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Title: Work People’s College
Author: Jon Bekken
Date: 2019
Language: en
Topics: education, college, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review
Source: Retrieved on 28th January 2021 from https://syndicalist.us/2020/01/16/work-peoples-college/
Notes: From Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #76, Summer 2019

Jon Bekken

Work People’s College

In the modern school’s heyday, the U.S. labor movement recognized the

importance of education. Unions fought against authoritarian school

systems designed to funnel workers’ children into endless wage slavery.

A wide variety of working-class organizations set up their own

educational institutions, ranging from preschool and elementary school

programs to labor colleges offering programs in history, economics and

literature, as well as practical organizing and union administration

skills.

The short-lived Chicago Modern School operated a Sunday school for

children and evening lectures for adults in 1910. In 1888 German workers

launched a network of free-thought Sunday schools for children,

alongside libraries and reading rooms for adult workers.

It is revolting to expect the worker to accept a promissory note for

“heavenly joys” in lieu of profits stolen from him by greedy sharks.

That the children shall not bow to such an economic system is the aim of

the liberal Sunday schools…

Czech workers operated 18 schools in the 1920s, serving 1,340 Chicago

students. The Free-Thought School Association was closely tied to a

network of mutual aid societies, workers’ choirs and other associations

which raised funds for their support and made their halls available to

the schools. For adults, the Socialist Workingmen’s Society offered

evening lectures in economics and social science, while nearly every

Czech hall had a reading room or library.

The Chicago Federation of Labor and Women’s Trade Union League jointly

sponsored the Chicago Labor College, offering night courses in English,

parliamentary procedure, public speaking, economics, and other subjects

in the 1920s and 1930s. The Workmen’s Circle bought an auditorium in

1920 for its labor lyceum, which hosted lectures and cultural events,

while on Chicago’s Northwest side the Socialist Institute offered

evening classes for children as part of an effort to counter capitalist

indoctrination in the public schools. The Polish People’s University,

organized by socialists active in Chicago’s labor movement, offered

lectures and courses in science, history, mathematics, literature and

English. Similar educational programs were sponsored by workers’

organizations of every political tendency and ethnicity.

Similar projects could be found in every city with a significant labor

movement. IWW and other union halls hosted libraries, classes and public

lectures addressing a wide range of issues of interest to workers. One

such project that deserves to be better remembered is Work People’s

College, in Duluth, Minnesota. Organized in 1903 as a Finnish “folk”

school, it soon affiliated first with the Finnish Socialist Federation

and, after 1913, the Industrial Workers of the World.

Work People’s College was part of a vibrant Finnish workers’ culture,

including cooperatives, daily newspapers (including the IWW-affiliated

Industrialisti), libraries, dramatic societies, choirs, etc. The College

initially served a Finnish student body, but gradually expanded to other

workers. Work People’s College sought to educate students not to rise

out of their class, but to become more effective actors in the class

struggle, offering classes in economics, labor history and industrial

unionism as well as more “practical” subjects such as public speaking,

journalism, bookkeeping, English, Finnish and running meetings.

The College launched a summer program for Finnish youth in 1929,

offering courses in radical literature, Finnish language and culture,

labor history and economics in the mornings, with afternoons set aside

for recreational pursuits.

WPC instructor Fred Thompson described the economics curriculum in the

September 1937 One Big Union Monthly. After reviewing increased

productivity made possible by modern machinery, and working the

increases as math problems, students

reached the inevitable conclusion that if we can produce so much more

than we used to, and do not live more than a couple of times as well, it

must be that the working class is gypped of a good part of what it is

now able to produce.

To determine where this robbery happened, they turned to a hypothetical

candy and ice cream store.

Suppose that there is a general complaint that where you buy your

confections they charge such high prices that you are robbed. Will those

who have no money to spend there be robbed? All agree the answer is “No”

[The more they spend, the more they are robbed.] … Is it possible to

explain that one class with plenty of money, and spending plenty of it,

lives without working by assuming that when people go to buy they are

robbed by high prices? And so these 12-year-old economists conclude that

the gypping of the working class must be perpetuated by the time the

worker gets his paycheck, that “exploitation occurs predominantly at the

point of production.”

Similarly, students tackled the problem of unemployment, proving

somewhat more astute than the U.S. Congress. When faced with the fact

that 12 million lacked jobs, while 28 million worked for nine hours a

day, they treated the problem as a simple mathematical problem,

concluding that a six-hour day would allow for full employment.

While the four-week summer program classes were structured by the WPC

staff, students took charge of organizing social and recreational

activities, putting their lessons in running meetings and organizing to

practical use. Worker-students in the regular program played a more

active role, helping arrange the curriculum, organizing the evening

debates and lectures (as well as entertainments), and handling conflicts

and discipline.

Work People’s College had neither traditional tests not grades nor

diplomas. The faculty were not academics, but rather workers with many

years’ experience as wage slaves and in labor agitation.

While there was a schedule of classes, Thompson recalled, there was

little lecturing.Rather, students were encouraged to hunt up information

and present it in the form of debates, soapbox talks, articles and

skits, many of which found their way into the pages of the IWW press. (A

WPC theater troupe also regularly toured northern Minnesota and Upper

Michigan, performing for immigrant and labor groups.) One of those

plays, “Banker’s Island,” told the story of three workers stranded on an

island with a banker who used his supply of gold to get them to build

him a home and provide him with the necessities of life. But they

organized when the banker decreed that they could not eat the bounty on

“his” island without paying for it, and reorganized things to suit

themselves. After a few days the boss capitulated, agreeing to wash the

dishes in exchange for an equal share of the food.

Regular classes ended in 1941 (the summer program continued for a few

years) and the army seized the campus during World War II. WPC did not

reopen, and its building was sold in 1953.