Education has long been a focal point of debate across U.S. society. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the country’s evolving industrial economy necessitated changes to the education system. Parents, students, government and business leaders, and community members questioned whether classical liberal arts – especially the study of Greek and Latin – were still useful to the growing multitude of factory workers and middle-class professionals. Connie Goddard’s Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity explores this fascinating period of educational change to show how industrial education kept students engaged and “enriched their opportunities to participate in a rapidly industrializing economy” (xiv). Goddard’s work is particularly timely as debates about the proper role of education in the post-industrial era continue to churn.
Goddard deploys a case study approach to examine Manual Training Industrial Education (MTIE) programs across the United States in the Progressive Era, looking closely at the Chicago Manual Training School (CMTS), the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth (MTIS) in Bordertown, New Jersey, and the Normal and Industrial School (NI) in Ellendale, North Dakota. This approach allows Goddard to compare how education strategies differed between programs addressed to Black students and white students, as well as those established in urban and rural settings.
The first half of Learning for Work centers on the CMTS, both during its independence and after its incorporation into the University of Chicago. Scholars of the era will not be surprised to find Chicago at the center of educational debates. Business leaders and intellectuals hoped to solve the ever-present “labor question” of the late nineteenth century by preparing the city’s youth for employment in the mechanical fields. Charles Ham deserves much of the credit at CMTS for pushing schools to, in his words, “make every worker a thinker and every thinker a worker,” in hopes of resolving the “struggle between labor and wealth” (49). Ham and CMTS found mixed results, however, between their male and female students’ job prospects. The school’s “carefully selected body of students” allowed education leaders to focus on middle-class boys (17). By becoming engineers, architects, and industrial supervisors, CMTS alumni entered the workforce in ways less likely to question the industrial economy’s stratifying hierarchy. At the same time, CMTS neither encouraged nor fostered female participation in the industrial workforce; instead, it encouraged the gendered spheres of labor through coursework in home economics. Goddard’s work acknowledges these gendered discrepancies, but more analysis could have been done to explore the gendered constraints of the schools’ structures.
The book shines in later chapters, as Goddard shifts away from Chicago to show how MTIS and the NI fostered democratic education for their student bodies. In New Jersey, MTIS “offered a democratic opportunity denied to many of their” Black students (92). Often compared in the literature to both the Tuskegee Institute and the Hampton Institute in Virginia, MTIS prepared Black youth, boys and girls, for non-agricultural careers, despite government plans to the contrary. Black students at Bordertown pushed back against the state’s top-down tactics to pursue stable careers and professional education beyond MTIS’s walls. Goddard focuses heavily on James Gregory, the longtime head of MTIS, although this reader would have liked to have learned more about the students themselves.
Goddard then returns to the Midwest and the NI in North Dakota. The success of industrial education in both urban Chicago and rural Ellendale highlights the centrality of the Midwest to progressive change. The NI arose shortly after the Dakota boom of the 1880s, when settlers from nearby states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois demanded well-trained teachers to educate their children. As a result, NI filled an important role, training educators capable of teaching both manual and fine arts classes. Goddard stresses that North Dakota residents wanted to live off their own labors and be well-rounded citizens. Graduates of NI maintained their middle-class status and provided opportunities for less-privileged students in rural parts of the state. As in Bordertown, this focus on teacher training resulted from educational leaders “going where the crowd pushed” and responding to the demands and desired outcomes of their students (136).
Beyond the book’s insights into educational development, Goddard speaks to the ways in which female reformers used educational opportunities to break out of domestic space in the Progressive Era. This process was often transnational. Lillian Tingle, for example, studied in Germany prior to her arrival in Ellendale. Ina Randall, another Ellendale instructor, became “quite the ardent feminist” when she stressed that “Industrial training demands that male and female education be placed side by side” and “no land will be what it ought to be until woman is given opportunity for a thorough education with man” (140). Manual education in Ellendale provided ample opportunities for women to lay claim to their futures through stable employment. By 1912, the graduating class of NI was thirty-one women to fifteen men, suggesting that many women grasped the opportunity. Many of NI’s graduates, Goddard hypothesizes, may have left the Midwest to found schools across the American West. The federal Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 funded the salaries of manual and industrial school instructors. Therefore, the Progressive Era’s impacts in the realm of education lingered well beyond World War I. In the present day, in fact, Congress continues to appropriate funds for Smith-Hughes.
After reading the book, questions remain. Where did NI teachers travel to and bring their expertise after graduation? If they went west, that answer would draw the West and Midwest closer together in terms of their educational experiences. Goddard focuses on three schools in the North, but how did these educational ideas fare in other parts of the country? These questions do not detract from Goddard’s work. On the contrary, they are a testament to the book’s strength. Learning to Work will surely inspire conversations around technical education in the United States and serve as a launching pad for further studies of education as a “living symbol of democracy” during the Progressive Era (128). This book also provides a vision for what education could be at its best: a process that listens and responds to students’ desires, rather than market demands, and gives them the tools – both mental and technical – to find their place beyond the classroom walls.
