Adam Smith feared industrial labor would degenerate workers’ minds without education

Evidence

The minds … of the great body of the people are in danger of really degenerating, while the other elements of civilization are advancing, unless care is taken, by means of the other instruments of education, to counteract those effects which the simplifications of the manual processes has a tendency to produce. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 292

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adam Smith’s worry that the division of labor stultifies workers — the same concern Marx later developed into alienation theory. — connects to: Education can nurture workers unwilling to accept workplace domination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 249; Industrialized labor destroys manual skill and familiarity with things — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2307
• SEED: Angle: the intellectual genealogy of ‘education as remedy for the stupor of work’ — from Smith to modern remedial-training-for-automation discourse.

Broader Connections

• Education can nurture workers unwilling to accept workplace domination #expands (0.85) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 249
• Industrialized labor destroys manual skill and familiarity with things #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2307