Diary and Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, page 7
We must be cautious in our judgment of these things. Acceptance of the responsibilities of government representation may of necessity transform an honest man into the opposite. Don’t forget that this old world is just as human now as when the apple episode occurred in Eden.
The competent representative of any government is likely to think, and may be justified in thinking, when the interests of the country sending him are threatened, that the end justifies the means.
The war did not reveal the inner secrets of the governments. All sorts of strictly private understandings now exist affecting practically every portion of the world, no matter how much this may be denied by diplomats.
Entirely wrong impressions may arise out of too free discussion of things, which have not been accomplished, but are being worked for. I know that that is true in business. I know it must be true at meetings of the sort which will occur in Washington.
America must not expect too much of this conference on the limitation of armaments. Its agreements will be dependent upon circumstances. The people must realize this or they will meet with disappointment. The delegates will be the servants of their governments. Their agreements will be like those of trade representatives who meet and solemnly agree to programmes and then rush to the telegraph offices to notify their selling agents to cut prices.
The whole world is hard up. Knowing that this condition will persist for the period of reconstruction it will be glad to dodge taxation for war-machinery purposes. This period will last for at least five years more. While the world remains hard up, common sense will be much stimulated, for the world, we must remember, is but an aggregate of human beings. The man grown rich will do things which when he was pressed for money he would have known to be foolish.
If we all can agree to being sensible for a short time, while we are short of funds, that brief experience may educate us so fully to the beauties of good sense that in later years we will cling to it. And now, it must be borne in mind, the nations will agree to almost anything because, as matters are, the future is too terribly uncertain to make prophecy a pleasant task.
We are all happier when we look ahead with confidence. The world wants confidence. We must be careful not to lose the possibility of it by scaring men through asking them to make agreements reaching far beyond their ken into the future.
We must realize that nations will not willingly commit themselves too extensively.
If governments would realize this principle and then go on experimenting with death-dealing devices, ceaselessly, inexorably, without counting cost (experimenting doesn’t cost much; it’s manufacture in large quantities which swells taxation) the world soon would be full of such death-dealing devices as would make war utterly impossible. Soon all the general staffs would be found useless, because no general staff would find it possible to meet scientific achievements in devising instruments of death.
Then, when war came, if reasonably prepared to ward away the first threatened attacks, we could proceed with the construction in great numbers of the best available and most perfectly developed device as it might be at that particular moment.
But I know one procedure that might tend to lessen likelihood of wars. No competent government in the world ever ought to cease experimentation with war-making machinery and substances. This, I think, at this time, is especially true with regard to aviation and asphyxiating and other war gases.
That may sound bloodthirsty. As a matter of fact it is the common sense of a true man of peace. Experimentally every terrible way of war-making should be developed without pause or hindrance.
Bring about that situation and humanity is going to say:
“I think I’d better quit on killing and try peaceable negotiation.”
If every nation knew that it could not attack another, and, to use a slang phrase, ‘get away with it,’ there would be an end of arrogance. I feel sure that through experiments, utilizing present and approaching scientific knowledge to its full, such knowledge might be brought about.
At the end of a five-year period devoted to unceasing research and experiment another conference, at which knowledge of the dreadful potentialities revealed by such research would be well known or fully revealed, no matter how tremendously all experimenters tried to keep their results secret, would find the delegates more willing to be reasonable.
XV • THE FIGHT AGAINST RADICALISM
It is curious that the better impulses of our humanity do not work as hard to spread their careful, helpful thought as the less worthy elements do to spread their evil thought and foolish reasoning. If this could be reversed the world very quickly would become a better place to live in.
We hear a great deal in these days about radicalism, for example, and I have no doubt that the greater part of that which we hear is true. We are trying to fight this by locking up some dangerous people, deporting others and trying thus to warn them all.
With these methods I have not the slightest quarrel. Doubtless they are necessary. They may check the immediate dangers arising from constantly regrowing. It is conceivable that they may help.
Used alone certainly they won’t permanently help us much. We must put soap-box orator against soap-box orator, if we wish, as the opponents of our present system do, to produce results, print pamphlet against pamphlet, in every conceivable way put argument against argument.
The best way to combat a campaign of miseducation is to conduct a campaign of education. The undesirables are gaining ground not because they are permitted to speak, print and scheme but because their falsities are uncontradicted. Putting a few of them in jail won’t cure the evil, although I don’t say keep them out of jail.
The thing which would destroy them utterly, making all their efforts unavailing with the American public, would be to prove them to that public to be liars. If we adopted tactics of that sort we could run them out of the country in a year. We wouldn’t need to deport them; they would deport themselves, and be glad to have the chance to get away. A man will run a good deal faster from a hostile population than he will from a hostile Secret Service or police force.
We’ve got an immense foreign-born population to deal with. They don’t read the English-language press, in which most of the arguments against radicalism are printed. Why should they be expected to? They don’t know how, and it will be years before we can teach them to.
But most of them probably can read some language, and there are not so many languages that it would be impossible for the United States of America to use all of them as effectively as the radical workers and propagandists now use them.
These pests tell the ignorant man every day that he creates all wealth and is being robbed; presently he believes it. Nobody tells him that he isn’t being robbed; and, while sometimes he is, usually he isn’t. Those who try to tell the truth to him don’t know how to reach his mind. They do not adapt themselves to him as the agitators do. Probably they don’t make a living that way, while the blatherskites and Anarchists find it an easy way of getting money without working.
I can see no earthly reason why the sensible and constructive elements in American life should not publish the sensible and constructive facts of American life and hand them out out to my men as they leave the gates, as the Reds publish and hand out their arguments now.
I believe that the clean and right-thinking elements should work as hard as their opponents do, hiring able writers who would prepare articles disproving all the silly but curiously ably prepared twaddle of the agitators.
These men lie, lie daily, lie continually—and lie well.
But it never is a difficult thing to nail a lie if you know it is a lie, are informed about the truth and are willing to take the the trouble to tell your truth ably.
The workers of America, like the workers of the Allied countries (and perhaps more than some of them), are sound. Who can doubt it? They are showing far more common sense than their employers. We employers are a dead lot.
We ought to district the whole Nation, by groups of States, by States, by parts of States and by sections of the parts of States, and conduct a great campaign of education.
Before such a campaign had ended everybody, on both sides, would have learned something, and the more all of us know the better we shall be off as a Nation. Having done this, we should organize as carefully and minutely as we did for the loan drives and put that which we may find to say before the public in language plain and convincing.
It seems silly to me that the necessarily loosely organized, furtive and obviously not highly intelligent radicals should be permitted to conduct more competent campaigns of education than those conducted by potentially well organized, unafraid and highly intelligent constructionists.
If the people who now are yielding to the arguments of half truth or none had an opportunity to study with equal ease the real truth they would understand its genuineness and superiority. The trouble is that they have no such opportunity, and that chances for the study of false theories very cleverly presented, are at hand continually.
The cause of common sense sadly lacks leadership in this particular matter. It needs some young men like Roosevelt, perhaps, with both ability and energy, to start a real fight in the country and get other young men to stand beside him in keeping it up.
The Chambers of Commerce and other organizations which have practical reasons for desiring peace and progress along rational lines in the United States should come to life, get orators and get soap-boxes, and not only trail the Reds but precede them. Such procedure would wipe out all the nonsense, or as much of it as really is dangerous, in no time.
The worker needs some explanations from constructive minds. He’s getting all he gets out of destructive minds. Let him understand that all these radicals are trying to make a fool of him (and measureably succeeding), and very soon he will turn on them. He’s the only man who can discourage them. Let him understand what they really are after and he will not alone discourage, but destroy them.
At heart and head there are no better in the world than the workers of America. Let them once understand that they are being flim-flammed and loafing in the shops would stop. The strikes that are sending up the prices of necessities also would stop if our American workers comprehended the great fact that an idle man, whether he be a worker, or a millionaire, harms all.
IV
Education and Work
EDUCATION AND WORK
XVI • EDUCATION AND SPEED
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach men how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The world is moving too fast for them, they are cluttered up with too much red tape and precedent. We have too much red tape in all of our institutions.
Our educational system—much of it—belongs in the time when we traveled by horse-back and canal boat.
This is the age of speed—speed such as men had never dreamed before. We are annihilating distance—we are conquering not only the land and the sea but the air—we are doing in minutes what our grand-fathers could not have done in days.
They were not equipped mentally to grasp or to utilize the new order of things which burst upon them. Many of them did not seem to know at first what it was all about. If modern industry and invention expected to have a market for its products it had to turn school-master on an elaborate scale. It had to educate the world before it could sell the world. It had to show men how to think a little farther and a little faster before it could expect to interest them in how to buy.
It was necessary to create an understanding and appreciation of a higher standard of living—and then a desire for it—a demand to get more out of life on the part of several million individuals who would have been entirely satisfied with what they had. People used to be content with tin bath tubs and kerosene lamps. Most of the attendants at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1892 had never used a telephone. Had you told farmers who voted for Bryan for president that in less than twenty years they would be driving to town in automobiles at forty or fifty miles an hour they would have thought you had been drinking too much hard cider.
But the main point is that society was satisfied with things as they were. There could be no progress until enough people could be made dissatisfied—and this could be done only when they were brought to think beyond the limits to which they were accustomed. The educator had to follow the inventor—the specialist in high pressure stimulation of the public imagination—and the salesman had to wait until his work was done.
We may term it commercialized education—but it has made its results felt. I should say that the thinking power of the average man has increased perhaps twenty-five per cent in the past ten to twenty years. And certainly it has always been low enough.
It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work. They seem to insist on somebody else—often anybody else—doing their thinking for them. That is why I regard the general mental stimulus we have seen in recent years as so significant. Several industrial factors have been definitely responsible—to mention only three of them, the motion pictures, the radio, and the automobile. Let us look at the automobile.
Most of us view the automobile principally as a great business and manufacturing achievement. It is—but it is a greater educational achievement.
Next to the World War it has done more, perhaps, to jar people out of the ruts of commonplace thinking than almost any other factor in our history. This is not so much because of its stimulus to our transportation as because of its stimulus to our imagination.
The great value of the automobile is not the fact that it has made it easier and quicker and cheaper to go to places but the fact that it has inspired several million people to go. It has caused them to move, to stir themselves, to get out and away, to wake up to what was going on about them. And any agency that would have moved some of them would be a public benefaction. Before the automobile it would have needed an earthquake. Many of them had never looked at a map since they left school.
We emphasize the slogan, “See America.” But the automobile has done more than that. It has made a good many hundred thousand Americans see themselves and their neighbors—for the first time. It has set their gray matter to work. It has revealed to them how petty and meaningless their lives were becoming.
In the beginning we were a pioneer people—a restless people. But when things came easier for us and we were able to make a comfortable living without much effort we began to lose our restlessness. The automobile is helping to restore it. And that is one of the most healthful signs of our generation. Restlessness is discontent—and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man—and I will show you a failure.
The important mission of the automobile is not the opening up of new geography—but the opening up of new opportunity. And if it has awakened enough people to the fact, all of the gasoline we have used has not been too much.
The automobile has made better roads—but the best roads of progress it has made are not physical. They are those mystic paths which urge men into new worlds of imagination and incentive.
We have long since passed the age of the pedestrian. But the mental advance of society as a whole has not kept pace with our physical advance. We have come to take the wonders of invention as a matter of course—as we do everything else. But those who call this a sophisticated age are wrong. It is a perfunctory age. And it is so principally because the majority of people won’t or can’t think far enough to understand what it all means.
Physically, the world is moving faster than at any time since its creation and some of us may pause now and then to question our emphasis on physical speed, but if it serves to stir up our sluggish brain cells, if it makes it necessary for more of us to think in order to live, it is worth while.
The wheels of progress—especially those of the automobile—have worked results which might be called miracles. But their greatest service has been to raise the thinking capacity of society. If there is one evil in the world today for which there is no excuse it is the evil of stupidity.
Vol. 3, No. 6
XVII • OBSOLETE EDUCATION
I am frequently asked about our system of education. I say that we have none. Our system is a relic of past ages. It consists of parrot-like repetitions. It is a dull study of twenty-six hieroglyphs.
Groups of hieroglyphs. That is what the young of this present day study. Here is an object. I place it in the hands of a child. I tell him to look at it. If we begin before we have hardened and dried his mind he studies the object with kindling enthusiasm. The mind of the child is naturally active. Why should we make him take his impressions of things through the ear when he may be able to see? The child is a natural born “rubber neck.” His curiosity is alert. Give him the chance and he will learn. One glance, if he sees the thing itself, is better than two hours of studying about a thing which he does not see. The child develops through exercise. Give him plenty of exercise for body and brain. The more he works his arm the bigger the muscles; the more the faculties are exercised in a normal way the greater the brain. The folds of the brain grow deeper through observation; they grow fallow from disuse. If we educate too abruptly—if we cram the mind with facts memorized for themselves alone—what comes? Pure atrophy. This matter of education is a big question for the American people. It is of the utmost importance that every faculty should meet its environment. What is the use of crowding the mind with facts which cannot be utilized by the child because the method of their acquisition is distasteful to him?
I like the Montessori method. It teaches through play. It makes learning a pleasure. It follows the natural instincts of the human being. That system of education will succeed which shows to those who learn the actual thing—not the ghost of it. I firmly believe that the moving picture is destined to bear an important part in the education of the future. One may devote pages to the descriptions of the processes of nature to be learned by rote in the schools. Suppose instead that we show to the child the stages of that process of nature—the cocoon itself, the picture of the cocoon unfolding, the butterfly actually emerging. The knowledge which comes from the actual seeing is worth while. The geography which comes from travel is better than the geography of the books; the next thing to travel is following the same scenes through the moving picture.
