Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 3

First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial
education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the sort
of education that America wants.
America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if it
holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their
efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the heritage
which industrial evolution has given the world. But what shall we use
this efficiency for? For the sake of the heritage? For the sake of
business? For the sake of Empire?
Business knows very clearly why it wants it, but as a rule most of us
are not clearly conscious that we need, for the sake of our expansive
existence, to be industrially efficient. We are not even conscious that
industry is the great field for adventure and growth, because we use that
field not for the creative but for the exploitive purpose.
It is the present duty of American educators to realize these two points:
that industry is the great field for adventure and growth; that as it is
used now the opportunities for growth are inhibited in the only field
where productive experience can be a common one. Shortly it will be
the mission, of educators to show that by opening up the field for
creative purpose, fervor for industrial enterprise and good workmanship
may be realized; that only as the content of industry in its
administration as well as in the technique of its processes is opened up
for experiment and first-hand experience, will a universal impulse for
work be awakened. It is for educators, together with engineers and
architects, to demonstrate to the world that while the idea of service to
a political state may have the power to accomplish large results, all
productive force is artificially sustained which is not dependent on
men's desire to do creative work. A state as we have seen, may invoke
the idea of service. It might represent the productive interests of a

community if those interests sprang from the expansive experience of a
people in their creative adventures.
In the reconstructive period educators may have their opportunity to
extend the concept that the creative process is the educative process, or
as Professor Dewey states it, the educative process is the process of
growth. The reconstruction period will be a time of formative thought;
institutions will be attacked and on the defensive; and out of the great
need of the nations there may come change. Educators will find their
opportunity as they discover conditions under which the great
enterprise of industry may be educational and as they repudiate or
oppose institutions which exclude educational factors.
It is for educators to realize first of all that there can be no social
progress while there is antagonism between growth in wealth (which is
industry) and growth in individuals (which is education); that the
fundamental antagonisms which are apparent in the current
arrangement are not between industry and education but between
education and business. They must know that as business regulates and
controls industry for ulterior purposes, that is for other purposes than
production of goods, it thwarts the development of individual lives and
the evolution of society; that it values a worker not for his potential
productivity but for his immediate contribution to the annual stock
dividend; or if, as in Germany where his productive potentiality is
valued in terms of longer time, it is for the imperial intention of the
state and not for the growth of the individual or the progress of
civilisation.

CREATIVE IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY

CHAPTER I
PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EFFORT
As a human experience, the act of creating, the process of fabricating
wealth, has been at different times as worthy of celebration as the
possession of it. Before business enterprise and machine production
discredited handwork, art for art's sake, work for the love of work, were
conceivable human emotions. But to-day, a Cezanne who paints

pictures and leaves them in the field to perish is considered by the
general run of people, in communities inured to modern industrial
enterprise, as being not quite right in his head. Their estimate is of
course more or less true. But such valuations are made without the help
of creative inspiration, although the functioning of a product has its
creative significance. The creative significance of a product in use, as
well as an appreciation of the act of creating, would be evident if
modern production of wealth, under the influence of business enterprise
and machine technology, had not fairly well extinguished the
appreciation and the joy of creative experience in countries where
people have fallen under its influence so completely as in our own.
It is usual in economic considerations to credit the period of
craftsmanship