Some teacher who is not in touch with the labor world will read the story I have told about labor government in San Francisco and in Butte, Montana, and will ask, is that what I mean. It isn’t what I mean; and for the benefit of newcomers, I hasten to explain. I wish that there existed in modern society a beautiful and altruistic labor movement, instead of what does exist, a part of the capitalist system, partaking of the weaknesses and corruptions which are automatically produced in human societies by the continuous operation of mass rivalries and greeds. The American Federation of Labor is a machine, precisely like the Republican party, or the National Education Association; it is a vested interest of high-salaried leaders, whose function is to dicker with Big Business for the best terms obtainable in the labor market. Many of these leaders are sincere but ignorant men, who have grown up in the present system and can imagine nothing else. Many others have accepted without realizing it what I call “the dress-suit bribe.” Still others are cynical corruptionists, who sell out their deluded followers, and permit labor unions to be used as weapons in the partisan wars of Big Business. Any teacher who goes to the labor movement without realizing these things, will suffer bitter disillusionment.

Underneath this machine is the great mass of the workers, groping their way toward freedom and self-government; betrayed a million times by leaders throughout the ages, they continue to grope, and to learn. The modern machine process has brought them together by tens of thousands, and the printing press and the soap-box have given them the means of spreading information. Many new organizations may have to be made and broken, many new weapons constructed by the masses; but they are on their way toward freedom and self-government, with a movement like that of a glacier. To understand the workers and their needs, and to help them to find their path—that is the task to which the teacher may contribute. Let her go to the labor movement, not expecting too much, but ready to give the precious things which she has.

The teacher who goes in that spirit will not be disappointed. She will find in the toiling masses a deep and touching reverence for her profession. The teacher is well known to the masses, she has messengers who carry good words about her to the homes of the people. The great bulk of our wage-slaves have but little hope for themselves; what ambitions they have are for their children. They send these children to school, and they think of the teacher as the children’s friend, the guardian of the children’s future, the keeper of a magic key. To the very poor in the slums, the teacher comes as a missionary; she is the only representative of authority who assumes any aspect of kindness. As one who has been in the labor movement most of his life, I say that I have yet to hear a labor man speak of teachers without respect; or to hear of an American city in which the teachers made an appeal to the working masses without getting a response.

That portion of the labor movement which has especial need of the teacher, and which should command the teacher’s especial regard, is workers’ education. I have devoted a chapter to this subject in “The Goose-step,” and do not want to repeat information which is given there. Suffice it to say, that the organized workers have grown tired of seeing their best brains stolen from them, they have set out to educate their own youth, and train their own leaders. There are now workers’ colleges or schools in all the leading cities of America, and to know them and to help them should be one of the joys of progressive teachers. In places where there is not yet a labor school, it only waits for some group of teachers who will go to the labor men, and advise with them, and help them to break into this new field.

There exists in New York a center of information, the Workers’ Education Bureau, 465 West 23rd Street, which works in harmony with the old-line labor unions and has received their endorsement. This bureau has established fifty labor colleges in America in the six years of its existence. It holds a convention every spring, and if you will read its proceedings, you will pity the N. E. A.

The more radical labor unions have their own educational centers, concerning which you may have information for the asking. The Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, under the presidency of James H. Maurer, a clear-visioned Socialist, has established a department of education and labor research at Harrisburg, and has promoted labor classes in a dozen cities throughout the state. It will send you much interesting literature on request. The Brookwood School at Katonah, New York, has twice as many pupils as it had last year, and you will wish to know about this charming place. You will meet here several of the kicked out college professors whom you read about in “The Goose-step”; one of them is Professor A. W. Calhoun, who writes:

I mention also that the I. W. W. have their Work Peoples’ College at Duluth, Minnesota (Box 39, Morgan Park Station). Mrs. Kate Richards O’Hare has moved to the Llano Colony at Leesville, Louisiana, and has started there Commonwealth College, under the direction of W. E. Zeuch, a college professor whose adventures you may read in “The Goose-step.” The International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers are maintaining elaborate educational programs for their members in many cities.

I give you these various addresses in order that you may get the literature of the subject. I will also say a friendly word for the “Labor Age,” an admirable magazine of information edited by Prince Hopkins, and published at 41 Union Square, New York. The issue of April, 1922, was devoted to the subject of labor education, and is full of information as to developments both in this country and Great Britain. In the latter country the Workers’ Education Association has a total of 2,760 branches, to say nothing of the various independent and radical educational bodies.

Also, I ought to mention that outside the labor movement there are some independent experimental schools, which are radical so far as concerns education, and are clearing the way toward the future. In Washington, D. C., in the Progressive Education Association (1719 35th St., N. W.). Ask them for their pamphlet, “The Spirit of Adventure in Education”; ask them for their lists of experimental schools, and especially their account of what is going on at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, which is making an effort to combine real work and study—the basis of all truly democratic education. Write also to the Organic School at Fairhope, Alabama, and inform yourself about the splendid work which Mrs. Marietta Johnson is doing, to train young people in the realities of life, and to make education a complete and living thing. Write to the Bureau of Educational Experiments, 70 Fifth Ave., New York. There are a number of new schools in or near New York; I mention especially the Walden School at 32 West 68th St., the Teachers’ College Playground, and the Gregory School at West Orange, New Jersey. The New School for Social Research, located in New York, is doing excellent work. The Modern School, at Stelton, N. J., is testing out the theories of “libertarian” education. Finally, Dean Alva P. Taylor of the State College of New Mexico has a very interesting plan for organizing a college to be managed by its faculty; he wishes to hear from others who are interested.

Also I must not fail to mention the Pathfinders of America, which is endeavoring to supplement our public school education by character training, the lack of which is our greatest school defect. The founder of this organization, Mr. J. F. Wright, is one of our pioneers, and the work he is doing should be known to all educators. He began with efforts to redeem convicts, and he had sixty-five organizations when I met him a year and a half ago, and was reaching five thousand men in prisons. They have now started “junior councils” in the public schools—much better than the junior chambers of commerce, I assure you! They eliminate religion from their training, but teach the children practical conduct in a practical way, and the parents perceive the results—as do the juvenile delinquency officers in Detroit.

Also, I should mention the work which is being done by Mr. Vance Monroe, editor of the “Colorado Union Farmer” of Denver. Here is a co-operative organization of farmers, which has got up a series of juvenile clubs—again something better than junior chambers of commerce! There are forty-eight such organizations in the state, with youngsters up to the age of sixteen conducting their own courts, forming their own “co-operative credit associations” for the handling of their savings, working up their own debating teams, and in general running their own affairs. There is no control from the grown-ups except the written suggestions of Mr. Monroe, together with the advice of two adults whom the youngsters have themselves chosen to fill that rôle when requested. This is real training for democracy; it is education in the strict sense of the word—drawing out the child’s own impulses and abilities, instead of repressing them and crushing them into a predetermined mould. Through such voluntary and self-governing associations our schools will be made over—and I fear it will have to be done from the outside, not from the inside.^[N]

If this book were not already too long, I should like to take space to tell you about this kind of work. But all these schools and reform projects have their own literature, which they will send you for the asking. I want to add, by way of comforting some anxious souls, that I am not really a pessimistic and destructive person; I understand that there are many earnest workers in the schools, and that some of them manage by tact and force of personality to put liberal ideas into the heads of their students. I know that plutocratic influences are not entirely unopposed in America; I know that conditions portrayed in this book are less bad than they would be, if conscientious men and women were not risking their jobs every hour. My reason for writing this book is my belief that these people can do their work better, if they know exactly what they are opposing. I do not want liberal teachers to be in the position of Mr. M. C. Bettinger, who gave thirty-eight years of his life to the school system of Los Angeles, as teacher, assistant superintendent, and school board member, and then, after he had been kicked out in his old age, read “The Goose-step” and wrote me these pathetic words: “I may not be of much help to you, but you certainly have helped me. I know now what I have been trying to do, and what has been done to me.”

I close this chapter on workers’ education with a message from an abler writer than myself. In France the teachers are an organized and disciplined social force; and to their trade union convention came the greatest of living French prose masters, a sage and bel esprit whose high position in the world of letters has not held him from full sympathy with the revolutionary workers of the world. I quote four paragraphs from the message of Anatole France to the teachers of his country; and I mention, in case you want to read it all, that you can find it in the “Nation,” Vol. 109, or in the “Living Age,” Vol. 302.