John Dewey devoted a chapter in Democracy and Education to “The Vocational Aspects of Education.” He could scarcely have avoided the subject. For several years he had both observed and participated in a contentious debate, one more intense than anything before or since, over the relationship between school and work.Footnote ¹ Issues raised during the debate, which culminated in passage of the Smith-Hughes Act in 1917, shaped Dewey's positions in Democracy and Education.Footnote ² Although the Smith-Hughes Act authorized federal appropriations for states, on a dollar-matching basis, to hire teachers for agricultural, home economics, and industrial education in public schools of “less than college grade,” advocates for industrial education powered the engine that drove the law.

That Dewey deplored this law was no surprise. He had repeatedly tangled with educators who equated industrial education with narrow trade training that was written into the law. Even before President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill into law, Dewey announced that the law would initiate a clash between “irreconcilably opposed industrial and educational ideals.”Footnote ³ In Democracy and Education, Dewey argued that the battle between industrial and educational ideals was really a conflict between rival philosophies. What he labeled the industrial ideal rested on a philosophical disjunction between theory and practice. The “bodies most active” in designing the Smith-Hughes Act liked cold facts, the colder the better. They routinely blasted advocates of the “general,” “academic,” or “cultural” curriculum as reactionaries who saturated public education with too much theory and too little practicality, and they associated theory with an educational establishment that served the leisure classes, who had the time and money to indulge their interest in cultural values detached from daily life.Footnote ⁴ Practice, in contrast, became the preserve of ordinary Americans who could not afford to keep their children in school beyond age sixteen. Originally entitling his book “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education” (this became its subtitle), Dewey aimed to equip public school officials and teachers with an understanding of the learning process that would enable them to bridge the stark dualisms that permeated the industrial ideal and to recognize that the advocates of “real” vocational education were themselves in the grip of wildly impractical theories.Footnote ⁵

Tension between theory and practice had long characterized industrial education, which in 1870 connoted two separate traditions. One tradition, the diffusion of “useful knowledge,” threaded the antebellum mechanics’ institutes to the Morrill or Land-Grant College Act of 1862, whose stated goal was “the liberal and practical education of the agricultural and industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.”Footnote ⁶ Insisting that knowledge of theory would improve the practice of any trade, adherents of this tradition sought to raise the status of “mechanics” by elevating their minds through instruction in science. Education was to be both “liberal and practical.” Focusing on narrow trade training for paupers; criminals; delinquents; and, after the Civil War, freedmen, proponents of the other tradition of industrial education envisioned job training as both an agency of economic self-sufficiency and a means of correcting character flaws by instilling orderly and industrious habits. After 1870 the movement for manual training high schools, which sought to reform secondary education by introducing handicrafts into the curriculum, revealed an additional motive for industrial education: nostalgia for a passing age of artisans. Educators debated whether manual training high schools should primarily aim at trade training, at preparing students for specific occupations for which demand was robust; or at reviving respect for traditional arts and crafts in the machine age. These schools did a little of each but not enough of either to satisfy critics.Footnote ⁷

Trade training, this history shows, became more respectable when linked to some higher motive like science, theory, or even nostalgia. It had to become something that was not exactly trade training. History nevertheless indicated that attempts to dignify trade training yielded low enrollments. Between the 1860s and the 1890s, a score of states made manual labor compulsory in the land-grant colleges, partly to head off criticism of silk-hatted and kid-gloved professors of agriculture and partly to reassure farmers that the colleges welcomed their children.Footnote ⁸ Yet enrollments in the colleges’ agriculture courses remained low. Manual training high schools faced a similar problem: a negligible number of graduates of manual training high schools entered manual trades.Footnote ⁹ After 1900, seething dissatisfaction with manual training ushered in a long campaign in which new groups issued stark demands for “real” vocational education, for trade training undiluted by symbolic moralism about the regenerating effects of craftsmanship.

The spark that elevated trade training to the forefront of conflict over education was the widely circulated 1906 report of Massachusetts's Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, also known as the Douglas Commission; and, specifically, a 100-page report of a subcommittee on “The Relation of Children to the Industries,” written by Susan M. Kingsbury, a pioneer in social investigation.Footnote ¹⁰ Kingsbury and her team of highly educated women charted the work experiences of over 5,500 children in factories around the state and then pronounced the years from fourteen to sixteen as “wasted.” If hired at all, children who dropped out of school at fourteen or younger were restricted to unskilled, dead-end jobs.Footnote ¹¹ Recognizing that employers preferred to hire children at sixteen rather than fourteen, the report defended industrial education on the grounds that its relevance to children's immediate future would arouse their interest and encourage them to persist in school.

While the Douglas Commission focused on the job market, contemporaneous studies of “retardation” by E. L. Thorndike and Leonard Ayres punctured cherished beliefs about persistence in school. Thorndike acknowledged that he had expected to find that most children who left school at thirteen or fourteen had completed the eighth grade. In reality, he discovered, only one-third of pupils who started in first grade completed the eighth grade. Many of these non-graduates were still in school but overage for their grades. In Cincinnati, Ayres discovered that nearly one-third of fourteen-year-olds in elementary schools had yet to reach the sixth grade. Ayres concluded that the public school curriculum was too difficult to be completed in eight years by the average child. Depressed by the difficulty of the school curriculum, fourteen-year-olds were abandoning school for the street trades—newsboys, messengers, bootblacks—and then graduating to juvenile delinquency or to jobs without prospect of advancement. The term “dropout” was coming into fashion.Footnote ¹²

Support for vocational education attracted a wide following in the lead-up to the Smith-Hughes Act. In 1906 the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), responding to growing fears of Germany as an industrial rival and to manufacturers’ complaints about a shortage of skilled labor, took the lead in organizing the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE) to coordinate a campaign for federal support for industrial education. Sponsored by the Commercial Club of Chicago, the 1911 lecture tour of the German educator Georg Kerschensteiner provided abundant information about Germany's system of technical education, including its continuation schools for the German equivalent of the dropout. The NSPIE increasingly reached out to the growing vocational education movement by broadening its agenda to include federal support for vocational education in agriculture and home economics, and by constructing a coalition of citizens with different ideologies and agendas who united behind proposals that appeared to offer something for nearly everyone. In addition to businessmen, the movement attracted support from farm groups eager for federal aid for agricultural education; labor leaders who, after initially opposing industrial education because it threatened to create a surplus of non-unionized workers, shifted to cautious support for a cause whose victory increasingly seemed inevitable; feminists who expected trade training to increase the bargaining power of working women; clubwomen in favor of federal aid for teachers of home economics to strengthen the rationale for keeping women in the home; and politicians like Senator Hoke Smith and Representative Dudley Hughes of Georgia, strong advocates of federal aid to agricultural education.Footnote ¹³

Despite the breadth of the coalition that advocated federal aid to vocational education, the Smith-Hughes Act was a victory for the NSPIE, or, more accurately, a faction of NSPIE activists led by Charles A. Prosser, who headed the Federal Board of Vocational Education (FBVE), established to supervise administration of the law. The son of an Indiana steelworker, Prosser held several teaching and administrative posts in Indiana, where he also served as a juvenile court judge. His dealings with delinquents led him to conclude that they wanted to learn a trade but found themselves blocked by “class education” in the shape of a public school curriculum suited only to the minority of young people who intended to persist in school beyond fourteen. In 1908 he enrolled as a graduate student at Teachers College, Columbia University, which awarded him a doctoral degree in 1915. Prosser soon made a name for himself as an avid supporter of federal aid for vocational education for both industry and agriculture, in the former case to match German investment in training its workers and in the latter case to train the stagnant farm population of the United States to become more productive so that it could meet the needs of urban America.Footnote ¹⁴ He served as executive secretary of the NSPIE from 1912 to 1915.

At Teachers College, Prosser became a friend of David Snedden, a fellow graduate student and zealot for “real” vocational education. To counter the tendency of vocational education to become “theoretic and bookish,” Snedden proposed in 1910 to begin industrial education with the simpler stages of productive work in a school, a shop, or a factory. The “individualism” of employers, he conceded, discouraged cooperative schemes in which the student alternated on a daily or weekly basis between school and shop. Hence the school would have to become nearly indistinguishable from a shop. It had to look like a shop and students would keep shop hours, wear shop clothes, produce marketable products, and perhaps share in the profits. Such a system would leave time, presumably in a classroom should one be found, for subjects related to the trade learned in the shop: applied science, economics, bookkeeping, and “the ethics of trade unionism.” Implementing such a plan, Snedden acknowledged, would require the complete separation of vocational from general education. This separation would nevertheless end the oppression of the children of “the rank and file” by the class with time and money for advanced education.Footnote ¹⁵

Snedden conceded that no way had “yet” been found to adapt this fantastic plan to the thousands of different trades practiced in urban America. But, in a sign of the speed with which vocational educators were mobilizing, a year earlier he had become Massachusetts's first commissioner of education, a post created in the wake of the Douglas Commission's report. Charged with appointing an assistant commissioner for industrial education, Snedden chose Prosser, who would eventually eclipse him as the leader of the industrial movement.Footnote ¹⁶ Prosser's detour to Massachusetts boosted his career. In 1914 he wrote the report of the congressionally appointed Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education, which foreshadowed provisions he would later write into the Smith-Hughes Act.

Several features of the Smith-Hughes Act reflected the influence of Snedden and Prosser, who was its main author. The law stipulated that at least one-third of federal appropriations for each state be spent on hiring vocational teachers for part-time schools for employed youths aged fourteen to eighteen. These schools or classes had to require a minimum of 144 hours of classroom instruction each year. Part-time schools of this type were known as continuation schools, or, more accurately, a type of continuation school that had been drawing favorable notices from educators and reformers since around 1910. In 1900 the term continuation school mainly signified an evening school for employed people beyond the compulsory school age, many in their late teens and twenties, who sought to advance in their day jobs or to change occupations.Footnote ¹⁷ No conflict existed between this type of school and Dewey's conception of democracy, which stressed that political democracy (equality before the law, elections, the free circulation of ideas) required its foundation on a social democracy in which experiences, including upward social mobility, also freely circulated and thereby discouraged society's stratification by social class. Between 1910 and 1917, however, seven states (and seventeen more in the wake of the Smith-Hughes Act) adopted legislation authorizing establishment of the type of continuation school favored by the Smith-Hughes Act.Footnote ¹⁸

More adaptable than any alternative to the goal of prolonging schooling until children reached sixteen, this type of continuation school drew support from public educators and reformers, including Dewey, who favored compulsory laws that required parents or guardians to keep their children in school until at least sixteen.Footnote ¹⁹ But the same laws, reflecting recognition of the high opportunity costs of prolonging education until sixteen, contained exceptions when the child was “lawfully employed” and/or when his labor was necessary to support himself or his family.Footnote ²⁰ Despite the conflicting pulls and pushes that permeated state school laws, a consensus was emerging by 1916 that children fourteen to sixteen should be either at school or at work.Footnote ²¹ In continuation schools they could be both.

Although Dewey saw the new type of continuation school as a hopeful development, stipulations written into the law by Prosser left him with dread for the future of public education. In his eyes, the naked “industrial” philosophy behind Smith-Hughes permeated the law's provisions for the qualifications of vocational teachers, its restrictions on the eligibility of vocational schools or classes for federal appropriations, and its stipulations about evening schools. To qualify as a vocational teacher, instructors had to have “experience in or contact with” the trade they taught. To receive benefits, schools or classes had to have as their “controlling purpose” to fit students for “useful employment.” Students preparing for work were required to devote not less than nine months and not less than thirty hours a week to “practical work on a useful or productive basis.” In response to a “siege” of questions from educators about the new law, a committee of the NSPIE on which Prosser and Snedden sat interpreted the stipulation that students preparing for work engage in practical work to mean that half the instructional time of students would have to be given to “actual practice” of a vocation on a useful or productive basis.Footnote ²² It is difficult to know how to interpret this. If a vocation was the same as an occupation, it no longer could be said that students in vocational schools were “preparing” for work. Prosser never clarified what he meant. Given his and Snedden's long-standing preference for making schools look like shops, he may have interpreted “practical work on a useful or productive basis” to require that students have gainful employment somehow inside or adjoining high schools. At the very least, Snedden and Prosser aimed at discouraging federal appropriations for schools that announced preparation for jobs as their controlling purpose but then engaged in “camouflage” rather than “real” industrial education.

From one perspective, continuation schools could be viewed as a temporary solution to an important tension between theory and reality. Dewey and his allies advocated prolonging schooling until sixteen or beyond, but high opportunity costs thwarted this in practice. In this sense, the continuation school was a stopgap measure, a way to provide education for employed children until the time came when more families could afford the opportunity costs of keeping their children in school until sixteen or beyond. But Prosser and Snedden maintained that, while general education was suitable for children under fourteen, the high school years were the time for serious vocational education for the “rank and file” of tomorrow. From this perspective, the continuation school looked less like a stopgap measure than as a permanent feature of the educational landscape, the best of all possible ways to manage the terminal education for children of “the rank and file.”Footnote ²³

An especially stark example of the law's “industrial” purpose lay in its restricting instruction in evening schools to subjects relevant to students’ daytime occupations. This stipulation, which eliminated any prospect that students could use classes funded by Smith-Hughes to change their occupations, struck Dewey as especially gratuitous. Why should it have mattered to the FBVE which vocation evening students beyond the compulsory school age studied? It mattered because evening students who shifted from job to job were substituting satisfaction of their personal ambition for society's need that they maximize their productivity. In this way, the law flatly contradicted Dewey's conception of a social democracy as acting morally when it allowed the free circulation of citizens.

Dewey did not have to wait for the enactment of Smith-Hughes to identify the industrial philosophy behind it. Proposals to separate the administration of vocational education from supervision by general educators had already drawn him into the arena of conflict over policy. He was familiar with a bill in the Illinois legislature drafted by Edwin G. Cooley, a former superintendent of Chicago's schools, which proposed state assistance to vocational classes taught in existing public schools but supervised by an independent board rather than by the state board of education. In contemporary parlance, Cooley was proposing to substitute a “dual” for a “unit” system of control. Sparring with Snedden in the pages of the New Republic in 1915, Dewey opposed the dual system on the grounds that it would build a “fence” around industrial education and encourage social stratification by shrinking personal contact between children bound for the manual trades and all others.Footnote ²⁴

In Dewey's view, the separation of vocational from general education damaged each: the former by confining vocational education to narrow training for manual trades, the latter by ratifying the assumption that academic subjects had little connection to life's activities. He had long drawn on his early commitment to Hegelian idealism to bridge “philosophic dualisms,” pairs of words conventionally understood to signify such separate and contrasting entities as individual and community, theory and practice, and work and leisure. All of these dualisms “culminate in the antithesis of cultural and vocational education.”Footnote ²⁵ Dewey's bridging of dualisms rested on his demonstration that apparently opposite terms made sense only when their relationship was grasped. He argued, for example, that the experimental method of modern science had overcome the disjunction thought to exist between theory and practice in an earlier age, when physicians who comprehended theory looked down on barber-surgeons. To bridge the dualism between vocational and general education, Dewey defined a vocation as a satisfying “direction of life activities” and an occupation as “a continuous activity having a purpose,” terms sufficiently general to turn the student from an object of training into a subject whose growth in interest, capacity, and understanding of social relationships was the essence of education.Footnote ²⁶

Dewey recognized the issue that he faced at this juncture. In the machine age, the machine's operator “becomes identified with the monotonous movements of the monster he tends.”Footnote ²⁷ He accused the NSPIE of promoting trade training at a time when the advance of machinery was reducing the demand for craftsmen and enhancing demand for unskilled labor (the automobile was a complex piece of machinery, he observed, but 95 percent of the workers in factories producing the less-expensive models were unskilled). His solution was to merge general and industrial education by turning elements of the industrial economy, specifically those of scientific and social importance, into a curriculum that could serve the purposes of both general and vocational education. Despite the soulless monotony of unskilled labor in the modern industrial economy, the growth of machinery based on scientific discoveries in physics and chemistry had exponentially enhanced “the intellectual possibilities of industry.”Footnote ²⁸ Harnessing these progressive features of industry for educational purposes required studying the most important processes of contemporary farming, manufacturing, and transportation in order to identify the “fundamental and general elements” that compose them.Footnote ²⁹

Dewey hoped that teenagers would find the study of modern industrial relationships sufficiently interesting to persist in school at least until sixteen and preferably until eighteen. In his view, coupling “vocational education” with teaching any trade that could be learned before the age of eighteen or twenty was an oxymoron.Footnote ³⁰ Dewey stated that he was not sufficiently in love with the industrial regime to want to adapt young people to it. Prolonged schooling alone would equip young people with information to make wise decisions about entry into the job market and to practice initiative on the job, even if by just expressing discontent at “whatever subordinates mental capacity to merely external regulation.”Footnote ³¹ He distrusted “real” vocational education as a cloak for business leaders in search of access to cheap labor.Footnote ³²

Dewey's “new kind of general education” was far more compatible with “unit” than with “dual” control of education. But he may have chosen the wrong battlefield. It was a sign of the increasing influence of Snedden and Prosser that they could achieve their goals under the unit system merely by gaining decisive influence in legislatures and on state boards of education. In 1913 Indiana passed a Vocational Education Act that included industrial, agricultural, and “domestic” education under the rubric of vocational education and authorized state aid to vocational classes in day high schools, evening schools, and part-time day schools, all under the control of the state board of education. Prosser, at the time secretary of the NSPIE, applauded the work of his home state's legislature for having passed the “most comprehensive” vocational law yet enacted.Footnote ³³ He did not mention that the state board of education had recently been reorganized to include several sympathizers with “real” vocational education. Prosser correctly foresaw that the Cooley bill, still languishing in the Illinois legislature in the face of opposition from unions and civic groups, would never pass. Although Indiana vested overall control of public education, including vocational education, in the same board responsible for general education, it hardly mattered. The 1913 law stipulated that vocational classes receiving aid in high schools have a separate head, corps of teachers, and course of instruction; that all vocational courses be taught by instructors with experience in the vocation they were teaching; and that all general education courses had to be taught from the “vocational point of view.” In effect, the law brought the Cooley bill in by the back door.

Aware that vocational educators were seeking federal aid, Dewey recognized that provisions of state laws were likely to foreshadow the eventual provisions of a federal law. One provision of the Indiana law, which clearly prefigured a similar provision written by Prosser into the Smith-Hughes Act, restricted state aid to vocational classes or schools on the condition that the instruction “deals with the subject matter of the day employment.” (The equivalent provision in Smith-Hughes imposed the same condition on evening classes.) Lest there be any doubt about the intention of this restriction, Indiana's state board of education issued an “official” interpretation of the law, which, after conceding the importance of assisting workers “who have got into blind alley jobs to fit themselves for more skilled occupations,” decreed that “a school having this aim cannot be state aided.” To illustrate, the official interpretation of the law stated that “a practical farmer would not be eligible to enter a class in plumbing.” Reflecting the fear of the law's authors that general educators would find ways to deflect the course of “real” vocational education, the law prohibited funding any school “giving general or prevocational courses designed to enable students to test and determine their vocational aims, or to lay a necessary or helpful basis for future vocational work.”Footnote ³⁴

Reading this, Dewey could scarcely believe his eyes. He quoted the state board's interpretation at considerable length, lest, he assured his readers, they conclude that he was making it up. What astounded him most was the restriction on state aid to vocational classes to those who had made known their intent or who had already chosen their specific employment. The debate swirling around blind-alley jobs was a debate about the jobs held by fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, whose jobs, as Dewey recognized, rarely required skill. He could see no logic in compelling them to attend classes on the sort of work they were doing, the more so since accident usually governed their selection of those jobs.

Prosser's fingerprints were all over the law.Footnote ³⁵ To Dewey, everything about the law exemplified “theory run mad.”Footnote ³⁶ It buttressed his view that philosophical differences were at the root of contemporary conflicts over education and that public educators had to be equipped with democratic arguments to counter vocational educators, who saw themselves as public education's only real democrats and who sought to monopolize practicality.

Superficially, it is hard to imagine two educators less inclined to theory than Prosser and Snedden. Yet Dewey unhesitatingly described the law as “essentially theoretical,” partly on the basis of a process of elimination: no law so breathtakingly impractical could be anything other than theoretical. The restriction of vocational classes to instruction in the day jobs of students—a feature of both the Indiana law and Smith-Hughes's provisions for evening classes—presumed a pool of workers within each town or city sufficiently large to enable the restriction of classes to those already employed in their chosen occupation. In each Indiana town there would have to be enough young plumbers, carpenters, coopers, and wheelers to justify a separate class for each. Dewey thought that no town or city in Indiana, with the possible exception of Indianapolis, had a large enough population to implement the law.Footnote ³⁷

In fact, Snedden and Prosser carried a lot of philosophical baggage.Footnote ³⁸ In 1925 Prosser boiled down his philosophy into sixteen “theorems.” Reduced to essentials, these theorems advanced a string of assertions: (1) that all job training had to be specific to the employment in which one was engaged at the time of the training (no skills or interests could be transferred from one occupation to another); (2) that for the successful employment of any job the student must use in the classroom the same tools he would use on the job; (3) that the efficiency of vocational education was precisely proportioned to the extent to which the learner was trained in an exact replica of the environment in which he would subsequently work; (4) that there was a single best way to perform each trade; and (5) that the road to peak performance lay in dividing each occupation into its component activities and then measuring each in order to discover the most efficient measure of its performance.Footnote ³⁹

Ironically, the first three of these theorems reflected the theory of transfer advanced by Dewey's friend and Columbia colleague E. L. Thorndike. In 1901 Thorndike and Robert S. Woodworth summarized the results of experiments to determine the extent to which improvement in one function (e.g., estimating the area of rectangles of 10 to 100 square centimeters) could lead to improvement in related functions (e.g., estimating the area of larger rectangles and of circles and trapezoids of similar size). They concluded that, while training could improve a subject's performance on one function, improvement in one function did not necessarily lead to improvement in related functions like estimating the area of larger triangles or of trapezoids or circles. Although the similarity between the situations tested influenced the amount of transfer, the transfer was meager in all situations.Footnote ⁴⁰

Thorndike's theory of transfer placed him in the vanguard of Progressive Era education. It cast doubt on the idea that knowledge was divisible into a hierarchy of subjects, with those more difficult judged worthier because they enhanced a transferable power of mental discipline. And it supported the view of educators who sought ways to reduce the high rates of attrition and retardation in public schools, which Thorndike had documented, by introducing subjects in which average and even below-average students could succeed. Along with Snedden, who had taken Thorndike's course at Columbia, Prosser combined the law of transfer with Thorndike's law of use, formulated in 1913, which stated that once a person makes a response to a situation, it becomes more likely that that the same situation will again elicit the same response and that each subsequent occasion of the response will strengthen the connection.Footnote ⁴¹ Prosser deployed these widely circulating theories, which Thorndike related to the learning processes of children, to establish that the “fundamentals” of thinking and doing peculiar to one trade were inapplicable to every other trade.Footnote ⁴² So much for Dewey's “industrial intelligence.”

Prosser recognized his debt to Frederick W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911) for the last two of the aforementioned theorems. Taylor described how pig iron handling, seemingly far from science, could be turned into a science once each component of the activity had been identified and timed. Even “Schmidt,” the imagined dullard described by Taylor as sufficiently stupid to choose pig iron handling as an occupation, could become a participant in science.Footnote ⁴³ Along the same line, Prosser claimed to see no difference between the principles used to educate surgeons and those applied to educating tinsmiths. Reduce each occupation to its component activities and then drill the student to repeat what he had just learned and the result would be an efficient surgeon or tinsmith, efficient in the sense that he would perform more surgeries correctly or produce a greater number of tin products.Footnote ⁴⁴

This does not mean that Prosser thought that anyone could be a surgeon. He repeatedly claimed that the purpose of industrial education was to render each worker “maximally productive,” which required a “specific efficiency” unique to each trade. Although requirements in ability differed from occupation to occupation, each occupation, no matter how unskilled, could be performed with more benefit to the public once it had been sliced into teachable units. A night watchman could be trained to stay awake and to be alert, a cement mixer to know the correct proportion of water and sand in mixing cement. Mistakes in the form of warehouse fires and collapsed buildings cost society millions of dollars each year.Footnote ⁴⁵

The propensity of Prosser and Snedden to subdivide trades into ever-smaller activities to facilitate instruction knew no bounds. In 1913 Prosser described the “short-unit” course, which attempted in a limited number of lessons to serve the needs of tradesmen within each occupation, as the ideal vehicle of industrial education. He gave examples. Maintaining orchards could be subdivided into sixteen courses (e.g., orchard insects, orchard spraying, orchard pruning), each with anywhere from one to twenty lessons. Mailmen would take separate courses on registered letters, special delivery, and mail rates, each in five to ten lessons. Janitors would master separate courses on elevators, dumb waiters, and fire escapes; waitresses on cleaning floors and setting tables.Footnote ⁴⁶ For his part, Snedden increasingly imagined a future in which the nation would be dotted with residential training centers where short-unit courses would equip individuals with new skills as they shifted from job to job, much as gas stations served motorists with a topped off tank.Footnote ⁴⁷

Ultimately, Prosser and Snedden's obsession with fragmenting occupations into discrete, teachable activities proved self-defeating. By 1925, when Prosser published his sixteen theorems, an industry of testing for vocational interests and aptitudes and also for IQ had sprung into existence. Prosser believed that some minimum intelligence was necessary for each occupation; so one might expect that he would be sympathetic to using IQ tests, or at least aptitude tests, to select workers. But Prosser, who never ran out of corners into which to paint himself, also maintained that there was little point in testing applicants for vocational aptitudes or IQ until each occupation had been standardized to the point where all carpenters, electricians, cement mixers, trolley car conductors, and farmers performed exactly the same tasks throughout the nation, an objective, he conceded, which would never be reached.Footnote ⁴⁸

Prosser's obsession with “real” industrial education turned the Smith-Hughes Act into a legal straightjacket and ensured that implementing its provisions for industrial education would prove a fiasco. As school persistence among teenagers rose in the early 1920s, the FBVE had difficulty finding enough part-time schools to fund. The school of the future turned out to be the comprehensive high school rather than the continuation school. Inasmuch as the law specifically ruled out spending federal funds on buildings and equipment, states would have to pay for shop-like conditions to enable “practical work on a useful or productive basis,” an absurdity even before considering the three thousand occupations eligible for federal funding. The law's stress on securing teachers with experience in the occupation taught conflicted with state laws specifying qualifications for teachers that could only be met in a teacher-training institute.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Smith-Hughes Act, the first time the federal government supported a segment of the public schools, owed its existence to a broadly based movement. A tiny circle of activists, however, determined its ideologically driven contents, which distanced it not only from Dewey but also from the larger vocational education movement. The broader movement accommodated testing children for vocational aptitudes and preferences and “pre-vocational” courses to aid children in choosing a vocation, the sort of activities that Prosser and Snedden dismissed as a tasty cultural confection rather than the real thing. In retrospect, Prosser and Snedden's ideas seem extreme and even fanatical.

One is tempted to write Prosser and Snedden off as a sectarian fringe of the vocational movement, but their influence made them more like a sectarian core. Their careers intersected several developments of the Progressive Era. All of the principal figures in this essay had a connection to Columbia University (Columbia College until 1894). With the inauguration of Nicholas Murray Butler as its president in 1902, the institution did much to live up to its new title. Dewey transferred his flag from the University of Chicago to Columbia in 1904. Born in 1870, Susan M. Kingsbury searched for an intellectual vocation suited to her education and discovered it at Columbia, which awarded her a PhD in history in 1895. While researching her dissertation on the Virginia Company of London, she became acquainted in England with the social investigations of Beatrice Webb and the cost-of-living studies of Seebohm Rowntree. Upon receiving her degree, the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education asked her to investigate the relation of children to industries, a topic with considerably more resonance among her contemporaries than the Virginia Company of London.Footnote ⁵⁰ Snedden and Prosser met at Teachers College, which had evolved from the “Kitchen Education Society” (1880), a philanthropic initiative that aimed at providing miniaturized kitchen utensils for the toys that kindergarten-aged girls played with, to the Industrial Education Association (1884), which offered courses in cooking, clay modeling, and industrial drawing (by now it admitted boys) to the New York School for the Training of Teachers in 1888 (headed by Butler), to Teachers College in 1892.Footnote ⁵¹

Thorndike received his PhD from Columbia in 1898, having worked under James McKeen Cattell, a pioneer in psychometrics. Thorndike would apply “metrics” to his study of the retardation of pupils, which brought unprecedented sophistication to educational bookkeeping and which did much to acquaint Americans with the problem of the dropout. In 1899 he accepted a newly minted professorship of psychology at Teachers College, where he elevated the hitherto neglected field of the psychology of learning to the forefront of American psychology, and where his career would intersect that of Snedden, who took Thorndike's course and taught at Teachers College before moving to Massachusetts; and Dewey, who came at the learning process from the direction of philosophy rather than psychology.Footnote ⁵²

The foregoing analysis helps us explain why the conflict over vocational education arose when it arose. Large-scale industrialization had been had been devaluing skilled labor at least since the early 1880s, but the timing and texture of the debate over “real” vocational education cannot be explained by pointing to developments much before the late 1890s. Everything important that was said during the debate had been said before passage of the Smith-Hughes Act; the aftermath of this law involved details of administration more than principle.

Participants in this debate frequently professed to misunderstand each other. This is unsurprising, for all parties shared a rhetoric that acted to obscure deep divisions. From the Morrill Act to the Smith-Hughes Act, educators and public officials proclaimed that only useful and practical education suited the American republic. Justin Morrill would likely have agreed with Dewey's proclamation that “the only adequate training for occupations is training through occupations,” but it is hard to imagine Morrill understanding Dewey's reasoning.Footnote ⁵³ The absorptive nature of republican language attracted iconic progressives with different agendas to the cause of industrial education. Both Jane Addams and Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin and earnest admirer of Robert La Follette, addressed the NSPIE. Charles A. McCarthy, author of The Wisconsin Idea (1912) and director of Wisconsin's Legislative Reference Bureau, served alongside Prosser and Snedden on the NSPIE's committee charged with explaining the Smith-Hughes Act to the public. So did John A. Lapp, director of Indiana's Legislative Reference Bureau, who had aggressively lobbied for Indiana's Vocational Education Act of 1913, the law whose logic struck Dewey as both “essentially theoretical” and incomprehensible.

A year after passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, the National Education Association's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education's report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (CPSE), provided the founding rationale for the comprehensive high school.Footnote ⁵⁴ Written by Clarence Kingsley, another of Snedden's former assistants in Massachusetts, CPSE earned Snedden's approval for making vocational education one of its cardinal principles and for stating the vocational teachers had to be “proficient” in the trades they taught, Snedden's anger for preferring the unit over the dual system for administering vocational education, and his fury for stating that the obligation of high schools to teach vocations had to depend on the nature of the vocation and the availability of facilities.Footnote ⁵⁵ Kingsley sounded like Dewey when he stressed the importance of connecting trade training to broader industrial and community relationships and when he endorsed Dewey's definition of education as a process of growth. But Kingsley's cardinal principles blandly substituted the slicing of education into discrete objectives—health, command of fundamental processes, vocation, worthy home membership, civic responsibility, worthy use of leisure, and ethical character—for Dewey's bridging of disjunctions.Footnote ⁵⁶

Who won this debate? Not Snedden, who realized that the comprehensive high school would never embrace “real” vocational education. Not Prosser, whose dream of intertwined schools and factories to prepare adolescents for “maximal productivity” and early entrance into the industrial workforce evaporated with collapsing demand during the Depression. Demand for a more productive workforce rose with wartime mobilization in the 1940s, but the Training Within Industry (TWI) program, initiated in 1940 and influenced by Charles R. Allen, Prosser's occasional coauthor, owed nothing to vocational education. Vocational graduates were put through the same training program as all others.Footnote ⁵⁷ And not Dewey, who interpreted the Smith-Hughes Act as the final triumph of his adversaries.

Perhaps it is unwise to think of winners who leave a significant imprint on institutions and losers who fail to do so. Each participant in the debate over “real” vocational education later adapted his rhetorical strategy and ideological stance to very different circumstances. For example, Prosser never abandoned his belief that high schools needed to adjust teenagers to the conditions that they would immediately face on leaving school, but after 1945 he became a leader in the life-adjustment movement, which substituted training youth in personality, etiquette, and skills relevant to marriage and child-raising for training in productivity. Dewey's defeat in 1917 scarcely diminished his influence. But with swelling enrollments in comprehensive high schools in the 1920s and 1930s, the focus of debate shifted from unit versus dual control over vocational education, the issue that had launched Dewey into the forum, to whether rising levels of educational attainment, which Dewey expected to erode class stratification, could offset the stratifying effect of class-based tracking within comprehensive high schools. Two decades after passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, Dewey was still the leading proponent of the view that democracy depended on an educational environment that encouraged “social interplay and modification of one group by another.”Footnote ⁵⁸