Creative Impulse in Industry

This volume is the result of some experiments and surveys carried on by the author during the past year in connection with her work in the Bureau of Educational Experiments, New York City. It contains four chapters as follows: "Production and Creative Effort; Adapting People to Industry"; "The American Way; Adapting People to Industry"; "The German Way, and Educational Industry"; and "Associated Enterprise." As suggested in the titles of chapters ii and iii, the book is mainly a discussion of the German system of industrial preparation and classification of her future workers, which crushes all their imaginative and creative impulses, and the American way, which under the influence of the movement for industrial education shows dangerous tendencies in imitating too closely the German way. The construction part of the book is found in the last chapter where a proposed experiment in industrial education is outlined. It is the author's belief that, before establishing a system of industrial education like Germany's, or extending the makeshift attempts which have been introduced here in the United States, "it would seem well to undertake experiments which would stimulate the impulse of youth for creative experience, which would give them an industrial experience where the motive of exploitation is absent and where the stimulus was the content which the product of wealth offers." On a whole, the book should have a wholesome influence on the industrial education movement by freeing it from the German domination under which it has been laboring.