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
methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have
played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of
industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for
patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German
system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could
deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed
in their industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a
comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children
into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen
explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal
when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic
enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people
unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of
the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology
in both England and America.
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