of the men who work, industry as a progressive enterprise
is doomed and high hopes for civilization are without foundation.

If the position of employers is true and the limitations of
individuals are as final as they have determined, there is nothing to
do except perfect the mechanical responses of men. This preeminently
would be the business of employers and not of education which is
concerned with the growth of the individual. On such a basis, it is
inconceivable that educators would concern themselves with preparing
people for industry. If, however, these limitations are not native,
but are due to some incompatibility between the institution of
industry and the interest of the labor force, then the limitations of
workers and of industry are a matter of paramount importance in the
field of education.

As I have said before there is a common supposition among people who
are not employers of labor, that such features of industry as the
mechanical devices of modern technology and the division of labor in
factory organization, are in their nature opposed to the expansive
development of the people involved; that these features of apparent
intrinsic importance to mass production, are antagonistic to
individual growth and to the interest of workers in productive effort.

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