But every manager will tell you
that industry does not produce men with sufficient initiative to
fill these positions. Their estimates of the number of men found in
industry who have initiative varies from one to five per cent. The
rest they believe are born, routine workers. They speak of their
limitations as native. Managers do not stop to consider that their
judgments are based wholly on the reaction of the mass of wage workers
to the special stimuli which they offer. They say also that high
school and college boys show up very little if any better in respect
to initiative than the lower school product. The truth is that schools
and colleges are more concerned with passing on the standards of an
older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is
the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand
inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at
its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to
the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry
or curiosity.
Factory management like college and school management, instead of
depending on the subject matter to interest the workers, instead of
opening up to them the factors of interest in industrial enterprise,
has adopted incentives for getting the required work done. Enlightened
school practice, out of long failure to get the children's initiative
by the artificial stimulus of rewards for work done, now depends upon
the content of the subject matter and the children's experiments with
it, to develop their desire to do the work.
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