Research, N: Workers' Education

Excerpt from Workers' Education: American and Foreign Experiments

HE way a group of grown persons best educate each other is in the method used by Socrates and his friends. It is the way of endless discussion centering on one subject.

It is probably the hardest work in the world. The results are al ways amazing. A grown man discovers he is beginning to grow again. Endless discussion about one subject can not maintain it self ou words. It dies away unless it feeds on knowledge and finally interpretation. It reaches out for facts and then for the meaning of them. In modern terms, this Socratic method means a class of from five to thirty, who read books, listen to talks, and ask ques tions. They take to themselves a like-minded teacher, who is a good fellow, and together they work regularly and hard. This is the heart of workers' education - the class financed on trade union money, the teacher a comrade, the method discussion, the subject the social sciences, the aim an understanding of life and the re moulding of the scheme of things. Where that dream of a better world is absent, adult workers' education will fade away in the loneliness and rigor of the effort.

But there is no 'one road to freedom. There are roads to free dom. So workers' education will include elementary classes in English, and entertainment for the crowd. But the road for the leaders of the people will be straight and hard. Only a few thou sand out of the millions will take it. It is a different, a new way of life to which the worker is being called.

In the United States there may be one kind of education for a particular racial group. There will be regional solutions, local experiments, experiments in a given industry. Our infinite variety of life and our wide spaces will demand a multitude of experiments.

The peasant and cooperative background of Denmark results in a workers' education of the folk highschools, which is possible perhaps for certain Middle Western' groups in our country, but which is not universally possible.

The healthy and balanced growth of the three-fold labor move ment of Belgium - the trade unions, the labor party, the coopera tivas - and the compactness of the Kingdom enable the workers to make a neater classification of needs and to federate the solu tions into a single central national administrative body, which would break down among our mountains or seep away upon the prairies.

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