Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

Nay, they have raised the contempt of manual labour to the height of a theory.

The man of science,” they say, “must discover the laws of nature, the civil engineer must apply them, and the worker must execute in steel or wood, in iron or stone, the patterns devised by the engineer.

He must work with machines invented for him, not by him.

No matter if he does not understand them and cannot improve them: the scientific man and the scientific engineer will take care of the progress of science and industry.

Surely there are such men; happily enough there is a nucleus of men who have escaped the so-much-advocated specialisation of labour, and it is precisely to them that industry owes its chief recent inventions.

But in old Europe, at least, they are the exceptions; they are the irregulars--the Cossacks who have broken the ranks and pierced the screens so carefully erected between the classes.

And they are so few, in comparison with the ever-growing requirements of industry--and of science as well, as I am about to prove--that all over the world we hear complaints about the scarcity of precisely such men.

What is the meaning, in fact, of the outcry for technical education which has been raised at one and the same time in England, in France, in Germany, in the States, and in Russia, if it does not express a general dissatisfaction with the…

Listen to those who know industry, and you will see that the substance of their complaints is this: “The worker whose task has been specialised by the permanent division of labour has lost the intellectual interest in his labour, and it is…

Manual workers--not men of science nor trained engineers--have invented, or brought to perfection, the prime motors and all that mass of machinery which has revolutionised industry for the last hundred years.

But since the great factory has been enthroned, the worker, depressed by the monotony of his work, invents no more.

What can a weaver invent who merely supervises four looms, without knowing anything either about their complicated movements or how the machines grew to be what they are?

What can a man invent who is condemned for life to bind together the ends of two threads with the greatest celerity, and knows nothing beyond making a knot?

At the outset of modern industry, three generations of workers have invented; now they cease to do so.

So that there is no issue out of the difficulty, unless scientific education and handicraft are combined together--unless integration of knowledge takes the place of the present divisions.

Such is the real substance of the present movement in favour of technical education.

Such an ideal may satisfy them, but it cannot satisfy those who keep in view the combined interests of science and industry, and consider both as a means for raising humanity to a higher level.

We maintain that in the interests of both science and industry, as well as of society as a whole, every human being, without distinction of birth, ought to receive such an education as would enable him, or her, to combine a thorough…

We fully recognise the necessity of specialisation of knowledge, but we maintain that specialisation must follow general education, and that general education must be given in science and handicraft alike.

In fact, it has been attained; and what has been done on a small scale could be done on a wider scale, were it not for the economical and social causes which prevent any serious reform from being accomplished in our miserably organised…

They were scientifically educated skilled workers--workers with university education--highly appreciated even by the Russian manufacturers who so much distrust science.

Science was taught hand in hand with its applications, and what was learned in the schoolroom was applied in the workshop.

While receiving substantial scientific education, the pupils are also trained in the workshops--but not for one special trade, as it unhappily too often is the case.

But we must recognise that the Moscow experiment--not to speak of hundreds of other partial experiments--has perfectly well proved the possibility of combining a scientific education of a very high standard with the education which is…

And it has shown also what can be obtained, without over-pressure, if a rational economy of the scholar’s time is always kept in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice.