ABSTRACT
Albert C. Barnes' goal was not simply to produce better employees. It was to produce happier people, that is, people with more options and more resources, by providing his employees with something quite like a liberal education. The trinity of classic American philosophers should be considered, therefore, not only as the sources of Barnes’s inspiration for his workplace experiment in education but also for the experiment in art education he made in Merion. In education, John Dewey insisted on combining instruction with doing and linked the development of an individual’s cultural interests with the development of his or her problem-solving skills. George Santayana, who studied at Harvard with William James, said the central challenge facing men and women, as creatures of nature, was to live rationally in an irrational world. As Barnes had recognized the beauty of black song, the woman he had handpicked to carry out his pedagogical experiment recognized the beauty of black speech.
