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EDUCATION MUST BE PRACTICAL
Several corporations use the phrase “tools not toys” to describe their prod-
ucts, and the same concept applies to education. There should always be a
connection between what a student learns in a classroom and what he or
she can do with the knowledge in the real world. The Henry Ford Trade
School implemented this approach by interspersing classroom instruction
and the production of usable products in the shop.
Ford warns, as he did in previous chapters, that education becomes a
liability when its sole function is to tell its owner why something can-
not be done. Ford (1922, p. 146) adds that, had Christopher Columbus
222 • The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
relied on his education in contemporary geography, he would have never
discovered America. “Columbus did not study geography; he made it.”
* * *
An able man is a man who can do things, and his ability to do things is
dependent on what he has in him. What he has in him depends on what he
started with and what he has done to increase and discipline it.
An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few
dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things. A man who cannot
think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have
acquired. Thinking is the hardest work any one can do—which is prob-
ably the reason why we have so few thinkers. There are two extremes to
be avoided: one is the attitude of contempt toward education, the other
is the tragic snobbery of assuming that marching through an educational
system is a sure cure for ignorance and mediocrity. You cannot learn in
any school what the world is going to do next year, but you can learn some
of the things which the world has tried to do in former years, and where it
failed and where it succeeded. If education consisted in warning the young
student away from some of the false theories on which men have tried to
build, so that he may be saved the loss of the time in finding out by bitter
experience, its good would be unquestioned. An education which consists
of signposts indicating the failure and the fallacies of the past doubtless
would be very useful. It is not education just to possess the theories of a lot
of professors. Speculation is very interesting, and sometimes profitable, but
it is not education. To be learned in science to-day is merely to be aware of
a hundred theories that have not been proved. And not to know what those
theories are is to be “uneducated,” “ignorant,” and so forth. If knowledge of
guesses is learning, then one may become learned by the simple expedient
of making his own guesses. And by the same token he can dub the rest of
the world “ignorant” because it does not know what his guesses are. But
the best that education can do for a man is to put him in possession of his
powers, give him control of the tools with which destiny has endowed him,
and teach him how to think. The college renders its best service as an intel-
lectual gymnasium, in which mental muscle is developed and the student
strengthened to do what he can. To say, however, that mental gymnastics
can be had only in college is not true, as every educator knows. A man’s
real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained
through the discipline of life.
There are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd
you happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which
kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. There are fashions in
knowledge, just as there are in everything else. When some of us were lads,
Things in General • 223
knowledge used to be limited to the Bible. There were certain men in the
neighbourhood who knew the Book thoroughly, and they were looked up to
and respected. Biblical knowledge was highly valued then. But nowadays it
is doubtful whether deep acquaintance with the Bible would be sufficient to
win a man a name for learning.
Knowledge, to my mind, is something that in the past somebody knew and
left in a form which enables all who will to obtain it. If a man is born with
normal human faculties, if he is equipped with enough ability to use the tools
which we call “letters” in reading or writing, there is no knowledge within the
possession of the race that he cannot have—if he wants it! The only reason
why every man does not know everything that the human mind has ever
learned is that no one has ever yet found it worth while to know that much.
Men satisfy their minds more by finding out things for themselves than by
heaping together the things which somebody else has found out. You can go
out and gather knowledge all your life, and with all your gathering you will
not catch up even with your own times. You may fill your head with all the
“ facts” of all the ages, and your head may be just an overloaded fact-box
when you get through. The point is this: Great piles of knowledge in the head
are not the same as mental activity. A man may be very learned and very
useless. And then again, a man may be unlearned and very useful.
The object of education is not to fill a man’s mind with facts; it is to teach
him how to use his mind in thinking. And it often happens that a man can
think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past.
It is a very human tendency to think that what mankind does not yet know
no one can learn. And yet it must be perfectly clear to everyone that the
past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future learning.
Mankind has not gone so very far when you measure its progress against the
knowledge that is yet to be gained—the secrets that are yet to be learned.
One good way to hinder progress is to fill a man’s head with all the learn-
ing of the past; it makes him feel that because his head is full, there is noth-
ing more to learn. Merely gathering knowledge may become the most useless
work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the world? That is
the educational test. If a man can hold up his own end, he counts for one. If
he can help ten or a hundred or a thousand other men hold up their ends,
he counts for more. He may be quite rusty on many things that inhabit the
realm of print, but he is a learned man just the same. When a man is master
of his own sphere, whatever it may be, he has won his degree—he has entered
the realm of wisdom.
225
18
Democracy and Industry
This chapter exposes the fallacies of class warfare and then, more impor-
tantly, addresses industrial and labor relations. Ford denounced equally
managers who tried to pay their workers as little as possible, and dema-
gogues who fomented labor unrest for their own benefit.
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