and radiance of dawn fled suddenly, and the world grew stern. The light was hidden by murky clouds, and the land was even black and lurid in large districts. The fear of hunger was like a lash to myriads. Yet the people had broken loose from their masters, and had to fight now only for further self-emancipation.
What is holding them back? A great many things still hamper them, but there is one above all others that hugs more closely at their straining arms than any other, and that is the fact that our educational system is far in the rear of the Spirit of the New Age. It is timid. It is timid as the ancient Greeks who hugged the coast in stormy times. It is afraid to let youth project freely. Yet the question begins to define itself, and to be asked more boldly—
"Should boyhood halt just where the race halted for ages?" Woodwork centres are opened; ironwork centres even are opened. That is very well. But is that all? As children grow older they put away childish things, but their impulsion is still reliable. They cease to want to become a humble order of artisan. Most of the boys want to be engineers!
And meantime thousands of mere machine-minders are being turned away. And there is a greater demand for skilled and inventive workers in the real workshops of the future!
It is not for the school doctor—camping hastily as it were on the outskirts of school life—to enter yet on a full explanation and justification of this new impulse of youth. He has had but little chance for studying it—a new arrival as he is, and still looked upon, by many, as a mere notifier of infectious diseases. Yet this is part of his work. What is more, nothing is safe till this has been done. Many reforms have been carried already, and lost for lack of it. Some reforms are, indeed, always in jeopardy till science has put their value beyond dispute. People will find substitutes for them—or what they regard as substitutes. The moralist may declare he should have lessons on temperance, truthfulness, diligence, and a score of other virtues (which may be true enough). But lessons do not take the place of life. Some may expect the school doctor to confine himself to showing methods by which the boys can escape having favus, or eye-diseases. But the greater service will have been rendered only when he brings reasons to show how or why the education the youth once longed for (or would, in any case, have eagerly responded to) would have saved him from moral and physical shipwreck. The new technical schools already show that this education saves—they show, at least, pupils who, at first feeble and unstable of character, after a certain time become strong, and self-controlled, and are saved from shipwreck. But the schools where such training is given are in peril all the time. Who will believe their report? It is still only a report. The thing that would give it authority is still lacking. The men who could find out and explain why this is so do not even so much as get a chance to consider it. So the discovery of the new order of schools is at the mercy of every wind that blows. It is no more ours than is the bird who alights on the window-sill, and who then, startled by her own arrival, flies away before we welcome her.
But now a word of these new ventures—the schools themselves.
The pioneer one was founded, it appears, in Moscow, in 1868, by Dellavos. Prince Kropotkin gives some account of its methods in his Fields, Factories, and Workshops. It was a school quite in the ordinary sense of the word, taking in boys at the age of fourteen, after an examination such as is represented by our "leaving certificate." Only this school became a real industrial centre at the top. It merged into a genuine part of the industrial and financial world. The boys were "finished" by becoming bona fide wage-earners, competing in the open market with highly skilled workmen, making with their own hands "electric machines, steam engines (from the heavy boiler to the last finely turned screw), agricultural machinery, and scientific apparatus."
Just as the youth at Oxford tests himself by speaking and writing in public, the youth of the Moscow school went through a much more searching kind of test—a test that surely will appeal to all truly manly youths and practical men. They passed from the class room to the open market, and took their final examination, not under the eyes of mere inspectors, but in the real world—the open seas of industrial life. Yet in full view of the teacher!
The school at Moscow was destroyed, but others have followed its lead. Kropotkin mentions, for example, Gordon's College, Aberdeen, and there are others. The technical school at Chicago which took Dellavos' school avowedly as its model was started through the generosity of a few rich men in the seventies, and Charles Ham, in his book Manual Training, gives a full account of its work.
There is nothing strange or novel about it—and yet it is bold. At every stage the pupil resumes all he has learned from the first lesson, and then goes forward unflinchingly—recapitulating the industrial life of the world. Drawing is the basis of the work at every stage, so the pupils spend a great deal of time over this subject. But the work is related to history, and even physical geography in the earlier stages. The pupils enter the carpenter's shop, and there they make in wood the patterns they will make later in metal. (Some of these American boys have been brought up in the backwoods, and the teacher, at this stage, turns aside to hear their impressions and talk of trees. Their fresh bright talk of the virgin forest and its wonders arrests the casual reader, but it will be matched in England perhaps one day, when geography is taught out of doors.) Then they go into the wood-turner's shop, and there they are introduced to steam-driven machinery of whose power they are warned: "Death lurks in the shafts and pulleys." Work is certainly not play here. The pupils manage edged tools driven by machinery. Ernst is das Leben—revolutions are not made with rose water. Neither are men made by handling toys and making verses. The new education is much more tender than the old— but it is also a great deal more stern and grave. Its tenderness is real, and it is safeguarded by knowledge; its sternness is not in the mien of a teacher, but in the nature of the things to which the pupil has access. Thus the early education (with its care of the body) generates power, but power can continue to be generated only through the exercise of what has already come into existence. The pupil passes from the metal work to the forging room. At every step the work grows more grave, more absorbing. It is, as we said, not the teacher who grows stern, but the work. We are told that the pupil gains as much power in a day in the school forge as he would gain in a year in an ordinary smith's shop.
Finally the step is taken that makes the child who for fifteen years has haunted the world of the past, unconscious of its shades, a denizen of the modern world. The pupils go into the machine tool laboratory. They are now from 17 to 20 years old. They have to resume all they have learned in science, in art, in ethics: working as modern, up-to-date artisans. The graduating test is significant. They do not sit down to examination papers or answer surprising questions. They make "a project." Language has grown frank at last—gone back to origins. Each pupil makes his own project, a complete engine, a steam pump, an electric machine. He makes every part of it, and when it is done he watches it tremble as if awakening from sleep, "watches the shaft oscillate slowly, then faster, then regularly like a strong heart-pulse." And in the emotion shown by even the oldest of these very cool, disciplined young workmen we get a revelation at last surely of the fact that the growing realization of part of the organism is necessary for the evolution of the higher life. One is held back as with bands till this is done. But when it is done the worker is set free in some new way. What the whole meaning of this deliverance may be we cannot say. Our school doctors have not told us yet.
Two things, however, strike one very forcibly in regard to these pupils of the new order of schools.
We have seen that the health of the message-boys and child wage-earners fails suddenly, in a way that cannot be accounted for entirely by mere hardship or hunger.
We also saw that they lost ambition.
Well, the pupils of the Technical College of Chicago, and similar schools, were remarkable, first, because of their splendid physique at the end of the course.
And secondly, because of the great and growing ambition of every pupil.
Of the boys in the forging room Ham says: "They are manly-looking, animated, erect, and show the pride of conscious strength." In the smithy "their faces are aglow with the flush of health. …" Of the young men in the machine tool shop: "They are now from seventeen to twenty years old. They are robust, hearty-looking. Their bearing is very resolute. Their attitude erect. They are full-chested, muscular-armed."
So much for the physique. Now for the other great "result."
The ambition of the educated mechanic is a thing by itself, and is not to be confounded with the ambition of even the highest order of literary man. It is quite as ardent, but it is a great deal more confident. This enthusiasm and ambition effervesces in even the younger artisan boys. They are all going to make improvements and inventions, and they know of a score that require to be made, and that they may very well take a part in. As a matter of fact the young mechanic's ambitions are quite reasonable. There is no other field of invention where so many may make useful contributions; and the pupils know this.
Each knows that by working hard he may do some very important thing—that he may improve a machine, discover an improved way of dyeing, forging, tempering, a new way of applying what he has learned. Compare this with the ambition of the poet, the artist, the politician, the orator, so vague, troubled. … It is not, perhaps, a higher ambition. It may appear at the first blush a humbler one; but it is more impersonal. It makes less appeal to vanity and egoistic desires. The desire for "fame" plays but a small part in it. The incentives to vanity are not quickened in dealing, as the artisan deals, with the forces of nature—they are quelled rather. They are quelled even in handwork. The finest mechanics of the past got little credit for their work. The man who made the sword Excalibur was not immortalized, though the sword was immortalized. No doubt some great hand workers suffered through neglect, and wished for recognition. What is more remarkable, however, is that they seem to have suffered infinitely less through such causes than did other orders of great men. Our great inventors, too, so little talked about even to-day, suffer less; and this detachedness appears even in the fully-trained pupils of the new technical college. "It may be," said Ham, "that there are vain statesmen, kings, priests, but we should as little expect to find a vain mechanic as a vain scientist." That is to say, the mechanic is, morally, in some respects at least, the higher order of person.
But this elevation of one kind of worker is not due certainly to any innate superiority; it is more probably the result of the training given in his work. This integral kind of technical training extends beyond childhood into youth; and it seems to favour in these stormy years the harmonious working of many awakening brain centres.
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One cannot here attempt the task of showing what youth is. This is no place for it. The psychology of youth is in its infancy. True, the foundation is being laid by such men as Stanley Hall (in his book Adolescence) and by others. But the study of the adolescent is new. The existence of the elementary school has made it almost necessary to carry on the study of early childhood and to get to know something about the child. But the existence of adult schools, evening classes and technical schools, does not seem to have made it so clear that there is something to learn about youth as well as about childhood. Most people who consider evening schools or training colleges even, do so from the point of view of critics, not students, and so it happens that few are on really safe ground when they are dealing with the hobbledehoy of either sex. A word or two is all we can say here.
The adolescent, or girl or boy between thirteen and twenty-one is living through a period of rapid growth and great physical development. How great and rapid this change is we may judge from the great increase in the weight of the various organs, but more especially of the heart. Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen the child appears indeed to be passing into a new house, into a kind of dwelling which is strange to him, and of which he is hardly the master. That is why he is awkward, embarrassed by the sudden growth, for example of the lower limbs, which made people invent for him the name of hobbledehoy. The effects of this sudden impulse of growth are not only interesting, but very various. It may break up old barriers like a storm, so that a boy or girl who appeared in childhood very defective may come suddenly into a new heritage, and appear henceforth as normal or almost normal. The affections as well as the intellect usually suddenly expand and deepen in a very remarkable way, that seems to transform the character. On the other hand, this is an age when all kinds of hereditary defects and weaknesses declare themselves. Criminologists testify that the great majority of people become criminals between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three. In adolescence a great proportion of all suicides take place; the hold on life is less tenacious than it will be later, when, perhaps, life will have lost its charms. Deeds of heroism are common in adolescence, and one has not to read history in order to see how often youths and maidens have led or served forlorn causes. The philosopher is nearly always old: the hero is nearly always young. But whether it be heroism or criminality that youth brings in its train, this phase of life is always one of stress and storm, of eruption, and of revelation. The organism then as it were shows its hand. It is exposed through the turmoil of rapid growth, and, like the sea in tempest, yields up its secrets.
Imagination, which is the motor power in mind, is of course dominant during this period. It is more uncontrolled if not more creative than it will ever be again. Even those who will never again be artists are artists in youth. Youths and girls hide verses they have written away, distrusting quite rightly the instinct of the older person on finding them.[1] And as even the most original imagination requires at first a guide or master, so every adolescent is at first a disciple. A popular orator or public person holds the imagination of many young people in secret for years, while the ideal of the parent, which may be a higher one in a sense, does not probably in the least attract them. The parent's ideal as a rule is rational, beyond the point where it remains lovely in the eyes of youth. As a rule, indeed, it is only the noblest elements in it that even feebly attract youth.
It is quite clear, then, that youth has a great deal to lose as well as to gain, and it is a consciousness of this that inspired such phrases as "Whom the gods love die young" and "Be true to the dreams of thy youth."
The working-class boy of fourteen who goes to the mill has some difficulty in keeping his dream. He has difficulty in even conceiving the dream of youth at all or embodying it in any form at all. But the lad or girl who receives a merely scrappy and pseudo literary training, or who is taught science from textbooks without applying anything learned, is not in a much better case. Experience comes to him, but it is for the most part experience of people whose growth is arrested like his own, and dealing with them he learns only a kind of worldly wisdom and a contempt for his young dream! Maturity, as well as age, brings thus merely a kind of degeneration.[2]
But for the new technical training we may claim that it favours a movement that is not degenerative in any sense, but progressive. All through the rationalizing process goes on and is not checked. It consists, not in the discovery of the perversions of human beings, but in the discovery of the nature of materials and the forces of nature and of what is possible in dealing with them. Thus the development of reason is accompanied by no inner blight or withering. It does not bring in its train loss of faith or weakening of sympathies. Rather it strengthens faith, not in self or in some showy public character, or even in one great inventor, but in a great army of nameless inventors and workers—in humanity. And the worker's imagination is not weakened. It is exercised in new ways, and embraces realities more completely and truly. He is not held in a slavish, half-hypnotic trance. Obscurely perhaps, but more and more strongly, he feels the rallying and renewal of life within him, advancing without pause or arrest towards some new goal.
Of course all this is not demonstrated quite clearly yet. There are too few of the new order of schools and writers[3] to warrant us in speaking with authority. But those who have come into existence all give the same kind of testimony. They testify that of all the non-selected pupils received, none have turned out badly. And it is shown on the other hand that among the wrecks of society there are hardly any who have had even the beginnings of this kind of education.
- ↑ The Germans have a word for this kind of literature—"Schwärmerei."
- ↑ Of the noisy, violent behaviour of these in holiday times we have spoken already. That is a more elementary kind of expansion than the Schwärmerei of the sentimental German school girl or boy, but it is, if carried far, an indication of lack—not of natural power, but of opportunities for its expression.
- ↑ "The psychology of the artist" has been dealt with by Arreaé and others. The psychology of the artisan waits its exponent. Perhaps a school doctor will write it one day. But already it seems safe, however, to say that it will be the story of a healthy brain, whose development extends at least to the verge of manhood.