Without question, it is the business of educators to determine whether
such features of industry as machinery and the division of labor are
fundamentally opposed to growth or whether they are opposed only
in the way in which they have been put to use and directed. We can
discover whether or not these features are opposed only as the people
concerned have the chance to master them and undertake, through their
experience, to turn them to account.
Because industry has been impersonalized and the mechanics of
associated effort in industry worked out in such large measure, it
is to-day possible to conceive of spiritual as well as physical
association in productive enterprise. A difficulty in the way of this
conception, aside from the business complex, is our habit of thinking
exclusively of creative effort as an individual expression. In
describing the individual expression we would say that a man may
create a machine but that when men jointly produce one they work. The
creative act is in the conception of the machine in conjunction with
its construction, and the conception, after our habit of thinking,
is an individual and isolated achievement. As a matter of fact it
frequently is. A man may create a machine if he conceives it and
constructs it or if he conceives and directs its construction. Those
he directs, those who do the work of construction alone, do not
participate in the creative act, as the creative act is the
concentrated intellectual and emotional expression and effort to
produce an article or idea.
Pages:
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126