We have seen the National Education Association assembling in Boston, and welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce. We have seen them assembling in Oakland, and welcomed by the same organization. Wherever they go, they are welcomed with open arms by Big Business, and the school-marms hasten to this bear’s embrace. It is no exaggeration to say that from the earliest days of the public school system its worst enemy has been organized commercialism. I understand that there are individual business men of vision, who believe in and work for the schools; but the organizations, the class groups of the exploiters did all they could to block the establishment of public schools, realizing that to educate the lower classes was to prepare the overthrow of wage-slavery.

What Big Business wants of children is their labor. Twenty years ago Margaret Haley was lobbying at the state capital of Illinois for a bill to abolish child labor, and she talked with the head of the Levis family, which owns enormous glass works at Alton. It was provided in the bill that children shouldn’t work in these factories earlier than fourteen. Said Mr. Levis: “If you keep the children in school till then, they aren’t of any use to us when they come.” This he said before the legislature; and afterwards Miss Haley went up to him asking: “Just what is it in the public schools which hurts the children?” The answer was: “All this literature stuff, and history and music. In the schools where they don’t have such things the children are willing to go to work.” Before the legislature Mr. Levis threatened that if this bill were passed the glass works in Alton would move to some other state. The work of the children was carrying bottles a short distance, and they couldn’t get men to do it—not at their price. The bill was passed—and immediately the manufacturers decided that the work could be done by machines.

Having realized that the schools are here to stay, Big Business now seeks to turn them to its own ends. Modern educators, with their manual training want to use handwork to develop the brains of the child, while the manufacturers want to develop the hands only. The educators want to keep the unity of the system, understanding that where hand and brain are separated both degenerate. The business interests want schools in which their workers may be trained; they are willing to pay generously, in order to get cheap skilled labor which they may use in strike-breaking. They want two separate school systems, with separate boards, buildings, funds and corps of teachers. They want no co-ordination between the two systems—the plan being that when they have got them separate, they can feed the vocational schools and starve the cultural schools. The organized teachers of Chicago have understood this plan from the beginning, and they have explained it to the organized workers, who have beaten it.

Move up to Minnesota, and you find the same fight, financed by the same people. The National Association of Manufacturers has had this definite policy for the schools for a generation, and they have had highly paid lobbyists and organizers at work all over the country. In Minnesota these lobbyists came to the legislature with their bill for industrial training under the direction of employers. The money was to be put up by the public, but the school authorities were to have nothing to do with the spending. There was to be a second school system, run by the manufacturers, and they were to have power to transfer students without the consent of their parents! Also, the local school boards were to be permitted to accept petitions to provide industrial education in the public schools.

Mr. H. E. Miles, agent of the National Association of Manufacturers, came to Wisconsin and denounced the schools there, declaring that the vocational schools would never amount to anything until they were run by the manufacturers themselves. Once more, Big Business was to train its wage-slaves, and the state was to pay the bill. Mr. Miles made the beginning of what he wanted, starting a trade school in a tannery in Sheboygan. Mr. Schultz, a member of the state board, wanted one in his chair factory; he objected to all scholastic subjects, especially civics—he wanted only the trade taught. Many of these pupils were foreigners, many were feeble-minded and could not get beyond the third grade.

Mr. Charles P. Cary, state superintendent of education, insisted that these children should spend half their time in self-improvement; but Mr. Miles would take nothing less than their whole time. He wanted them to learn but one thing—the exact thing they were going to do the rest of their lives; anything else was “overeducating” them. Talking with Mr. Cary in April, 1921, Mr. Miles admitted that what he wanted of the part-time schools was to train strike-breakers. “I was talking with one of our great manufacturers,” he said, “and he told me that by putting in the plant system of training he had made twenty thousand dollars in one year. Now if that were paid for by the city and state”—and then suddenly Mr. Miles realized that Mr. Cary was not a man to appreciate this line of argument; he said abruptly: “It’s a remarkably fine day, is it not?”

We went to war with Germany, thinking to abolish the German system of autocracy. But here was a high-salaried agent of our biggest business organization, representing many billions of dollars of invested capital, devoting his energies to establishing the complete Prussian system in the American schools! In Germany of the old regime, this system comprised two distinct types of schools; first, the people’s schools, and secondly, the gymnasia for the privileged classes. The children of the poor dropped out at the age of fourteen years; ninety per cent of them took to part time study and part work, fitting themselves to do what their fathers were doing. Those who were destined for the gymnasia pulled out at the third year, and began on foreign languages. A boy who finished the people’s school had to go back and take up foreign languages in order to get into the gymnasia, and very few ever achieved the feat.

This is class education, and it is what the National Association of Manufacturers has been working for all over the United States. Margaret Haley told me of a legislative hearing at Springfield, Illinois, at which they produced Superintendent Cooley of Chicago, who gave an elaborate lecture on the European system of vocational training, which he pretended to know. Mr. Frederick Roman had gone to Germany, with credentials from the governor of North Carolina, and had spent two years making an independent study. Superintendent Cooley didn’t know about this, and was taken by surprise when Mr. Roman walked in upon this legislative hearing, and showed that Cooley had misrepresented both the law and the facts of the European system. The vocational training which the Chicago superintendent of schools was recommending for the state of Illinois was worse than anything in Prussia!

Superintendent Cary of Wisconsin told me the details of his long struggle with the manufacturers. They informed him that if he did not obey orders, they would put him out; he must play the political game, and name the county superintendents selected by them. When he refused, they put up a candidate against him—whose son was an agent for Ginn & Company, book publishers. A little later on we shall deal with these book companies in detail; suffice it here to say that one book agent offered to put up fifteen thousand dollars for Mr. Cary’s campaign fund, and the offer was refused. The manufacturers, being unable to get the trade schools they wanted from Mr. Cary, went to the legislature and got provision for separate vocational schools, and put their man in charge of these. When the next election came round, they put up a man for Mr. Cary’s place, and set out to raise a campaign fund; one contractor sent out a letter to the others, the book companies rallied—and so Mr. Cary no longer has anything to say about public education in Wisconsin.

The National Association of Manufacturers, together with the National Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers’ Association and the rest of them, now have a comfortable working majority in the Supreme Court, and they got a decision granting them the right to work our babies in their factories. They have several million now at work; and you recollect how in California the Better America Federation tried to force through the state legislature a bill providing for the dismissal of any teacher who should discuss with any pupil the desirability of any amendment to the Constitution. As an illustration of the conditions they want, take the state of Delaware, which has no compulsory school attendance law, and where children are bound out to employers on the old English apprentice system, which is practically the same thing as selling them into slavery. In Delaware the powder interests, owned by the Dupont family, have very kindly taken over the educational system of the state; they have established a School Association, which under the law does all the buying of supplies and the putting up of school buildings.