Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674492868, 9780674492851

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A publication of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University

Origins of the Urban School

Origins of the Urban School Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915

Marvin Lazerson

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1971

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-168433 SBN 674-64482-4 Printed in the United States of America

For Judy

Contents Introduction

ix

Acknowledgments

xix

Chapter I II

The Burden of Urban Education

1

The Kindergarten: Childhood and Social Reform

36

III

Manual Training: The Search for an Ideology .

74

IV

Manual Training and the Restoration of Social Values

V

97

From the Principles of Work to the Teaching of Trades

132

VI

The Politics of Vocationalism

155

VII

Vocationalism and Equality of

VIII IX

Educational Opportunity

179

The Quest for Citizenship

202

The Shape of Urban Education: A Retrospect .

241

Bibliographic Note

260

Index

275

vii

Introduction This study treats the assumptions, ideologies, and practices of the generation of educators who shaped America's city schools. It is concerned primarily with the way in which late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schoolmen viewed existing conditions, what they thought urbanization and industrialism meant, and how they tried to integrate the schools into a changing environment. Drawing extensively upon the experience of ten Massachusetts cities— Boston, Cambridge, Fall River, Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, Springfield, and Worcester—the reports and publications of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and other documents on education from national, state, and local sources,1 it focuses on the kindergarten, manual training, vocational education, evening schools, and citizenship education. These activities by no means encompass all the changes of those years, but they were significant in the transformation of the urban school. Initiative for reform often came from nonprofessionals—philanthropists, social reformers, immigrant groups—but no reform was implemented or in some measure shaped without the participation of those directly involved in running the schools. And, rarely have reforms had such a continuing influence. The decisions taken at the turn of the century created our modern urban school system; we continue to function under their impact. Assuming that New England society had once been homogeneous, its institutions balanced and sharing in the education of all individuals, late nineteenth-century reformers believed that a prior social harmony had been rudely shattered. Ambivalent about industrialism and hostile to the 1

Annual Reports of school committees, mayors' inaugural addresses, and other government agency documents were published in the town of origin unless otherwise cited. The annual report of the State Board of Education was published in Boston. The year cited in the annual reports refers to the academic or fiscal year being discussed, although the publication date may actually be a subsequent year. For these reasons, the places and dates of publication for these reports have not been included in the notes.

ix

Introduction city, they turned to the schools to preserve the social and moral characteristics they thought existed at an earlier period. The emergence of the factory and its unskilled labor force and the disappearance of the apprenticeship system, they argued, necessitated manual education to teach individuals the values of honest labor—industriousness, thrift, and self-pride. Kindergartens would reshape urban family life and the immigrant community by educating the young and by teaching parents the mores and behavior patterns of the traditional home. Literacy and patriotism taught in evening schools and community centers would inculcate the essentials of citizenship and would thus bring cohesion to a heterogeneous urban population. In practice, this optimism in the school's ability to reshape the urban environment was difficult to retain. Educational reforms did not eliminate the problems of the city or industry. Family life among the poor still seemed anarchic. The streets continued to be filled with youths who dropped out of school as soon as it was possible legally to do so. Manual training did not produce any clear relationship between a skilled, efficient work force and the schools, and, indeed, serious questions were raised as to whether simple exercises in wood were the best means of preparing individuals for labor in the industrial economy. Confronted by these dilemmas, Massachusetts' schoolmen moved away from the notion of using the school to institute broad social change to the idea that schooling should fit the child into the new industrial order. School reformers argued for vocational education rather than manual training: their expressed goal was to prepare the individual for particular jobs in the economy rather than to teach a set of moral values. Prevocational classes and vocational guidance were emphasized for their ability to direct the child into the proper economic role he was to play. By 1915 two central themes had thus become apparent in Massachusetts' city schools. One drew upon the reform ferments of the decades between 1870 and 1900 and saw education as the basis of social amelioration. The school would reach out to uplift the poor, particularly through

X

Introduction

xi

new techniques to teach traditional moral values. The second theme, increasingly prominent after 1900, involved an acceptance of the industrial order and a concern that schools mirror that order. It made the school's major function the fitting of the individual into the economy. By the teaching of specific skills and behavior patterns, schools would produce better and more efficient workers and citizens, and they would do this through a process of selection and guidance. These developments would transform the idea of equality of educational opportunity in America for they made segregation—by curriculum, social class, projected vocational role—fundamental to the workings of the school. Between 1870 and 1920 modern America emerged. During those years the United States became the world's leading industrial power, possessing about one-third its manufacturing capacity. A parochial and fragmented economy was replaced by highly integrated and national economic structures, increasingly dominated by large corporate enterprises. As the United States went from a debtor to creditor nation in the world market, foreign affairs assumed permanent domestic importance. During these years, too, America decisively became an urban nation. This was largely the result of migration—from farm to city, from Europe to the United States. For every ten new city dwellers in the decade 1900-1910, four were non-American immigrants, three were native-born from rural areas, and two came by natural increase. At least half the arrivals were thus non-American immigrants and their children, many from Eastern and Southern Europe. By 1920 it was clear that the newcomer and the city would dominate America's future development.2 Industrial and urban growth caused severe social dislocation, but they also led Americans toward a new social order. Poverty became a more widely acknowledged prob2

Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957); Douglass C. North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., PrenticeHall, 1966), pp. 149-164; Charles Glaab and Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (New York, Macmillan Co., 1967), pp. 107-166.

Introduction

xii

lem, and labor conflict and corporate violence increased. New welfare agencies appeared—juvenile courts, public health departments—that sought to apply humanity and expertise to complex social problems. More important for education and social services, a new middle class of professionals and specialists made the "values of continuity and regularity, functionality and rationality, administration and management" dominant. The complexities of industrialism and urban life placed a high priority on administrative ability. "The dictatorship of the clock and schedule," Oscar Handlin has noted, "became absolute."3 The schools, too, were reshaped to urban and industrial needs. By the 1870's public education was widely accepted as a necessary agent of citizenship training and moral learning. It provided the setting within which a diverse society could be harmonized, and economic growth enhanced. Yet in the last decades of the century the schools came under bitter attack for their irrelevance: They were inadequately integrated to the new industrial economy. They failed to assume sufficient responsibility for social problems. They did not effectively teach patriotism to the foreign-born. Their administrative structures were neither economical nor efficient. The critics charged that an ossified pedagogy and curriculum, overcrowded and unsanitary facilities, poorly trained teachers, political influence, and inadequate financing had combined to create a disjunction between social needs and the public school.4 3

4

Oscar Handlin, "The Modern City as a Field of Historical Study," in Handlin and John Burchard, The Historian and the City (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1963); Wiebe, Search, esp. pp. 111-132; Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in America (New York, N e w York University Press, 1966); Anthony M. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969). Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), pt. I; Oscar Handlin, John Dewey's Challenge to Education (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959); Henry Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education, 1865-1965 (New York, Random House, 1968).

Introduction

xiii

Such criticism inevitably raised questions about the functions of schooling: What knowledge was most worthwhile? Who should learn? How should they be taught? What responsibility should the school have? Critics asked for new instruments to enlarge the school's responsibilities and questioned whether traditional goals and methodologies should be retained. These demands that the school be relevant led to a variety of institutional and ideological reforms. To meet industrial needs, schools were urged to teach marketable skills and the values of industrial work. The business corporation became the model for a generation of educational administrators. Education was applied to the pathologies of urban life. Kindergartens would bring the young into the classroom, withdrawing them from the street and tenement and teaching them proper behavior. To overcome disease, both social and physical, children were washed and fed; cleanliness and full stomachs were the foundation of moral behavior. Manual training introduced work as a noble activity; the poor had to be taught that labor was more than a grubby struggle for existence. To become a citizen, one had to attend evening school, learn the history and civics of the textbooks, and give up one's allegiance to a prior culture and language. Evening social centers were opened to teach the poor the meaning of community, for kinship and voluntary social clubs no longer sufficed. Indeed, in their particularism such parochial groups were threatening. The response to urban ills led to a search for a more efficient melting pot. One of America's leading educators, Ellwood P. Cubberley, wrote that the schools had to "assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, popular government, and to awaken in them a reverence for our democratic institutions . . ." 5 6

Ellwood P. Cubberley, in Cremin, Transformation, p. 68; Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Introduction

xiv

Mass education required clearer assumptions about the school's role. The new ethic of bureaucratic efficiency provided a basis for increased supervision, professionalization, centralized, nonpartisan school boards, and the reorganization of school systems in accord with business models. In order to run their schools efficiently and to categorize students for their occupational roles, educators adopted selection and classification measures. They differentiated the curriculum and introduced vocational guidance and educational tests into their school systems.6 Little of this was entirely novel. Similar developments had occurred even before the Civil War.7 But not until after 1870 did schools touch the mass of Americans. Only Massachusetts had passed a compulsory attendance statute during the antebellum period, and that had been infrequently enforced. By World War I, however, every state had effectively asserted its authority. In 1870, 57 percent of the five- to seventeen-year-old population were enrolled in public day schools; fifty years later the proportion had almost reached 80 percent. High school enrollment increased even more sharply. Length of annual public-school attendance rose by more than 50 percent, expenditures annually by two-thirds, and the number of teachers from 200,000 to 700,000. What had been an amorphous collection of parochial and virtually autonomous agencies under the guidance of transient untrained teachers became an integrated system whose characteristics were strikingly similar across the nation, and whose tone was set by a professionally certified interest group. Whereas few normal schools existed prior to 1860, by 1900 almost every major city had a special school or program for supplying its teachers. Where one instructor had taught all ages and all subjects, urban schools now seg6

7

Perkinson, Imperfect Panacea, pp. 127-159; Michael B. Katz, "The Emergence of Bureaucracy: The Boston Case, 1850-1884," History of Education Quarterly, 8 (1968), 155-188, 319-357. See Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Re/orm: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968).

Introduction

XV

regated students by age and teachers by specialty, and their subject matter was standardized. One way to summarize these developments is this: the growth of a mass educational system intensified what had previously been a haphazard rationale for schooling—the concern for social problems—into a permanent and primary feature of American education. After 1900 the rhetoric of schooling less frequently offered the traditional justifications —intellectual and moral training—and instead gave increasing attention to meeting particular social demands. Any study that traces the development of American education at the turn of this century thus raises important questions about our contemporary situation. During those years our school system was established. What began then has been intensified and modified, but not significantly altered. Contemporary high schools, for example, are as easily understood by reading Robert and Helen Lynd's description of secondary schooling in Middletown during the 1920's as by seeing Joseph Wiseman's recent film High School. The social class bias and selectivity of American education were as clear in George Counts's 1922 study The Selective Character of American Secondary Education as they are today.8 Indeed, the parallels go deeper. It was between 1870 and 1920 that Americans pronounced the school the agency of widespread social change. Through schooling, the disorganization of the city, the plight of the impoverished, the assimilation of the newcomer, and the adjustments to an industrial economy would occur. With only slight alteration, that faith continues to underlie our educational commitments. Confronted by what they believed to be family life in disarray, which was a product of the urban environment and the ignorant poor, reformers supported kindergartens to teach the child how to behave and his parents 8

Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929), chaps. XIII-XVI; George S. Counts, The Selective Character of American Secondary Education (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1922).

Introduction

xvi

how to raise their children. The kindergarten's innovative pedagogical techniques—play, "warmth," physical activity —its supporters believed, would transform the elementary school. Those who had attended kindergarten asserted that their children would do better than nonkindergartentrained children in the later grades. It goes without saying that these assumptions pervade the contemporary preschool movement. 9 Striking, too, are similarities in the debates over vocational education. In the earlier period, the school dropout problem —limited job opportunities for the uneducated, loss to gross national product, the threat of delinquency among out-ofschool, unemployed youth—crystallized the vocational education movement. It remains a focus today. The disjunction between schooling and economic needs was offered then as a major argument in favor of job training in the schools, and while the gap between the school and the economy has never been closed, it remains a central rationale for vocational education. 10 Historical continuity and analogy, however, should not obscure the differences between past and present. An earlier generation of school reformers directed attention toward urban white, often European, migrants. Our primary concern today is with the black poor, resident in America for generations. The thrust of administrative reform after the turn of the century was toward centralization, integration, and standardization. Business models infused the reform ethic. Now reformers seek decentralization, less standardization, and less bureaucracy. The implementation of reform was still tentative early in this century; now it has been sanctified by more than a half century's practices. Teachers and administrators who once struggled for security now 0

10

Marvin Lazerson, "Early Childhood Education and Social Reform: Some Historical Perspectives," Urban Education, 5 (1970), 84-102. Berenice M. Fisher, Industrial Education: American Ideals and institutions (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Sol Cohen, "The Industrial Education Movement, 1906-1917," American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 95-110.

Introduction

xvii

have the power to control the implementation of reform. The schools have increased their importance as certifying agencies. Differences also exist in the nature of reform. Today's school critics are less certain about what is needed, more open to relativism and cultural pluralism than an earlier generation. The poor are better organized and more articulate, their leaders more openly mistrustful of public education. Yet even here differences can be overstated, for turn-of-the-century conflicts between Catholics and public schoolmen produced a viable parochial system, a testament to ethnic organization and hostility to public schools. It is unlikely that such a system could be established today without government support. The differences between past and present make clear that the educational historian takes great risks when he claims too much continuity. This study, then, attempts to understand the present through an examination of the past. Certain caveats should be entered, however. Massachusetts was not America in microcosm. More industrial and urbanized than most states, by 1870 it had already established its preeminence in the commitment to mass education. Private support for and philanthropic initiative in education were stronger there than elsewhere. Ethnic conflict accentuated the importance of Roman Catholic parochial schools. This study does not, moreover, examine all phases of schooling. Higher education, private schools, professionalization, and bureaucratization are slighted, as are questions about the role of business and labor in shaping these developments. Many questions about the impact of reform are untouched, especially the response of those being educated. This is, in essence, an examination of the ideology and institutionalization of Massachusetts' public education as seen by those most involved in running the schools: professional educators, school committees, and those reformers and philanthropists who significantly influenced the former two groups. The questions and answers raised here are only part of the story. They deal with the ways Massachusetts' schoolmen tried to

Introduction

xviii

comprehend urban and industrial life and adjust their institutions to it. What relationship to slum reform did the early childhood education movement have? Why and how were the schools adapted to the industrial economy, and with what implications for equality of educational opportunity? How did the ideology of Americanization emerge ? These are the focuses of this study. What happened in Massachusetts between 1870 and World War I is by no means the story of American education in those years. But the school systems created in the state were strikingly similar to those in other urban areas. The developments there are thus basic to understanding that period—and our present condition. M. L. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971

Acknowledgments No author completes his work without accumulating debts to individuals and institutions. Grants from the Bureau of Research of the United States Office of Education and a Samuel Stouffer Fellowship from the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies provided the funds and an intellectually exciting environment for research and writing. Dr. J. R. Hayden, Superintendent of Schools, New Bedford, and Mr. Ernest Jacoby, Director of the North Bennet Street Industrial School, provided access to important collections. The staffs of the Cambridge, Lynn, and New Bedford Public Libraries were hospitable on a number of occasions, while those at the Massachusetts State Library, the Harvard College Library, and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College proved of inestimable value. Kenneth Waltzer, Tamara Harevan, Daniel Horowitz, and Stephan Thernstrom commented on parts of the manuscript. My friend and former colleague, Robert L. Church, criticized the entire study. I am grateful to Oscar Handlin, whose mastery of American history, advice, and painstaking editorial concern helped bring this manuscript to fruition. During its final revisions, my colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and, particularly, David K. Cohen, Director of the Center for Educational Policy Research, consistently challenged me to see the contemporary implications of a historical monograph. Needless to say, none of the above should be held responsible for my interpretations. A somewhat different version of Chapter II appeared in the History of Education Quarterly. Finally, but hardly least, I want to give deep-felt thanks to my wife, Judith Schoenholtz Lazerson, for her patience, editorial incisiveness, and affection.

xix

Origins of the Urban School

I The Burden of Urban Education As the twentieth century approached, Massachusetts' educators were deeply troubled. The ideals of commonwealth, that blurring of distinctions between public needs and private desires, in which government acted as a copartner in the economic and social progress of society, had eroded even before the Civil War, but they had left behind a commitment by government to the welfare of its citizens. While Americans had engaged in a frenetic quest for individual achievement and thus social salvation, Massachusetts continued to affirm that society's advancement depended upon social balance and equity, achievable only when its constituents accepted certain common obligations. If the state had, in practice, lost its earlier role as the key participant in Massachusetts' economic growth, it nonetheless passed statutes and appointed commissions to preserve the responsibility of corporate enterprise to the broader public it served. In the face of industrial change and the revolutions in transportation and communication, it continually readjusted its laws and institutions to preserve traditional standards of social behavior. Institutional reforms in the political process, child and female labor laws, and other social legislation sought to improve the quality of life and established progressivism in the state before that word had become a movement. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the notion of state and citizen responsibility for public welfare was breaking down. With the Mugwump movement for good government rejected, those who talked about integrity in government were forced into alliances with ward politicians and adventurist businessmen in order to assume power. The social fragmentation of industrial and urban life and the growing number of immigrants had destroyed the assumptions of commonality and had heightened the distinctions between public and private. 1 1

On the nature of commonwealth and its revision before the Civil War, see Oscar and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy; Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York, N e w York University Press, 1947), pp. 53-143, 247-260, passim;

Chapter I

2

No institution embodied the former ideals of state responsibility for humanitarian reform and social order more than the common schools. Educator and layman alike viewed the public schools as sui generis to American society. To some, they seemed the most distinguishing feature of the state's history, a contribution more valuable than the Revolution itself. "But for the American school idea," wrote Boston's Journal of Education in 1888, "we should never have had the American Republic," and few in Massachusetts doubted that the school idea originated in the Puritan colony and reached its fruition under Horace Mann. By the end of the Civil War, Mann's arguments for public support of education as essential to a government of free men and his justifications of common schools as the basis of economic growth and social unity were fundamental assumptions of Massachusetts' educational leadership. The public common schools, supported and controlled by the state, provided a common education "which every citizen of the State must receive as a necessary preparation for citizenship." "This education," the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education insisted, "must produce such states of mind as are favorable to a common belief in those general principles, and that particular form of civil government which the people have pledged themselves to accept and maintain." The common schools—that "crown of glory to Massachusetts"—inculcated the common values in support of an accepted form of government. The tradition of state responsibility for social welfare thus combined with the faith that schooling would foster common values to yield strong support for public education. In the mid 1890's average length of the school term in Massachusetts (124.9 days) exceeded the other states. As late as 1894 it was the only state requiring cities and towns to operate high schools or proRichard Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics, 1900-1912 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 19641, pp. viii-x, 1 - 2 4 , 71-79, 1 9 0 - 2 1 6 ; Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1966), chaps. 1, 2, 5, 9.

The Burden of Urban Education

3

vide the opportunity to attend high school in neighboring communities. Indeed, few states even considered the high school as separate and distinct from the elementary grades. With some justification, the future advocate of the Social Gospel, the Reverend Washington Gladden, declared in 1886, "What education can do to promote morality has been more thoroughly done for Massachusetts than for any other American State."2 The commitment to public education was paralleled by the growth of professionalization and bureaucracy. An ideology that blended science and public service received its initial institutional base in the founding of normal schools and the emergence of teachers' institutes during the middle of the century. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, organized in 1847, gave educators greater influence as an interest group and higher status as professionals. Teacher certification laws were passed in the 1850's, establishing for the first time clear standards of entry and providing a basis for a permanent class of teachers. Closely related to these developments was the emergence of bureaucratic structures designed to bring order to increasingly complex urban school systems. Record gathering—attendance, expenditures, teacher-pupil ratios—assumed major importance, the dissemination of statistics providing for comparative analyses of school systems. In the larger cities, the instructional staff became specialized and hierarchical and was placed on 2

Journal of Education, 28 (1888), 304; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annual fleport], 1887-1888, p. 75; ibid., 1888-1889, p. 11; Washington Gladden, "Christianity and Popular Education," Century Magazine, 9 (1886), 939; Theodore R. Sizer, Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 21, 39-40, 53. On the founding of Massachusetts' schools in the interests of community, see Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1880-1881, pp. 6 2 68; George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1904), pp. 1-89. A convenient summary of Horace Mann's assumptions about schools in a republic is Lawrence Cremin (ed.), The Republic and the School (New York, Teachers College Press, 1957).

Chapter I

4

structured salary scales. Supervision and administration were centralized and made prominent in the daily workings of the schools. In Boston a school committee composed of ninety-seven members in 1850 was cut to twenty-four in 1876 and to five in 1905. Whereas no supervisory staff existed in the city in 1850, by 1876 a superintendent, five supervisors, and forty-eight principals had been appointed. The superintendency of schools, a virtually nonexistent office in Massachusetts before the Civil War, had become by the end of the century the central educational position in every city. Though by no means satisfied with their gains— teachers were still reappointed annually, salaries remained low, and educators sometimes conflicted with lay boards— schoolmen had constructed professional identities and bureaucratic mechanisms that ensured their importance in the educational decision-making process.3 In the half century after the Civil War the assertion that the progress of society depended upon the success of the public schools became a fundamental assumption of Massachusetts' social thought. But, as in so many other areas, the assumption was in the process of reformulation. For the public schoolmen this involved greater emphasis on the state as a formal entity and the role of the common school as an agent of the state. During the 1840's Horace Mann, the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, had legitimized public schooling by pointing to the relationship of a people to the common needs of a free society. He saw the state as an extension of the family and had been slow to support compulsory attendance. Four decades later the Board's fourth Secretary, John Dickinson, asserted the dominance of the state in the relationships among men. Agreeing with Mann, Dickinson believed that the "existence 3

Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 1 5 3 - 1 6 0 ; Martin, Evolution, pp. 1 6 8 - 1 7 4 , 2 2 0 - 2 2 3 ; Michael B. Katz, "The Emergence of Bureaucracy in Urban Education: The Boston Case, 1 8 5 0 - 1 8 8 4 , " History of Education Quarterly, 8 (1968), 1 5 5 - 1 8 8 , 3 1 9 - 3 5 7 .

The Burden of Urban Education

5

of a free State" depended upon a "common education of the people . . . , that they may be trained to think alike and to exercise that common sympathy through which alone it is possible for human individuals to become a people." But Dickinson argued more forcefully that common institutions had to be "organized, controlled and supported by the State." As the major spokesman for Massachusetts' public education in the 1880's, the Secretary of the Board of Education placed the results of the social contract upon divine terms: since the state had been organized for "man's wellbeing, then, like man himself, it must have a divine origin." "The State and the people are one and the same thing." Preservation of the state thus became synonymous with preservation of the people, and "when the State is in danger, even the property and life of individuals must be offered in its defence." Since a free state depended upon the intelligence, virtue, and homogeneity of its people, its institutions of education had to be common and have the allegiance of all. While few educators in Massachusetts wanted to outlaw parochial and private schools, all supported compulsory attendance at some school, and many supported public inspection of nonpublic schools as a defense against the fragmentation of society and thus the destruction of the state.4 This heightened awareness of the state as a distinct entity grew out of the recognition that society had dramatically changed in the decades after the Civil War. Prior to 1860 Massachusetts moved toward urbanization and industrialization. Railroads began to alter traditional conceptions of time and space. The proportion of population living in cities and towns of more than 10,000 went from 18.5 percent to 36 percent between 1840 and 1860, while the new 4

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1886-1887, pp. 70-71; ibid., 1887-1888, pp. 70-81; ibid., 1890-1891, pp. 100-102; Martin, Evolution, p. 212; Katz, Irony, pp. 43-44; Peleg Aldrich, "The Legal and Constitutional Powers of the Civil Government in Relation to Education," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Beport, 18761877, pp. 152-172.

Chapter I

6

cotton cloth industry and European immigration created industrial prominence and an industrial proletariat. But if industry and the city seemed the wave of the future before 1860, few in Massachusetts could have estimated their impact. By 1900 most of the state's population resided in thirty-three incorporated cities, twenty-five of which contained more than 25,000 people. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century these cities absorbed newcomers at double the national rate. Between 1890 and 1900, despite a severe depression, Worcester, Lawrence, Springfield, Fall River, Fitchburg, and Brockton grew by over 40 percent, while New Bedford's population increased by an extraordinary 53.3 percent. The major increases occurred among non-English-speaking, non-Protestant foreign-born. In 1880 foreign-born and native-born of foreign parents equaled one-half of the total population of Massachusetts. A decade later the proportion rose to 56.3 percent, in 1900 to 61.9 percent, of whom 30 percent were foreign-born, and about a third of these spoke no English. By 1910, 66 percent of Massachusetts' population was made up either of immigrants or the children of immigrants, and, among the foreign-born, the non-English-speaking outnumbered the English-speaking. 5 Immigration statistics for individual cities were even more striking. At the turn of the century all of the state's twenty largest cities had more than 20 percent foreign-born in their populations. Thirteen had more than 30 percent, while five (Fall River, Holyoke, Lowell, Lawrence, and New Bedford) possessed more than 40 percent. In nineteen cities more than 50 percent of the population was made up of immigrants or children of immigrants, and nine had more than 70 percent in those categories. Large sections of every city contained individuals who took their identities from abroad, spoke no English, but had cast their lot and their children's with the New World. 6 (See Table 1.) 5 6

Katz, Irony, pp. 5-11; Abrams, Conservatism, p. 28. U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1901-1902), I, clxxxviii, clxviii.

7

The Burden of Urban Education

Table 1 Number and proportion of foreign-born and children of foreign-born in Massachusetts' ten largest cities, 1900

City

Total population

Number foreign parentage

Percent foreign parentage

Percent foreignborn in total population

Boston Worcester Fall River Lowell Cambridge Lynn Lawrence New Bedford Springfield Somerville

560,892 118,421 104,863 94,969 91,886 68,513 62,559 62,442 62,059 61,643

404,999 80,084 90,244 73,995 63,589 37,689 51,999 44,755 33,710 36,847

72.2 67.6 86.1 77.9 69.2 55.0 83.1 71.7 54.3 59.8

35.1 31.8 47.7 43.1 33.2 25.9 45.7 40.9 23.2 28.0

Source:

U. S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, D. C„ Government Printing Office, 19011902), I, clxxxviii.

Immigration had changed the face of Massachusetts. It also provided the basis for the state's industrial development. At the end of the nineteenth century the most distinctive feature of Massachusetts' economy was its dependence upon outside sources for raw materials and workers. The three major industries—cotton goods, boots and shoes, and woolens and worsted products—accounted for about 40 percent of the aggregate value of Massachusetts' manufactures, and all depended almost entirely upon foreign and non-Massachusetts raw materials. The same industries employed more than 45 percent of the manufacturing wage earners in the state, most of whom came from outside Massachusetts. Of the 76,813 wage earners in the cotton goods industries in 1900, 70.2 percent were foreign-born with an additional 24.6 percent children of immigrants. The three leading cotton manufacturing cities—Fall River, Lowell, and New Bedford—contained more than half the industry's total wage earners, and their labor force was

Chapter I

8

more foreign-born than the state-wide totals. In the woolens and worsted industries, of the 26,939 wage earners in 1900, 14,357 (53.2 percent) were foreign-born with 9,901 (36.7 percent) children of foreign-born. Lawrence, which contained 7,180 of the state's woolen and worsted workers, had 4,801 (65.7 percent) and 2,005 (27.9 percent) in the same categories. In the boot and shoe industry, too, more than half (58.7 percent) of the 65,671 wage earners were foreign-born (26.1 percent) or their children (32.6 percent). 7 The prominence of immigrants in Massachusetts' industrial life inevitably affected education and the schools. Illiteracy in the post-Civil War period, for example, was preeminently an immigrant problem. Of the 77,550 illiterates in the state in 1875, 91 percent were foreign-born; a decade later the proportion remained above 88 percent. In the latter year 21.5 percent of all immigrants were illiterate, while the total for the state as a whole was only 7.7 percent, including the foreign-born. Disproportionate birth rates also affected educational developments. Studies in 1890 and 1900 revealed that foreign-born mothers were producing children at a strikingly faster rate than native-born. The proportion of children under five years of age for immigrant women was twice the proportion for native-born whites. In absolute figures the numbers were startling: in 1900, Massachusetts contained 61,064 children under five of native-born white mothers and 103,064 children under five of foreign-born mothers. And the proportions in the major cities were even higher. 8 7

8

Abrams, Conservatism, p. 20; "Occupations," U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census, pp. 302-306, 56-62, 588-590, 598-600, 602, 626; "Manufactures," Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911-1914), IX, 491-493. See also "Immigrants in Industries," U. S. Immigration Commission, Reports (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911), X, 7-8, 18-22; ibid., XII, 212, 227, 361, 445. Horace G. Wadlin, "Illiteracy in Massachusetts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1886-1887, pp. 225-237; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1873, p. 386; U.S. Census Office, Proportion of Children in the U.S., Bulletin No. 22 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1905), pp. 22-25. Illiteracy in 1875

The Burden of Urban Education

9

To understand the relationship between immigration and the schools, Massachusetts' educators did not need birth rate or illiteracy statistics. They had only to look at the ethnic compositions of their classrooms. By 1900, 51 percent of the state's school children were either foreign-born or children of immigrants, and the percentage was almost 58 percent in the cities. When the U. S. Immigration Commission undertook its extensive nationwide survey, "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," in 1908-1909, eight of the thirty-seven cities examined were in Massachusetts, and the findings revealed what had already become obvious. The public schools in four of the eight cities—Boston, Chelsea, Fall River, and New Bedford— contained more than 60 percent children of foreign-born, while Worcester and Lowell were just below that percentage. In the primary grades (1-4) the percentages were even more striking. Two-thirds of the children in the first four public-school grades of Boston had foreign-born fathers, almost three-fourths in Fall River and New Bedford. Just four years later New Bedford reported that 55 percent of the children in its first two grades came from non-English-speaking homes. In three cities studied intensively by the Immigration Commission—Chelsea, Haverhill, and New Bedford—between 9 and 24 percent of the publicschool children came from homes where English was not spoken. 9 These children of the foreign-born, overwhelmingly settled in the cities and increasingly coming from homes of non-English-speaking parents, provided a major test of

9

was defined as "those persons (over ten years of age) who can not read, but can write; can not write, but can read; (or) can neither read nor write . . ." The definition in 1885 remained substantially the same. Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1900-1901, pp. 211-213; "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports, XXIX, 8-13, 15, 21, 30, 83, 97; ibid., XXX, 179; ibid., XXXI, 203, 291, 659, 743; ibid., XXXII, 326; ibid., XXXIII, 563; N e w Bedford, Annual Report of the School Committee [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1913, p. 42.

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public education. The immigrants were seen as part of a larger process; they represented a congeries of problems associated with urbanization and industrialism. The city, the factory, the poor, the immigrant, all seemed related. Educators rarely distinguished cause and effect, and, indeed, they used the terms industrialization, urbanization, and immigration synonymously. Yet the population of Massachusetts' cities were primarily foreign-born, and schoolmen tended to phrase their activities in terms of the immigrant child. That phraseology shaped the major educational reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their responses to the city, Massachusetts educators did not differ significantly from their contemporaries. Prominent reformers, Boston Brahmins, and leading intellectuals and professionals found themselves confused and often hostile to industrial and urban change. Attempts to create wellordered towns before the Civil War—Lowell and Lawrence were prime examples—had become urban chaos by the 1880's. The city seemed artificial, its relationships and institutions founded upon alien values. Urban conditions, the State Board of Education claimed, interfered with the "healthy natural development of children," an observation affirmed by Boston's Superintendent of Schools Edwin Seaver who found "city children like plants in a greenhouse or animals in cages, developing abnormally under abnormal conditions." In such an environment, educator George Martin asked, was there any wonder that the "streets of every large city in the world are filled with young persons who have been confirmed in the evil habits by the sins of society—sins of omission and of commission. The lack of suitable playgrounds, of proper places for evening recreation, and of adequate instruction in industry has left the young of both sexes a prey to their own natural but perverted instincts." Institutions seemed to be functioning inadequately; the church, home, and useful employment all seemed to be giving way to urban disruption. As educators sought answers to the puzzling problems of schooling in

The Burden of Urban Education

11

the city, they defined their tasks in terms of competition with the "poisonous atmosphere of the streets."10 The immediate problems were facilities. In rapidly growing urban districts—the suburbs and immigrant wards—overcrowded classrooms and often unsanitary conditions were common. "It is more and more apparent," wrote the Journal of Education in 1891, "that one of the great American problems is how to 'house' the multitude of children in the city schools." Lowell claimed in 1887 that its schools could accommodate less than half of the nearly 12,000 children in the city between the ages of five and fifteen, while the hygienic conditions in the majority of existing buildings were intolerable. In N e w Bedford the grammar school classes averaged almost sixty children a teacher from the late 1870's until World War I. A similar situation existed in the neighboring industrial city of Fall River where, in 1872, there were ten to fifteen more pupils than seats in a classroom. In 1913 that city's school board reported that some buildings contained 50 percent more children than they were built to hold. Even Boston, which prided itself on its school facilities, experienced severe accommodation problems from the 1880's into the first decade of the twentieth century. During the school year 1882-1883 the Superintendent reported that 2,795 primary school children had registered in the city's schools, but could not attend, apparently owing to lack of

10

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Re port, 1905-1906, p. 91; Massachusetts Board of Education, fieport of the Committee to Investigate the Existing Systems of Manual Training and Industrial Education [hereafter cited as Report on Manual Training] (Boston, 1893), p. 29; George Martin, Essentials of Education, ed. Joseph A . Pitman (Boston, Gorham Press, 1932), pp. 149-150. On the response to late nineteenth-century changes in Massachusetts, see Barbara M. Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956); Daniel Horowitz, " R e sponse to Industrialism," unpub. diss., Harvard University, 1967; Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954). On the development of Lawrence f r o m a model city into an urban horror, see Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 (Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1963); Katz, irony, pp. 93-111.

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space. Seven years later, children continued to be turned away. Beginning primary classrooms in some schools held between sixty-five and seventy children. In 1894, despite four years of impressive school construction, the School Committee found the lack of school accommodations worse than ever. A decade later more than 10 percent of Boston's public-school children still attended classes in rented halls, corridors, basements, "portable buildings," and hired rooms. 11 New buildings and classroom needs inevitably raised questions of financing. Massachusetts had, on the whole, done well supporting its public schools. Between 1870 and 1890 it was the only eastern state to increase its expenditures per pupil, going from $13.65 to $22.30 per enrolled student. In the latter year it ranked second in the nation in per capita spending for schooling and in expenditures per fiveto twenty-one-year-olds in the population. As late as 1890 Massachusetts ranked third in per capita school financing behind California and Nevada, both of which had highly inflated economies. 12 As public-school enrollment continued to grow, however (from 273,661 in 1870-1871 to 307,953 in 1890-1891 to 538,411 during the school year 1910-1911) the state's educators expressed concern over the costs of their schools. In Boston expenditures for public education jumped from 11

Journal of Education, 34 (1891), 2 0 0 ; Lowell, School Report, 1887, pp. 3 7 - 3 9 ; New Bedford, School Report, 1879, p. 1 4 ; New Bedford, "Minutes of the School Committee" (MS in Office of the School Committee, New Bedford), Feb. 4, 1907, Sept. 11, 1 9 1 4 ; Fall River, School Report, 1 8 7 1 - 1 8 7 2 , pp. 3 - 6 ; ibid., 1913, pp. 3 1 - 3 3 ; Boston, Documents of the School Committee (hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1884, No. 4, p. 7 ; ibid., 1891, No. 7, pp. 3 - 5 ; ibid., 1892, No. 12, pp. 1 9 2 - 1 9 9 ; ibid., 1894, No. 18, pp. 4 - 7 , 2 2 - 2 4 ; ibid., No. 19, p. 2 8 ; ibid., 1903, No. 3, pp. 7 - 8 .

12

U.S. Census Office, Ninth Census, 1870 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1872), I, 4 5 2 ; U.S. Census Office, Tenth Census, 1880 (Washington, D.C., 1883), I, 9 1 6 - 9 1 8 ; U.S. Census Office, Eleventh Census, 1890: Report on Education in the United States (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1893), pp. 73, 1 4 1 ; Lewis C. Solmon, Estimates of the Costs of Schooling in 1880 and 1890 (Lafayette, Ind., Purdue University, 1968), pp. 3 - 5 .

13

The Burden of Urban Education

Table 2 Public-school expenditures as a proportion of tax revenues, 1910-1911 school year (ten largest cities)

Massachusetts® Boston Worcester Fall River Lowell Cambridge N e w Bedford Lynn Springfield Lawrence Somerville

Tax revenue (April, 1910)

Total expenditure for support of public schools, 1910-1911

Percent

$68,589,376 23,249,628 2,398,444 1,793,183 1,618,135 2,280,334 1,648,704 1,509,524 1,932,250 1,118,842 1,271,328

$16,642,471 4,061,432 731,467 442,319 337,788 509,665 350,890 328,322 547,491 289,413 371,222

24.2 17.4 30.8 24.6 23.3 22.3 21.2 21.7 28.3 25.8 29.2

i n c l u d e s cities and towns of more than 5,000 residents. Source: Massachusetts General Court, Documents of the House of Representatives (Boston, 1913), No. 423, Appendix A.

$1,538,883 in 1880-1881 to $2,816,696 in 1899-1900, and the School Committee frequently had to defend itself against possible misuse of funds and demands that it keep expenditures per pupil stable. As total school costs increased, so too did school expenditures as a proportion of municipal budgets and tax revenues. In 1870 Cambridge spent 16.2 percent of its budget on public schooling; twenty years later the figure had reached 22.5 percent. Fall River saw its school costs as a proportion of the city's budget go from 7.7 percent in 1870 to 11 percent in 1890 to 20.9 percent in 1910. Worcester went from 9.1 percent to 13.9 percent to 16 percent during the same interval. By the school year 1910-1911 nine of Massachusetts' ten largest cities were spending more than 20 percent of their tax revenues on the public schools.13 (See Table 2). Hoping to overcome some of the problems created by spiraling enrollments and expenditures, school officials 13

The figures are drawn from the auditor's reports, mayor's annual addresses, school committee reports, and the Annual Reports of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

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rationalized their activities. Large, unwieldy school committees were reduced in size. These, in turn, transferred some of their executive authority to superintendents of schools and to a newly created bureaucracy of assistant superintendents and program directors. Professional supervision and certification of the teaching staff occurred, and cost-accounting procedures were introduced. Close attention was paid to per pupil costs of any educational innovation. Despite these attempts to achieve economy through efficient administration, schoolmen nonetheless often conflicted with city officials over rising expenses. This reflected, in part, a widespread concern with economy in public services and, in part, the frequent economic difficulties in which Massachusetts' cities found themselves at the turn of the century. However, conflict was also the result of ambiguity over who had responsibility for school expenditures. While school committees claimed autonomy, the actual appropriation of funds depended upon city councils. In Boston, prior to 1898, the City Council provided school funds annually. For the next three years the School Committee automatically received a fixed proportion of the city's tax revenues, thereby assuring its independence. After 1901, however, the Committee's control of expenditures was sharply curtailed when the financing of school buildings was turned over to either the Council or a Schoolhouse Commission appointed by the mayor. Similar questions of autonomy appeared in other cities and led to a number of school committee-city government conflicts before World War I. On a few occasions, school committees simply exceeded the authorizations of the councils, claiming with some apparent legality that the city was required to meet the additional expenditures. More often, however, demands by school committees for new buildings, higher salaries for teachers, and curriculum innovation were rejected or delayed, a condition that helped provide a basis for widespread philanthropic involvement in the public schools.14 14

Katz, "Emergence of Bureaucracy"; John D. Herney, "The Movement to Reform the Boston School Committee in 1905," unpub. manuscript

The Burden of Urban Education

15

Within the classroom, urban educators confronted two striking phenomena: turnover among their students and a growing proportion of non-English-speaking children. A number of educators in Massachusetts recognized that population mobility was an acute problem. New Bedford's Superintendent noted the serious educational issues raised by an annual classroom turnover of from 25 to 50 percent. A study of school admissions in the Boston grammar schools between September, 1882, and June, 1883, suggested that between 20 and 25 percent of the children moved within the system, that is, changed from one Boston public school to another. Others were added to the schools from outside the city or from the local parochial schools. The large turnover of population reported by Stephan Thernstrom in Newburyport and Boston probably applied to most of Massachusetts' other cities, placing severe pressures upon teachers who had to integrate new arrivals into their classrooms.15 To meet the problems of those who did not speak English, Massachusetts' educators opened separate classrooms for intensive English-language instruction. Occasionally isolated by language groups, the children were usually categorized as non-English, and a number of nationalities were placed together. In the Hancock School in Boston's immigrant North End, one class of fifty girls was composed of Jews (probably Russian, but likely including other language groups], Germans, Italians, and Portuguese. Most school systems preferred to hire teachers who did not speak foreign

15

in author's possession, 1966. Tension between the city government and school committee often appeared in inaugural addresses of the mayors. See Cambridge, Mayor's Inaugural, 1892, p. 38; 1903, pp. 8 - 9 ; 1906, pp. 10-11; 1907, pp. 6 - 8 ; 1908, p. 4; Fall River, Mayor's Inaugural, 1901, pp. 12-13; 1918, pp. 18-21; Lowell, School Report, 1890, pp. 13-14; 1898, p. 13. N e w Bedford, School Report, 1905, p. 118; Boston, School Documents, 1884, No. 4, p. 6. On the general problem of population mobility, see Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 84-90, 167-168, and "Working Class Mobility in Industrial America," paper delivered at Anglo-American Colloquium of Society for Urban History, June, 1968.

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languages, partly because the classes were multilingual anyway, but more often as the most rapid means of ensuring complete exposure to the English language. With young children, knowledge of English was quickly followed by integration into the regular school program. For the older children, especially those nearing the limits of compulsory attendance, lessons in English were combined with special classes in civil government and occasionally some manual training. Though the ungraded classroom for foreign-language children remained a subject of controversy until World War I, most urban educators agreed with the conclusion of a Lynn newspaper writer: "It is found that the foreign room is a saving rather than an added expense to the school department. In the regular grades these children made but slow progress and thus the teacher was kept back in her work. In this room the children easily proceed with the first four years of the school work when they are ready to enter that of the fifth grade." 1 6 Educators also expressed concern about those children who went elsewhere: to the private and parochial schools or to no schools at all. For much of the nineteenth century, the fact that many children did not attend any school had been the primary focus of educational reformers. After 1870, however, truancy declined noticeably. The estimated proportion of school-age children (ages five to fifteen) not regularly attending school went from 25 percent in 1870 to 10 percent by the mid-1890's, and in the major cities dropped even lower. 17 Simultaneously, enrollment in nonpublic schools increased from 10 percent in 1870 to 16 percent in 1910, a trend that seemed to threaten the ideals of public education and the state's commitment to homogeneous institutions and common social values. "It is becoming by no means uncommon," reported the Lowell 16

17

Edward Everett Hale, " I f Jesus Came to Boston," New England Magazine, 11 (1894), 4 0 8 - 4 0 9 ; F. T. Fuller, " A Typical Tariff Town [New Bedford]," Boston Common, Feb. 11, 1911, pp. 7 - 8 ; "Cobbett Prepares for Fifth Grade," Lynn Item, Apr. 20, 1912. Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport, 1 8 6 9 - 1 8 7 0 , p. 1 2 0 ; George Walton, " R e p o r t . . . School Attendance and Truancy in Massachusetts," ibid., 1 8 9 4 - 1 8 9 5 , pp. 5 2 7 - 5 8 7 .

The Burden of Urban Education

17

School Committee in 1878, "for people to withdraw their children from the so-called 'vulgar' associations of the public school, in order to place them in 'select' private schools." Whether the proportion of pupils in nonparochial private schools was increasing before World War I is uncertain, although a sharp increase in the number of such schools between 1880 and 1905 suggests that they were at least holding their own. "There is danger," wrote a committee revising the curriculum of the Cambridge grammar schools in 1892, "that the children intended for college will be put into private schools where they can have the desired opportunity of early preparation. Such a removal from the grammar schools of promising children, with the best home influences, is unfortunate alike for those who go and for those who stay . . . " School authorities viewed the implications of these trends as dooming the public schools to the education of the poor and immigrant, and to isolation from the colleges. "Cheap schools, supported, but not attended by the wealthy classes, and intended for the education of the children of the poor . . . have no place in a republican State. They are opposed to the genius and character of our free institutions," declared Fall River's School Committee. Speaking before the Massachusetts State Teachers Association in 1898, Edwin Seaver summarized these attitudes when he condemned the people who think "the public school is good for the masses of children, but not good for their children." 18 Public schoolmen met the competition of upper-class 18

Lowell, School Report, 1878, p. 17; Cambridge, School Report, 1892, pp. 90-91; Fall River, School Report, 1877-1878, pp. 5 - 7 ; Edwin Seaver, quoted in Journal of Education, 47 (1898), 3; U. S. Ninth Census, I, 450, 455; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1910-1911, pp. 71-75; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, The Census of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1905 (Boston, Wright and Potter Printing Co., 1909), I, 938. On the changing attitudes of Boston's Brahmins toward the public schools and their withdrawal into private education at the end of the nineteenth century, see Isabella MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal: Boston Public Schools, 1888-1891," unpub. honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1967, in Radcliffe College Archives, pp. 34-35, 5758, 62, 79-81.

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private schools by attempting to persuade the rich to remain. The opening in 1881 of the Frederick O. Prince School in Boston's affluent Back Bay was one example of this persuasion. Considered the "jewell" of the system, its inaugural drew the state's governor, Boston's mayor, and some of the city's leading citizens. It was a magnificent, modern building, with a highly qualified teaching staff, but the school's most remarkable characteristic "is found in the character of the population from which its pupils are drawn." Located in a "territorial district . . . cut off from the rest of the city," without "one poor dwelling in it," "the home of the wealth and culture of Boston," the Prince School was composed "wholly of pupils drawn from homes of culture, wealth, luxury, and refinement," declared former Superintendent of Schools John Philbrick. That such children elected it "in preference to attending select private schools," proclaimed School Committee member John C. Crowley, "renders it in our common-school system altogether unique." It was, all the speakers agreed, the city's finest example of the strength of the public system, and the only means whereby the system could compete with the private schools. 19 Such adaptability to the desires of the affluent, however, became increasingly more difficult as Massachusetts' cities became more heterogeneous. The Back Bay of Boston was cut off from nearby working-class districts. Few other cities could boast of such isolated upper-class sections, and in even fewer cities could urban public-school systems assure special educational advantages for long periods in such areas. The movement of immigrant children into the schools and the expansion of the high school into a more democratic institution helped push the upper classes into private schools or surrounding suburbs. 20 19

20

Journal of Education, 14 (1881), 324; ibid., 37 (1893), 211-212; Boston, School Documents, 1881, No. 26, 108-109; Boston, School Report, 1881, pp. 89-112. Edward Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 6-7, 150. Enrollment in public high schools in Massachusetts increased from 15,826 in 1875 to 23,317

The Burden of Urban Education

19

The hostility of Massachusetts' affluent to public education unsettled many, though not all, of the state's educators. Because attendance at public high schools was increasing, some schoolmen contended that private alternatives served a necessary function as college preparatory institutions. Others commended such schools for their willingness to experiment, thus making them teachers to the public system.21 Private schools for the affluent seemed, moreover, considerably less threatening to the traditions of common education than the rapid expansion of the Roman Catholic parochial schools, though here, too, many public schoolmen soon accepted a role for private education. In 1873 an estimated 7,500 pupils attended parochial schools. A quarter of a century later, enrollment had grown to 61,500, an 800 percent increase, while the number in public schools hardly doubled. By the first decade of the twentieth century between 13 and 15 percent of all school children in Massachusetts were enrolled in parochial classes. As in the statistics on immigration, state-wide totals dilute the magnitude of the situation in the large cities. In Cambridge in 1905, 19 percent of school enrollment was parochial, less than 2 percent nonparochial private, and the remaining percent attended the city's public classes. The proportion in private nonparochial probably remained fairly steady or declined after the 1880's, while parochial school attendance increased from about 8 percent of the school-age children in 1888 to 15 percent in 1894 to nearly 20 percent in 1905. Between 1900 and 1915 Boston's parochial schools increased their proportion of children from about 14 to 18 percent. The extent of parochial attendance was even more striking in cities with the highest proportion of foreignborn. In Lawrence, in 1878, more than 18 percent of all

21

in 1890 and 59,068 in 1910. See also Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 169-189. William A. Mowry, flecoiiections of a New England Educator: 18381908 (New York, Silver, Burdett and Company, 1908), pp. 58-72, 140144; Journal of Education, 58 (1903), 148.

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20

children of ages five to fifteen received a Catholic education; by 1915, the proportion had increased to almost a third of the city's enrolled school population. In Fall River, as early as 1890, around 30 percent of the city's children were in parochial schools, and the School Committee predicted continuing growth in attendance. In neighboring New Bedford, more than 25 percent of the city's five- to fifteenyear-olds attended Catholic schools in 1900, a proportion that appears to have dropped to about 23 percent five years later, but increased to 26 percent in 1910. The extent of parochial education in the major cities was summarized in 1915 in a survey of Massachusetts' eight largest cities (other than Boston) undertaken by the School Committee in Fall River. In industrial, heavily immigrant New Bedford, Lawrence, Lowell, and Fall River between 24 and 35 percent of the children enrolled in schools were in Catholic classes. In Springfield, Worcester, Cambridge, and Lynn the proportion increased from 12 to 23 percent. In every case the overwhelming number of parochial pupils were children of immigrants. 22 The response of Massachusetts' educators to parochial attendance varied. Initially, led by the (New England) Journal of Education and one of its editors, A. D. Mayo, public schoolmen attacked the concept of a parochial school. In the late 1870's and 1880's the Journal engaged in a continuing controversy with Catholics, particularly the Catholic Review, designed to show that parochial education led to more crime, illiteracy, and pauperism than public schooling. "Now, when the Journal of Education, as the advocate of our American system of free education, protests against this crusade of the ecclesiastics and their followers, and ex22

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annua] Report, 1900-1901, pp. 199, 201; Cambridge, School Report, 1894, pp. 3, 13; ibid., 1905, p. 75; Boston, School Documents, 1905, No. 11, p. 32; ibid., 1915, No. 12, p. 4; Lawrence, School Report, 1878, p. 13; Fall River, School Report, 1890, p. 14; ibid., 1915, plate 16; N e w Bedford, School Report, 1900, pp. 3 - 4 ; ibid., 1905, pp. 3 - 4 ; ibid., 1910, p. 4; "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," U. S. Immigration Commission, Reports, XXIX, 144.

The Burden of Urban Education

21

poses the compromises suggested in that interest, some zealous brother, cleric or lay, immediately rises to accuse us of 'unjustly attacking the Catholic Church and clergy.' " 2 3 By the end of the 1880's, however, with Mayo no longer an editor, the Journal had considerably moderated its attacks on parochial education. Still claiming that the common schools were essential to the unity of American life, it contended that hysterical attacks served only to consolidate the Catholics. Comparing the fanaticism of the antiparochial forces to the fanaticism of John Brown, the Journal wrote in 1889 that such hysteria would only lead to t w o united groups at war with one another.24 The changed tone of the Journal's articles reflected a peculiar modus vivendi being worked out among many of the state's educators and Catholic school officials. Massachusetts witnessed an outbreak of virulent anti-Catholicism during the late 1880's and 1890's. By 1895 the nativist American Protective Association had enrolled an estimated 75,000 members in the state. In Boston controversy over the teaching of medieval and Reformation history fostered a series of conflicts within the School Committee and in city-wide electoral campaigns. A Committee of One Hundred organized almost simultaneously to defend Protestantism and good government—the t w o were synonymous in the Committee's view—and introduced legislation to place parochial schools under public inspection. Because the Committee was forced to include all private schools in its legislative proposal, its bill was vigorously opposed and defeated by a coalition of leading private school supporters and Catholics. Despite these controversies, however, local public schoolmen frequently established amicable relations with nearby parochial schools, especially after 23

24

Journal of Education, 4 (1876), 6; ibid., 8 (1878), 389; ibid., 12 (1880), 185. On A . D. Mayo, see Lawrence Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood P. CubberJey ( N e w York, Teachers College Press, 1965), pp. 15-17. Journal of Education, 27 (1888), 25-26; ibid., 29 (1889), 296; ibid., 49 (1899), 88.

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1890. Although they occasionally condemned the Catholic alternative, the educators more often considered them pedagogical competitors, safety valves for the public system, or a fact of Massachusetts' political life. With 25 percent of his city's children in parochial classes, N e w Bedford's Superintendent wrote in 1891 that the future of public education depended more upon improving quality than attacking Catholics. Parochial programs in a number of cities had gained an advantage on the public schools, reported the Journal of Education, by introducing typewriting and stenography into their curriculum. Reaffirming the New Bedford Superintendent's position, the Journal declared: "The public schools must never be so conservative as to allow any other institution to do better work or to do it more promptly." 25 Indeed, despite publicized outbreaks of hostilities, most urban public-school educators found it possible to live in harmony with the local parochial schools—provided they were taught in English. In Cambridge a Catholic priest who claimed that parochial attendance was desirable for Catholic children joined the city's School Committee and appears to have worked harmoniously with it. In Lowell, during the 1870's and 1880's, at a time when controversy between public and parochial schoolmen in the state was intense, the School Committee acknowledged that parochial classes lightened the economic burden of public education and that the Catholic pastors had invited the Committee to visit their schools. A similar attitude appeared in N e w Bedford where parochial programs in the late 1880's reduced attendance pressures upon the public classes. Dis26

N e w Bedford, School Report, 1891, p. 39; Journal of Education, 34 (1891), 345. On anti-Catholicism and the schools, see Lois B. Merk, "Boston's Historic Public School Crisis," New England Quarterly, 31 (1958), 172-199; and MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal," pp. 24-26, 47-63. On the American Protective Association, see Humphrey J. Desmond, The A.P.A. Movement (New York, Arno Press, 1969, reprint of 1912 edition); and Donald L. Kinzer, An Episode in AntiCatholicism: The American Protective Association (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1964).

The Burden of Urban Education

23

cussing the withdrawal of public-school children to a newly opened Catholic school in 1886, New Bedford's Superintendent wrote: "Thus it will be seen that in one sense certainly, the Parochial schools have been of signal advantage to the interests of the public schools. The two north Parochial schools [almost entirely children of non-Englishspeaking immigrants] have an attendance of about 1200; and it can easily be seen that were those pupils still dependent on the city for their schooling, a large increase of school accommodations would have been required." Eleven years later the superintendent estimated that the parochial schools saved the city $40,000 to $50,000 yearly in addition to $200,000 that would be necessary for new schoolhouse facilities. Similar attitudes appeared in Haverhill in the 1880's and Lawrence in the 1870's and 1880's, though in each of these cases distinctions were made between the Irish and French-Canadian parochial schools, while in Lynn an amiable working arrangement was established between the Greek Orthodox schools and the public schools.26 Although they retained an ideology demanding common institutions for the inculcation of common values, in practice Massachusetts' public educators accepted private and parochial schools. For the affluent, private schools— taking only a small proportion of the school-age population —provided the college preparation many educators believed should no longer be the primary aim of public education. Parochial schools required a more complex response. Catering to large numbers, most of whom were immigrant children, they kept out of the public system those most needing a common school experience. Yet attacks on parochial classes risked political retaliation in cities where Catholics were becoming the largest voting bloc; Lawrence, Lowell, 26

Cambridge Chronicle, Sept, 18, 1880; Lowell, School Report, 1879, pp. 45-46; ibid., 1888, p. 27; N e w Bedford, School Report, 1883, p. 17; ibid., 1886, p. 26; ibid., 1897, p. 32; Lawrence, School Report, 1872, pp. 9 - 1 0 ; ibid., 1880, pp. 33-34; ibid., 1887, p. 22; Haverhill, School Report, 1887, pp. 66-70; ibid., 1888, pp. 31-34; Lynn Item, Apr. 20, Nov. 9, 1912, May 13, 1916.

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and Boston elected their first Irish Catholic mayors between 1881 and 1884. Moreover, parochial schools relieved hardpressed public systems from some of the economic burdens of universal education. Caught between their ideology and the pragmatics of a growing network of parochial classes, Massachusetts' educators ceased public attacks on the latter. The only major exception to this trend was the continuing criticism of French-Canadian schools which were invariably singled out for their insistence on teaching in a foreign language, poor facilities, and the hostility of French-Canadians to long-term residence and assimilation in the United States. More revealing, however, of the new relationships that had emerged was the frequent balancing of criticism of the French-Canadian schools with praise for the Englishlanguage—usually Irish—Catholic schools by local school committees and superintendents. Catholic education was here to stay, and public educators found ways to live with it 27 The ability of Massachusetts' educators to respond to the challenges facing them was seriously circumscribed by an idealized vision of the past. In 1900 Boston, Lowell, Cambridge, New Bedford, and Somerville—five of the state's ten largest cities—had superintendents of schools who were born before 1855, four in rural New England. The oldest, Francis Cogswell of Cambridge, was born in 1828 in Atkinson, New Hampshire, and did not leave his home region until 1854 when he became headmaster at a Cambridge grammar school. Appointed Superintendent in 1874, he shaped the educational affairs of Cambridge for more than thirty years before his retirement in 1905. More cosmopolitan was Boston's Edwin P. Seaver, who had similarly spent his formative years in a rural community. Born in western Massachusetts in 1838, Seaver attended Bridgewater 27

Lawrence, School Report, 1882, pp. 32-33; ibid., 1883, pp. 41-42; Haverhill, School Re port, 1886, pp. 47-48; ibid., 1890, pp. 27-28, 46-47; Cambridge, School Report, 1889, pp. 53-54; Journal of Education, 29 (1889), 104; ibid., 34 (1891), 427-428; Worcester, School Report, 1913, pp. 40-41.

The Burden of Urban Education

25

State Normal College, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University before embarking on his pedagogical career. Appointed to the superintendency in 1880, he remained Boston's leading educator until 1904. For men like Cogswell and Seaver educational problems and social change were reflected through a prism of rural values. They looked upon their upbringing as having occurred in a harmonious environment in which institutions shared in the socialization of the child. They contrasted contemporary urban conditions to a lost rural ideal, and upon this disjunction they articulated an educational philosophy and developed their educational policies. 28 This sense of a present alienated from its past received its most pronounced expression in the life of William A . M o w r y . A graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and B r o w n University, he had a career that spanned half a century as schoolteacher, headmaster, and owner of a private school in Providence, Rhode Island, and publisher and editor of the Journal of Education (in partnership with Thomas W . Bicknell), Education, and Common School Education. Between 1889 and 1891 he was an influential member of the Boston School Committee, following that with a brief tenure as Superintendent of Schools in Salem, Massachusetts. Widely known among the country's leading schoolmen, he gave frequent talks at educational gatherings and his writings made him a prominent spokesman for N e w England education. 29 M o w r y v i e w e d his personal success as an object lesson in American opportunity. As his long career neared its end, however, he looked to the future with trepidation. Com28

Brief biographies of Seaver and Cogswell can be found in the Boston Transcript, Mar. 3, 1914, Dec. 8, 1917. Similar complaints of a lost rural ideal appeared before the Civil War. See Katz, Irony, pp. 3-4. Rural nostalgia at the turn of the century was not limited to New England schoolmen. See Anthony M. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 36-43; and Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York, Oxford University Press, 1969).

29

Mowry, Recollections,

passim.

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26

pare, he asked the readers of his autobiography, society and education "fifty, sixty, and seventy years ago" with the early twentieth century, and he provided his own assessment. Holding up for emulation his childhood in rural Massachusetts before the Civil War, Mowry declared, "there is no better place to bring up a boy than on a farm, especially if that farm is located in the midst of an intelligent community with a good rural school." In such a community life was "very simple, honest and irreproachable. There were no crimes or criminals. Doors were seldom if ever bolted . . . There was no poverty in such a neighborhood." Like the surrounding environment, the material needs— food and clothing—were "plain but wholesome," homegrown and economical. Here education was life and thus began immediately and worked effectively. "If there is any truth in the adage so often quoted in recent years that 'We learn to do by doing,' surely the farm is the place where the boy, more than anywhere else, learns to do many things— more different things than he can learn anywhere else." On the farm the boy learned his greatest lessons: individual self-sufficiency and independence. "For a boy from infancy till he ceases to be a minor and attains his maturity, surely there is no place where he will gain so much, learn so much, do so much, acquire so much, expand his intellect so largely, and over and above all, come to measure his powers so wisely and accurately, and hence acquire so high and sensible an ambition for his future life, as in the home of his parents on the farm." 30 In this environment formal education—the school—built upon and reinforced the values of the home. In the local schoolhouse children of the district met on a common level. "To all are accorded the same rights, to all are assigned the same tasks, in all the same powers are developed, and all are subject to the same discipline." Boys were measured by their peers; all social classes mixed, and individual success was determined by individual abilities. The school taught 30

ibid., pp. 3, 9-14.

The Burden of Urban Education

27

the three R's and reinforced the essentials of democratic life. While the formal aspects of pedagogy had improved since the Civil War, Mowry argued, children suffered by having to grow up in the city or neglected rural areas. "In the old times," he concluded, "thoroughness was insisted upon. 'What is worth doing at all is worth doing well,' was a consistantly repeated motto."31 Mowry's nostalgic idealizations reflected a consensus about American society among Massachusetts' educators. Identifying with and assuming the strength of the institutions of rural New England's past, the state's leading public schoolmen believed that those institutions had so interwoven and supported one another as to produce a unified, harmonious society. "In earlier times," the Journal of Education wrote in 1889, "all that was expected of the school was the teaching of the three R's. The home disciplined, the church looked sharply after the morals, and the people, being homogeneous, had no problems to solve through the school." "The little red schoolhouse did its work well," recorded George E. McNeill in a report to the Massachusetts legislature in 1893, "because the cottage home, the little white church, the little shop and the town meeting were neighbors cooperating in the training of youth for the duties of life." In the home and its adjunct, the workshop, the child learned moral values and economic skills, laying the foundation for future success. "For the growing boy," Boston's influential Superintendent of Schools Seaver concluded, "there were the occupations of the field, the woods and the garden; and rainy days there were the tools in the tool room; or, if these failed to interest him, there was the neighbor's shop, where he might begin to learn his 31

Ibid., pp. 15-16, 21-31; see also Clifton Johnson, The Country School in New England (New York, 1893); Warren Burton, The District School as It Was, ed. Clifton Johnson (Boston, 1897); George W. Crocker, "The Rural School of a Half Century Ago," New England Magazine, 24 (1901), 583-587; John D. Runkle, "The Manual Element in Education," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1876-1877, pp. 185-186.

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chosen trade. The wise father took good care that these means of education were properly used." 32 Late nineteenth-century educators in Massachusetts thus saw in the rural past a unified educational environment providing social stability and healthy individual growth. The school performed limited roles, reinforcing the moral values of the home and inculcating intellectual knowledge. "The home," Seaver declared, "was to co-operate with school in the education of the boy, taking more particular charge of the training of his active powers and of his religious life, while leaving the book studies to the school." In the past the school's relationship to the child's future as a craftsman, farmer, or housewife was tangential; outside the classroom such decisions were made and implemented. Seaver cogently summarized the theme of countless educational writings and addresses when he concluded in 1893 that, until a generation before, New England life allowed for the almost complete education of the child outside the schoolroom. 33 Complementing this notion of a harmonious rural past were the disruption and fragmentation of the present. "A half century," observed the Lowell School Committee in 1887, "has almost completely transformed our industrial world . . . Look over the list of inventions and discoveries that have been made, and trace out their effect and influence upon civilization, and see how almost completely they have transformed it." Improvements had occurred; indeed, Mowry wrote, "improvement is the order of the day, the natural course of events." Yet, he continued, "it should be borne in mind that not all that is true is new and not all that is new is true. As a general rule the progress of mankind is seldom forward in a straight line. The motion 32

33

Journal of Education, 29 (1889), 153; Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, pp. 79, 26-28; Frank T. Carlton, "The Home and the School," Education, 26 (1905), 210. Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, p. 28; Charles O. Thompson, "Handicraft in School," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1878-1879, pp. 261-262.

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is in the main forward, but often in a zigzag course."34 Progress was obvious in education. Sparsely settled school districts were consolidated, and students were classified by grade levels. The growth of professional supervision through the extension of superintendencies of schools to most parts of the state had been matched by advances in pedagogy and quality of teachers, particularly through the growth of the state's normal schools. Compulsory attendance and truancy laws were now more efficiently enforced. Programs such as the kindergarten, manual training, evening centers, and vacation schools were introduced to bring the schools closer to the needs of a heterogeneous urban population. Yet deficiencies continued. A number of children did not seem to be learning. Schoolhouses in many parts of the state remained ill equipped, and, despite the more adequate enforcement of the truancy laws, irregular attendance still existed in some school systems and districts. Classes were too large, teachers inadequate, funds lacking, and public support for education lagging. Some of the "improvements" in curriculum had become controversial, their benefits questionable. If the process of evolution was in the main forward, it "has in it," wrote George Martin, a future Secretary of the state's Board of Education, "necessarily an element of sadness."35 Schools in the past, the educators claimed, had been part of a society in balance, reinforcing widely accepted social values. Now, lamented Seaver, "the conditions are all changed." "People have gathered themselves into great and growing cities; the farms are deserted; of gardens there are f e w ; and the neighbors who had workshops for their various crafts are now employed in great manufacturing establishments." The population, Seaver argued, has be34

35

L o w e l l School Committee, quoted in Journal of Education, 25 (1887). 35; M o w r y , Recollections, pp. 3-4, 265-266. M o w r y , Recollections, pp. 31-32, 158, 266-270; Martin, Evolution, pp. 190-217, 273-277; R. L. Bridgman, "Schools and the [Massachusetts] Legislature," Journal of Education, 50 (1899), 432; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1895-1896, pp. 204-205.

30

Chapter I

come urbanized, and the city father, "however wise, however disposed to carry on the education of his boys 'by and through work,' finds insurmountable obstacles in his way. His own work is seldom such that he can share it with his boys; the 'neighbor's shop' is hard to find; the 'manufacturing establishment' takes no apprentices." The opportunity to learn in the congenial home setting, the diversified work activities of the rural past, so fondly recalled by Mowry, had disappeared. The shop had become the factory with its altered conception of work and its mass of unskilled alien laborers, while changes in population, and the individual and institutional relationships they brought, had severely altered the probabilities that children would be adequately educated. 36 Holding as their model the common school nourished by a harmonious rural environment, Massachusetts' educators had to delineate new institutional roles in an urban, industrial, immigrant society. They began by stressing the limits of their ability to reconstruct relationships and by emphasizing the roles other institutions played. Gradually, however, they began to see public education as the crucial instrument for dissolving social corruption and disorder. "If we were to define the public school as an instrument for disintegrating mobs, w e would indicate one of its most important purposes," wrote the Journal of Education. The common schools would bring ethnic minorities into harmony, purify government, alleviate class conflict, lay the basis for vocational achievement, and preserve revered values. Believing the new urban society artificial and overwhelmed by the problems of administering large school systems, Massachusetts' schoolmen moved to reconstruct the methods and goals of public education. They began with the institution they considered the fundamental base of a balanced society—the family—and, in the urban envi36

Massachusetts Board of Education, fleport on Manual Training, 28, 5 8 - 6 8 ; Runkle, "Manual Element in Education," p. 186.

pp.

The Burden of Urban Education

31

ronment, they found it wanting. 37 The educators' assumptions about late nineteenth-century family life are easily schematized. Industrialization had eliminated the family's multiple functions, particularly the provision of moral values and instruction in basic vocational skills. Placed in the city, family members could neither commune with nature nor achieve that balance between interdependence and independence which marked rural society. Where the family was poor or immigrant, it also appeared hostile to the mores and cultural patterns of the dominant society. "Look at the homes of three-quarters of the children in many of our cities and towns," wrote an agent of the state's Board of Education, "and say whether the moral condition of the young is not lowered rather than raised by such influences." For the first time, reported the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor in 1875, there are a "considerable number of parents who would not only permit but force their children to grow up in ignorance." A year later, the Cambridge School Committee noted the large number of children " w h o at home never hear a kind work, and are surrounded by depraving influences . . . " Family life in the city, declared Samuel T. Dutton, soon to become Superintendent of Schools in Brookline, was in a state of disarray, the children tainted "either by bad blood or by vicious training." The schools, concluded New Bedford's Superintendent, summarizing a broad consensus, confronted the overriding problem of "material": the children of multiple nationalities and multiple family backgrounds. "Many of these children have no refining influences at home, but the contrary. They, in fact, have few if any home advantages." 3 8 37

38

Journal of Education, 16 (1882), 3 6 1 ; ibid., 12 (1880), 1 5 3 ; ibid., 32 (1890), 3 9 2 - 3 9 3 ; ibid., 42 (1895), 4 0 0 - 4 0 1 . John Prince, Moral Training and School Government (Boston, 1884), p. 2 ; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annuai Report, 1875, p. 4 5 ; Cambridge, School Report, 1876, p. 7 ; Samuel T. Dutton, "Education as a Preventive and Cure for Crime," American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses (Boston, 1886), p. 1 5 ; New Bedford, School Report, 1899, p. 69.

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These conditions always seemed worst among the lower classes. The belief that the poor, particularly the immigrant poor, were failing their children became a dominant theme of the era and pervaded discussions on education from the Civil War to World War I. The topic varied—kindergartens, manual training, truancy, citizenship—but the assumptions remained the same. The question of discipline in the schools provides a striking example. Before the Civil War corporal punishment had received its major justification on the basis of in loco parentis, with teachers sharing the powers of correction with the home. In the late nineteenth century, however, its primary support came as a necessity for the "heterogeneous masses of children" who come from homes where "discipline is defective." Justifying its use, one of Boston's leading schoolmasters declared that "where many of the children come from miserable abodes, destitute of all home comforts, and oftentimes even of decent influences, and where there is no moral training or judicious and proper discipline, the rod will be necessary in the school-room." The issue of home influence, of family background and the use of the rod, however, reached its height in 1889 when a major controversy erupted in the Boston School Committee. 39 At least twice since the Civil War the Committee had recommended curbs on corporal punishment, with little apparent effect.40 Now, in 1889, Superintendent Seaver sought a modification in the rules to require that all cases be reported and reviewed by the Committee. A majority of its members responded with outrage. A report adopted by the School Board gave the association between immigrant family life and discipline its clearest exposition. "This whole question of corporal punishment," wrote Committee member Samuel Capen, "is largely one of civilization, and the amount required for the discipline of a school depends 39

40

Katz, irony, pp. 173-174; Haverhill, School Report, 1889, p. 25; Joshua Bates, Our Common Schools (Boston, 1879), p. 16. Boston, School Report, 1869, pp. 8 - 6 5 ; Boston, School Documents, 1889, No. 5, pp. 36-38.

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mainly u p o n the character of the pupils composing that school." Character, in turn, depended u p o n home background. "If a child has learned to obey in the family, he comes naturally u n d e r restraint in the school." " B u t suppose he has never had a h o m e , " asked Capen, and suppose he "has lived in the streets and slept anywhere at night . . ." " W e have one School District in this city f r o m which of all arrests for crime are made . . . W e have, in one of our schools, 280 boys f r o m Russia and Italy." A classroom might contain six or eight nationalities. "Many of these children come f r o m homes of vice and crime. In their blood are generations of iniquity . . . They hate restraint or any obedience to law. They k n o w nothing of the feelings w h i c h are inherited by those w h o w e r e b o r n on our shores." Such w a s the case in many of Boston's school districts, w h e r e attacks u p o n teachers (even a revolver had been d r a w n ) were common. " T h e teachers in some of these schools w h o are trying to rescue and save these boys f r o m ruin are engaged in a mission almost as holy as the ministers of religion." Restricting teachers, " w h o by their surroundings are compelled to p u n i s h , " undermined the school's p o w e r s of good and strengthened the element of violence by reducing authority. Strong teachers, Capen concluded, w e r e all that stood between these boys and a life of crime. 4 1 Capen's report was, in many ways, an anachronism. The emergence by the late nineteenth century of a pedagogical reform movement that stressed student interest in learning and friendlier relations b e t w e e n teacher and pupil had already curbed the use of the rod in the classroom. But Capen's hostility to immigrants and his association of u r b a n evils w i t h the failings of social institutions outside the school w e r e typical and influential among the state's educators. His report on corporal punishment received enthusiastic support f r o m that b u l w a r k of the Massachusetts public schools, the Journal of Education. And, Capen's role 41

Boston, School Documents, 1889, No. 5, pp. 39-46; ibid., No. 19 ("Report of the Committee on Rules and Regulations on Corporal Punishment").

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34

in Boston was not limited to this incident. Beginning in the 1880's and continuing into the twentieth century, he exercised great influence over the School Board's decisions and appointments, often in close association with another Board member, Joseph Lee, with Capen, a cofounder of the Immigration Restriction League.42 By the end of the nineteenth century educators in Massachusetts had become committed to the assumption that industrial change and the city threatened social values. Believing that schools could no longer depend upon the home and the larger environment to inculcate moral values, they faced a choice of either seeking broad social change or using the school as a surrogate for other institutions. " W e have . . . to face the startling fact," declared Dutton, "that the family, which has been called 'the molecule of the social world,' is throwing upon the school much of the responsibility that justly belongs to it." 43 The schoolmen were, initially, ambiguous about the options available to them. They tried to restore older values, hoping to use the school to resuscitate family life and work activities. They supported kindergartens and manual training as aids in that process, and they looked to education as a means of protecting society from the destructive tendencies of industrial progress. Their thinking shaped by a rural idyll, educators looked for a return to the traditional. Their hopes, however, proved unavailing. Unable to control industrial and urban growth, they had either to admit defeat or to support social values more in keeping with the new order. They soon adopted the latter, turning to the public school as an antag42

Journal of Education, 31 (1890), 24-25. On Capen and the Boston schools, see Chauncy Hawkins, Samuel Billings Capen (Boston, Pilgrim Press, 1914), pp. 53-78; and MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal," pp. 64—68. On his anti-immigrant attitudes, see Solomon, Ancestors and immigrants, pp. 84, 86, 88-89, 104, 118; Hawkins, Samuel BiJJings Capen, pp. 189-192; Boston, School Report, 1889, pp. 214-215. The Boston Finance Commission, Report, 1911, p. 8, considered Capen one of the eleven individuals who had most influenced the city's schools since the early nineteenth century. On Lee, see Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants, pp. 136-140.

43

Dutton, "Education as a Preventive," p. 15.

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35

onist of traditional ties. They taught not the old values, but demanded allegiance to the new. Needing industrial skills, they accepted vocational training and modeled the school after the factory. Believing that the social environment outside the school could not produce citizens, they required Americanization and civics classes. Convinced that the majority of urban families could neither educate their children nor be reinvigorated by them, the schoolmen moved to isolate the child from his home. The trend was strikingly revealed in the kindergarten movement.

II The Kindergarten: Childhood and Social Reform The kindergarten movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed the dilemma of urban educational change. Focusing on children between the ages of three and six, kindergartens were initiated outside the public schools—among the affluent upper class and by social reformers and philanthropists. To the former, the kindergarten was seen primarily as an innovation in child rearing and as a first step in introducing a "softer" pedagogy into the teaching of children. Among the social settlement workers and philanthropists, early childhood education received support as an agent of urban reform. Through the child the poor would be taught how to raise their children. They would be introduced to cleanliness and health standards, the English language, and proper behavior patterns. The kindergarten would thus assimilate parents and child, bringing social harmony to family life in the slum. Public schoolmen, however, while acknowledging these goals, found other meanings in the kindergarten movement. Small pupil-teacher ratios and expectations that teachers spend part of their time with parents meant added expenses for already underfinanced school systems. Social reform extended the schools into areas outside their traditional responsibilities. While "play" might be a valid educational goal, its benefits were hard to judge in terms of school achievement. Did kindergartens improve first-grade success, and did all children similarly benefit? Could teachers change the life-styles of the poor, and would the public support the expense? These questions, often inarticulately raised, profoundly affected the responses of Massachusetts' educators to the kindergarten. The answers reshaped the social reform goals of early childhood education in the city. No individual did more to popularize kindergarten education in America than Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. A confidante of the transcendentalists, sister-in-law of Horace Mann, and eclectic social reformer, Miss Peabody first be-

The Kindergarten : Childhood and social Reform

37

came acquainted with the kindergarten in 1859 through the German emigre Mrs. Carl Schurz. Eight years later she traveled to Europe to study Friedrich Froebel's work. In 1870 her essay "Kindergarten Culture" was reprinted in the United States Commissioner of Education's annual report, and she followed that by establishing the Kindergarten Messenger, a monthly periodical, to propagate further her views. Although financial difficulties soon forced her to give up independent publishing, she continued to provide moral support to those advocating the new institution, briefly cosponsoring the Kindergarten Messenger and the New Education in 1878. 1 Synthesizing transcendentalism and the German idealism of Froebel, Peabody made the German schoolmaster an oracle upon whom all interested in the emancipation of childhood could draw. The kindergarten, she argued, was not simply a method of education, but a movement of mystical significance. She considered her advocacy an "apostolate," kindergartening a religion, a "vocation from on High," and a "Gospel for children." Like Froebel, Peabody and her associates spoke of absolutes and universality. They dealt with Truth, the Child, the Home, Family, and Motherhood. Parents were the "divinely-appointed instructors of their children." The Home, Mrs. Horace Mann wrote, was the "regenerator of society." All children, moreover, 1

Ruth M. Baylor, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: Kindergarten Pioneer (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); Mary J. Garland, "Elizabeth P. Peabody, 1804-94," in International Kindergarten Union, Committee of Nineteen, Pioneers of the Kindergarten in America (New York, Century Company, 1924), pp. 19-25; Lucy Wheelock, "Miss Peabody as I Knew Her," ihid., pp. 26-38. For a self-appraisal of Peabody's work up to 1876, see New England Journal of Education, 3 (1876), 9. Among her most important writings on the kindergarten are: "American Kindergarten," in Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Mann, Moral Culture and Kindergarten Guide (Boston, 1863); "The Kindergarten," U.S. Bureau of Education, Circulars (July, 1872); Lectures in the Training School for Kindergartners (Boston, 1893); "A Plea for Froebel's Kindergarten as the First Grade of Primary Education," in Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, The Identification of the Artisan and Artist (Boston, 1869). A complete list of Peabody's works can be found in Baylor, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, pp. 194-207.

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underwent the same processes of growth. Before age three, children were self-centered. They discovered their body, senses, and power to act. Under their mother's tender care they became selfish and egotistical, demanding that their needs and desires be immediately satisfied. Continued development along these lines, however, would threaten each child's and society's survival. After the age of three, socialization among peers and to society's mores thus became each child's central need. Here was the kindergarten's major role: it allowed the child "to take his place in the company of his equals, to learn his place in their companionship, and still later to learn wider social relations and their involved duties." In this society of equals the social instinct could be gratified and brought into equilibrium with the instinct of self-preservation. A kindergarten, Peabody wrote, "is children in society—a commonwealth or republic of children—whose laws are all part and parcel of the Higher Law alone." 2 To assure the most efficacious interaction, a trained adult was needed to uproot evil tendencies. The kindergarten was a garden of children, and like the gardener's cultivation of each plant until it reached perfection, the kindergartner helped the child develop by carefully removing obstacles to natural growth and by providing his natural nourishment. As the gardener must know plants, the kindergarten teacher had to understand children, bringing together the natural instincts of motherhood with special training in child development. "The mother," one speaker at a National Education Association meeting declared, "as handmaid of the Lord, will recognize in the consecrated kindergartner a fellow-worker in the garden of the Lord." 2

Peabody, Lectures, pp. 4, 22, 66-67, 88; American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses (Boston, 1871), p. 7; New England Journal of Education, 1 (1875), 1; Mary Mann, "The Home," Kindergarten Magazine, 1 (1888), 133-136, 165-168; Peabody and Mann, Moral Culture, pp. 12-14. On the relationship between transcendentalism and the kindergarten, see Fred Erisman, "Transcendentalism for American Youth: The Children's Books of Kate Douglas Wiggin," New England Quarterly, 41 (1968), 238-247.

The Kindergarten: Childhood and Social Reform

39

The kindergarten thus stood as an extension of ideal Motherhood, an institution that would effect the transition between the individualistic education of the home and the social necessities of the broader society.3 Although kindergartners frequently discussed socialization, the term's meaning varied. On the one side, stood the emancipation of the child from traditional and insensitive restrictions, the enhancement of spontaneity and creativity. On the other, emphasis was given to uniformity and control. Early kindergartners often pointed to the former as their new institution's primary contribution, calling for love and understanding of the child, creative expression, youthful teachers, and the elimination of corporal punishment and parrot-like memorization. They advocated movement and activity for children who desired and needed both, introduced new play objects into the environment, and were willing to accept noise as a healthy corollary of happy play. "Of the two evils," Peabody wrote, "extreme indulgence is not so deadly a mistake as extreme severity." 4 But while kindergartners urged emancipation, they also argued that their ultimate goal was order. The kindergarten was, after all, a "guarded company of children," and children could not be left "to a chaos of chance impressions." Individualism, with its potentiality for disorder and conflict, was another form of self-centeredness, vitiating the primary goals of kindergarten learning. Criticizing Rousseau's individualistic and antisocial educational theories, Peabody wrote, "All government worthy of the name begins in selfgovernment, a free subordination of the individual in order 3

4

Peabody and Mann, Moral Culture, pp. 10-15; Peabody, Lectures, pp. 4 - 5 ; Mary J. Garland, Essays on the Kindergarten (Boston, [1934?]), pp. 7 - 1 1 ; Angeline Brooks, "The Theory of Froebel's Kindergarten System," in [Anne Page et a/.,J The Kindergarten and the School (Springfield, Mass., 1886), p. 47; Elizabeth P. Bond, "The Kindergarten in the Mother's Work," National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (Washington, D.C., 1885), p. 359. Peabody, Lectures, pp. 15-18, 64; Peabody and Mann, Moral Culture, pp. 23-24; Elizabeth Peabody, What is a Kindergarten? (Cambridge, Mass., 1874).

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to form the social whole." While "the child is doubtless an embryo angel," he is "no less certainly a possible devil." Obedience, Mary Mann concluded, was essential for order, and order "I regard as 'heaven's first law.' " 5 To produce this socialization, channeling spontaneity into order, the kindergartners evolved a complex and highly structured methodology of play activities. Building upon Froebel's assertion that play represented the highest and purest form of activity for young children, they created an ordered environment within which the child learned by doing. "It is through the activity of play," Angeline Brooks wrote, "the only activity in which the child is free and joyous—that the ends sought in the kindergarten are attained . . ." All play activities, however, were not equally valid. Music, song games, and marching, which called for great activity but kept children within a highly structured program and prevented "disagreeable romping," were fundamental. On a higher level, formalized games helped the child internalize rules that would allow the kindergarten and later society to function harmoniously. As one kindergartner put it, "The ordinary child remembers to be good; the kindergarten child forgets to be naughty." Froebel's "gifts"—soft cloth balls, blocks, cubes, rings, triangles, spheres, and cylinders—introduced the child to geometrical forms and suggested the harmony and symmetry of life. Less important but still necessary in a well-run kindergarten were such utensils as paper, scissors, clay, desks and slates, pencils and paint, and weaving and sewing materials, which elicited creative activity and helped develop manual dexterity. Small gardens offered the child an object lesson in organized natural growth. Above all, early kindergartners warned, avoid the overuse of books, and let the child learn the use of objects before the words of adults. Under proper play conditions the peer group society guided by a trained kindergartner would learn 5

Peabody, Lectures, pp. 2, 4-5, 14-15, 44-46, 67, 78, 179; Elizabeth Peabody, "Kindergarten Schools," Massachusetts Teacher, 23 (3d Ser., 1870), 238; Peabody and Mann, Moral Culture, p. 182.

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virtue, cooperation, altruism, and truthfulness.6 These views of childhood education received impressive support in the closing decades of the nineteenth century from a new emphasis upon early habit formation and from the emerging child-study movement. Although earlier Lockean ideas had laid the basis for an emphasis on childhood learning, not until the end of the nineteenth century did American educators generally acknowledge the importance of the early years in shaping adult behavior. To the kindergartners, this was an article of faith. The young child, they argued, was both malleable and perceptive. "The first seven years of the child's life," wrote Angeline Brooks, "Froebel saw to be the most important for purposes of education; for, as he said, during that time tendencies are given and the germs of character are set." In 1886 the Journal of Education similarly concluded: "In the first 7 or 8 years of a child's life it will probably be settled whether he is to be swayed by superstition or intelligence, whether he is to live terrorized by fear or buoyed up by hope and courage." Under these circumstances, the kindergarten appeared vital.7 Further support for the kindergarten appeared as a byproduct of the child-study movement, particularly the ideas formulated by G. Stanley Hall. President of Clark University, indefatigable organizer, prolific author, editor, and public speaker, Hall played in the years prior to World War I a seminal role in the fields of child and adolescent psy6

7

Lucy Wheelock, "The Purpose of the Kindergarten," Journal of Education, 34 (1891), 36; Angeline Brooks, "Philosophy of the Kindergarten," in Kate Douglas Wiggin (ed.), The Kindergarten ( N e w York, 1893), pp. 119-121, 131; Alice W. Rollins, ibid., p. 2; Peabody and Mann, Moral Culture, pp. 34-51; Angeline Brooks, "The Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations," in [Page et ai.,] Kindergarten and the School, pp. 79-93; Laura Fisher, "Principles and Methods of the Kindergarten," Journal of Education, 38 (1893), 386-387; Nora A. Smith, The Children of the Future (Boston, 1898), pp. 67-100; Peabody, Lectures, pp. 1-23. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 169-171; Brooks, "Philosophy of the Kindergarten," pp. 103-108; Journal of Education, 24 (1886), 324.

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chology. To the kindergartners, however, his major contribution lay as the father of child study, the individual who made a gospel of childhood. Hall provided a scientific rationale for Froebel's views that education was evolutionary and developmental and that human growth was a process of stages. The kindergartners readily supported his injunction that teachers and parents "get out of Nature's way and allow her free scope, and avoid excessive checks and inhibitions." They agreed that teachers should know their children. It is not surprising that in 1880 when Hall sought to study children entering the first grade in Boston's public schools, he was financed by Boston's leading supporter of kindergartens, Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw, with four of Shaw's kindergarten teachers acting as investigators. 8 "The Contents of Children's Minds," the 1880 study, propelled Hall to the forefront of the child-study movement and revealed some of the reasons why his theories found such ready support from the kindergartners. Hall hoped to take an "inventory of the contents of the minds of children of average intelligence on entering the primary schools" of Boston. Basing his approach on similar studies in Germany, he formulated questions that "should lie within the range of what children are commonly supposed or at least desired or expected, by teachers and by those who write primary text-books and prescribe courses of instruction, to know." The findings were shocking. Children ex8

G. Stanley Hall, Aspects of Child Life and Education (New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1921), pp. vi, 1 1 ; Charles Strickland and Charles Burgess (eds.), Health, Growth, and Heredity: G. Stanley Hall on Education (New York, Teachers College Press, 1965), pp. vii-viii, 1 - 1 3 ; Nina Vandewalker, The Kindergarten in American Education (New York, Macmillan Co., 1908), pp. 2 3 5 - 2 3 9 . Merle Curti, The Social ideas of American Educators (Paterson, N.J., Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1963 ed.), pp. 3 9 6 - 4 2 8 , remains the best study of Hall. On the child-study movement, see Wilbur H. Dutton, "The Child-Study Movement in America from Its Origin (1880) to the Organization of the Progressive Education Association (1920)," unpub. diss., Stanford University, 1 9 4 5 ; and Charles J . Brauner, American Educational Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 6 6 - 8 2 .

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isted in almost total ignorance of the commonplaces of life: 80 percent of the children were ignorant of beehives, 54 percent of sheep, 87 percent of a pine tree, 61 percent of growing potatoes, 80 percent of the location of the heart, 40 percent of a pond, 92 percent of a triangle, 56 percent of a square, 62 percent of a spade. Children of Irish parents were even more ignorant than those of American parents, and Hall concluded that any first-grade teacher who assumed knowledge on the part of her students would be failing in her obligations to them. 9 These alarming results contained, however, some positive affirmations of the kindergarten. Children who had attended the charity kindergartens, where "superior intelligence of home surroundings can hardly be assumed," did substantially better than the other children, regardless of nationality. Moreover, most primary teachers interviewed found children from the kindergartens better fitted for schoolwork and more intelligent, though often more restless and talkative. Perhaps most revealing was the relationship between Hall's standards of intelligence and kindergarten activities. The test items were heavily weighted toward rural images and activities, and consciously so. "As our methods of teaching grow natural," Hall believed, "we realize that city life is unnatural, and that those who grow up without knowing the country are defrauded of that without which childhood can never be complete or normal. On the whole, the material of the city is no doubt inferior in pedagogic value to country experience. A few days in the country at this age has raised the level of many a city child's intelligence more than a term or two of school training could do without it." 1 0 These views paralleled basic assumptions of the early childhood educators. Kindergartners conceived of the city as an artificial environment antipathetical to natural growth. They sought to re-create in the "children's garden" the benefits of a rural environment as a substitute for urban 9 10

Hall, Aspects of Child Life, pp. 1 0 - 1 9 , 2 2 - 2 4 . /bid., pp. 1 9 - 2 1 , 2 5 - 2 6 .

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life. Nature walks, small gardens, and freedom to play, which were assumed to be integral to the life-style of the rural child, were essential ingredients of the kindergarten, while the strenuous play activities of the countryside found their parallel in the marching and games. The wood carving, sewing, drawing, and sand and mud manipulation that Hall thought fundamental to growing up intelligently were recreated in a variety of forms in the children's classes. Most kindergartners, then, could find Hall's assumptions and his study of the "contents of children's minds" gratifying. Not merely had kindergarten children outdistanced the others, but the general solution advocated by the psychologist pointed directly to expansion of the institution.11 Hall's early work thus confirmed and further popularized the kindergarten. Particularly by reinforcing the plea to treat children "naturally," the child-study movement added to the chorus of people calling for educational institutions that dealt with the distinctive characteristics of the young. Kindergartners were prominent contributors to Hall's periodical, Pedagogical Seminary; child-study soon became embedded in the course of instruction at teacher training schools. Hall's movement was, nonetheless, not the kindergarten. Hall believed that the kindergarten could never substitute for rural life, and he found the highly structured play and "gifts" of the kindergarten restrictive of natural growth. He believed that the restraints placed on children in most kindergartens hindered evolutionary development. At a convention of the International Kindergarten Union in 1895, thirty-three of the thirty-five persons in the audience walked out on Hall's lecture when he called for a revision of traditional Froebel classes and the substitution 11

Ibid., pp. 300-321; Strickland and Burgess (eds.), Health, pp. 16-18, 53-58. For examples of the antiurban bias of kindergarten supporters, see Peabody, Lectures, pp. 1-23, Ellise B. Payne, "The Problem of the City Kindergarten," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1896, pp. 510-514; Jenny B. Merrill, "Children's Gardens," ibid., 1898, p. 598; Edwin P. Seaver, in Massachusetts Board of Education, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Existing System of Manual and Industrial Education (Boston, 1893), p. 29.

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of more natural activities. Suffice it to say, Hall's question "What is a Child?" was of crucial importance to early childhood education, but it did not define the kindergarten. Hall's psychology was, rather, used to reinforce and set a seal of approval upon the rapidly emerging features of the "children's garden."12 The ideology of the early kindergarten movement emphasized, above all, its universality. All children, whatever their home background, would be provided with a transition from "the dreamland of infancy to the earnest preparation for the realities of life." Yet in Massachusetts the earliest kindergartens were less than universally applied. People like Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. Horace Mann, and Matilda Kriege, a German emigre, were from backgrounds of culture, and they spoke to individuals of wealth. Criticizing prevailing conditions, one Boston newspaper declared in the early 1870's: "So long as kindergartens remain private schools with the price of tuition fixed at from sixty to a hundred dollars per year, they will be of little real importance." Worcester's first kindergarten charged fifty dollars for a forty-week term of three hours per day. Even when Boston established a public-supported kindergarten in the early 1870's, "circumstances made it necessary," former Superintendent of Schools John Philbrick later wrote, to "locate it among the better class of population . . . "13 12

13

Vandewalker, Kindergarten, pp. 8, 245; Sara Wiltse, "A Preliminary Sketch of the History of Child Study in America," Pedagogical Seminary, 3 (1895), 189-212; Curti, Social Ideas, pp. 415-416; Strickland and Burgess (eds.), Health, pp. 19-22; Winifred Bain, Leadership in Childhood Education: A History of Wheelock College (Boston, Wheelock College, 1964), pp. 15-16; G. Stanley Hall, "Recent Advances in Child Study," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1908, p. 950. Journal of Education, 26 (1892), 45; Caroline D. Aborn, "Matilda H. Kriege, 1820-99," in Pioneers, p. 42; A. G. W., The Kindergarten, What Is It? (Boston, [1872-1874?]), pamphlet copy of newspaper article in Harvard University Library; Anna B. Knox, Kindergarten (Worcester, 1871), pamphlet advertisement in Massachusetts State Library; John Philbrick, "The N e w Departure in Boston," New England Journal of Education, 11 (1880), 116.

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Despite the early kindergarten's identification with the children of affluence and culture, its future in late nineteenth-century Massachusetts seemed, nevertheless, to lie elsewhere: with the child of the urban slum. The social problems of the city in the 1880's and 1890's came under more intensive investigation and received more publicity than previously, while the urban child's welfare became central to a variety of reform movements. A new view of poverty emerged, which thought in terms of insufficiency and insecurity and believed these no longer desirable or necessary. The belief that poverty was debilitating paralleled assertions that its evils—disease, want, disrupted families— could be eradicated by the social measures of an aroused public, by a reorganizing of the environment in which the poor lived. Simultaneously, the child and his home, not simply as symbols of the child-study movement, but as special objects of social amelioration, received new attention. Children's aid organizations sprouted and flourished. Volunteer charity workers reported that "labor among the children" was the most important feature of their work. "Here [in the homes of the children], by means of books, games and pictures, the visitors can bring brightness and activity instead of dreariness and idleness. The comfortable and interesting home will be the best safeguard against outside temptations."14 Not all educators adopted this new view of urban poverty, and few could articulate it completely. But the kindergartners and those who supported them found the attitudes and goals of the social welfare movement congenial. The kindergarten's antiurban bias accentuated the horrors of the slum and provided a vantage point from which to view poverty. Kindergarten advocates claimed 14

Robert Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in America (New York, New York University Press, 1956], chaps. 1, 3, 5, 8, 9 ; Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 59; Nathan I. Hugins, "Private Charities in Boston, 1870-1900," unpub. diss., Harvard University, 1962, chaps. 3, 5; Associated Charities of Boston, Annual Report, 1880, pp. 2 3 - 2 4 ; ibid., 1886, pp. 33-34.

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that healthy family life and slums could not coexist. Children of the poor were by definition "uncared for." Such children, Jacob Riis wrote, faced a "Hobson's choice" between the tenement and the street, the former overcrowded and unsanitary, the latter corrupt and anarchic. The urban street and home seemed an environment of terror; the slum, the incarnation of evil, destructive of the growing child and ultimately of society itself. Mary Mann, usually a sympathetic observer, was reported to have characterized slum children as "little savages from three to five, the pests of the street, their mouths full of profane and obscene language." In the immigrant ghetto—by the late nineteenth century in Massachusetts, poverty and immigrants were deemed synonymous—an institution adaptable to children, willing to recognize their need for activity and play while introducing order to their lives, appeared vital if society was to avoid adults bred in anarchy. The kindergarten, the editor of Century Magazine declared, was "our earliest opportunity to catch the little Russian, the little Italian, the little German, Pole, Syrian, and the rest and begin to make good American citizens of them."15 Between 1880 and 1900 similar expressions revolving around the preschooling of the urban poor came from almost every educational leader in Massachusetts. In Lawrence the Superintendent of Schools recommended in 1881 public support for kindergartens in the less fortunate areas of the city. In Lowell the Superintendent differentiated between good homes where mothers would exercise supervision over the children and thus make early schooling unnecessary and homes where parents worked, children failed to attend school, and illiteracy was prominent, homes that would benefit from early childhood schools. Lynn's Super15

Jacob Riis, "Children of the Poor," in Robert A. Woods et a/., The Poor in Great Cities (New York, 1895), p. 114; Mary Mann, in Cambridge Chronicle, May 11, 1878, p. 2; Richard W. Gilder, "The Kindergarten: An Uplifting Social Influence in the Home and District," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1903, p. 390; Alice Rollins, "Seed, Flower and Fruit of the Kindergarten," in Wiggin (ed.), Kindergarten, pp. 47-48.

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intendent pleaded for just one kindergarten especially adapted to "little ones from homes of the poor and the uncared for." The School Committee in New Bedford, arguing for kindergartens, believed that "the great majority of children who do not attend school between five and seven are unfortunately those of foreign parentage, and, as a rule, often of the most ignorant kind. They are the very children who should be in school at the earliest permissible age, as they, as a rule, are the first to leave school to go to work." In Cambridge "The value of these schools [kindergartens] cannot be estimated by their cost. They mean to many a child the difference between a happy useful life, and one of wretchedness if not of crime." In 1897 the new Superintendent of Schools in Haverhill summarized the prevailing ideology: "In my opinion the Kindergarten should be established not for the benefit of those children who come from homes of culture and refinement; but on the contrary, it should receive those children that have had little, if any, good home-training. If it were established in such a portion of our city, and were properly conducted, it would furnish a happy transition from those homes and the unwholesome influences of street life to the healthful schoolroom surroundings." 16 These views were not isolated. They reflected a growing sense of urgency about the relationship of education and schools to slum life, manifest to some extent in almost all the educational innovations of the late nineteenth century. Schooling and social welfare were becoming synonymous as individuals desperately sought to correct the dysfunctional institutions of the urban environment. In their efforts, educational change was seen both as a way of improving the schools and of ameliorating broader urban social prob16

Lawrence, Annual Report of the School Committee [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1881, p. 40; Lowell, School Report, 1880, pp. 22-23; ibid., 1881, pp. 10-12; Lynn, School Report, 1892, p. 51; New Bedford, School Report, 1902, p. 26; Cambridge, School Report, 1895, p. 48; Haverhill, School Report, 1897, p. 29.

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lems. It is not surprising, then, that school reform received much of its impetus from social settlement workers and philanthropists engaged in reshaping city life. To these individuals the kindergarten was a unique institution, distinctive in its approach to child development and, more important, a means of entering the home and neighborhood. To the social reformers the kindergarten was more akin to the settlement house than to the school, and they joined with the early formulators of the kindergarten ideology to keep preschool education distinct from the narrow pedagogy and academic goals of the regular classroom. "Let us take the little child in the future from its possibly ignorant, filthy, careless mother, as soon as it can walk," declared the prominent Boston philanthropist Annie A. Fields, " . . . and give it three hours daily in the kindergarten, where during that time it will be made clean, will enjoy light, color, order, music, and the sweet influence of a living and self-controlled voice." Boston's leading social worker, Robert A. Woods, trumpeted the benefits to be derived from the kindergarten, while Joseph Lee, the founder of the National Recreation League, member of the Boston School Committee, and leading philanthropist, emphasized the unity and commonality of the kindergarten and social reform. 17 So pervasive was the idea that kindergartens and social work were integral that when Laura Fisher, Director of Boston's public-school kindergartens, attempted to summarize developments in the field of childhood education at the beginning of the twentieth century, she focused on the role of philanthropy. The kindergarten, Fisher declared, was concerned with "the children of the poor" and had as 17

Vandewalker, Kindergarten, pp. 1 - 2 ; Kindergarten News, 3 (1893), 5; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Re port of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board (hereafter cited as Annual Report), 1897-1898, p. 197; Fields is quoted in Hugins, "Private Charity," p. I l l ; Robert A. Woods, The City Wilderness (Boston, 1898), p. 237; Joseph Lee, "Kindergarten Principles in Social Work," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1903, 378-382. See also Elizabeth Harrison, "The Growth of the Kindergarten in the United States," in Pioneers, p. 10.

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its aim "the elevation of the home." As such, it possessed a natural appeal to philanthropists. "The mere fact that the children of the slums were kept off the streets, and that they were made clean and happy by kind and motherly young women; that the child thus being cared for enabled the mother to go about her work in or outside the home— all this appealed to the heart of America, and America gave freely to make these kindergartens possible." Churches, women's clubs, individuals, and social settlements all estabblished "children's gardens." Of these, the most articulate definitions of what the kindergarten should accomplish came from the settlement houses.18 Settlement houses sought to improve society by melting families into a neighborhood; the kindergartens would harmonize and socialize individual families. Proposing a club for little children along kindergarten lines, one settlement worker wrote, "They would be easy to manage, and would give us an entree into the homes of the mothers." While settlement houses would elevate the neighborhood through art, literature, music, and the other refinements of a cultured society, so too would the kindergartens elevate the home. Settlements and kindergartens gave the highest priority to taking the child off the streets by providing him with attractions unattainable on them. Both viewed the poor, particularly the immigrant poor, with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. Kindergarten teachers, the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Sun wrote in 1898, would explain their methods and objects and teach the games and songs to mothers, thus allowing mothers to play with their children at home. And, "if the mothers happen to be poor, ignorant, uncultivated women, as so many are who have children in the public or free kindergartens, the kindergartner does real missionary work in the talks she can give on hygiene— proper food and clothing and neatness in every way . . . " Mothers' meetings, kindergartner Nora Smith argued, for 18

Laura Fisher, " T h e Kindergarten," U.S. Bureau of Education, Annual Report of the Commissioner (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1904), p. 692.

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those "hard-worked, unlettered women" whose children attended the charity kindergarten classes, should be social gatherings in spotless rooms containing flowers, light refreshments, and cloth-covered tables. "It will be," she wrote, "a cosmopolitan audience thus gathered together in any of our free kindergartens, and somewhat uncongenial in its elements, comprising, as it does, Italians, Germans, French, Irish, Scandinavians, Hebrews, Africans, a few native-born Americans possibly, and perhaps even some wanderers from Syria or Armenia." Indeed, even the settlement house itself might be considered a "kindergarten for adults." "The settlement may not have intentionally preached the doctrines of Froebel, but it has practiced them in every phase of its work. In the playground, the children's club, the vacation school, nay, in the very settlement itself, one may read the philosophy of the kindergarten writ large." 19 The most striking manifestation of this close relationship between the social settlement ideology of urban reform and the slum kindergarten was the opening of Elizabeth Peabody House in Boston on April 21, 1896, the anniversary of Froebel's birthday. Taking as its motto "A Little Child Shall Lead Them," and asking the question "Can the moral life of a neighborhood be elevated by work concentrated upon the youngest children and mothers?" Peabody House attracted Boston's leading educators, social workers, philanthropists, and kindergartners. The new settlement house offered a number of social services with the kindergarten as its base; its first board of directors included Dr. Samuel Eliot, former Superintendent of Boston's public schools and Frank A. Hill, Secretary of the State Board of Education. From the field of social work came Woods, from philan19

Folder 3, diary, Jan 6, 1893, Denison House Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Pittsfield Sun, in Kindergarten .Review, 4 (1898), 118-121; Smith, Children, pp. 52-55; Vandewalker, Kindergarten, pp. 108-111. See also Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 4 3 - 4 5 ; and Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 115-123.

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thropy Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw. Representing the kindergartners were Laliah Pingree, former associate supervisor of Shaw's charity kindergartens and chairman of the Boston School Board's committee on kindergartens, Fisher, director of the public-school kindergartens, and Lucy Wheelock, founder of a school for training kindergarten teachers. The close relationship between social work and education in Massachusetts was further exemplified by Mrs. Eva Whiting White who became head worker of Peabody House in 1909 and subsequently was a member of the State Board of Education, director of the Extended Use of the Public Schools committee of the Boston School Board, and an associate of the Boston School for Social Workers. Yet if Peabody House synthesized the philanthropic settlement and the kindergarten movement, its appearance in 1896 represented more a formalization than an innovation, for it drew upon more than two decades of philanthropic kindergarten activity, centered in Boston and led primarily by Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw. 20 Daughter of famed Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz, stepdaughter of Radcliffe College's first president, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, and wife of a copper mining heir who claimed three of Massachusetts' most distinguished names, Shaw epitomized the socially concerned philanthropist. In the last year of her life she wrote her children that she had "had too much—you will all have too much—and it will require great effort with God's help to determine 'to give' rather than 'to hold' . . . " Considered the richest woman in Boston, she was believed by Kindergarten Review to be the "means of social salvation to thousands upon thousands," while the Boston Evening Transcript called her the city's "greatest woman philanthropist." At the time of her death in 1917 Shaw was a major contributor to settlement houses in the Boston area, a strong supporter of women's rights, and founder and president of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association. Many of the educational innovations of the period 20

Elizabeth Peabody House, Annual Report, 1903, p. 4; ibid., 1910, p. 20; ibid., 1912, p. 16.

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—sloyd (a Swedish method of woodworking), industrial education, and vocational placement bureaus—received their initial support from her proselytizing and financial activities. Of all her concerns, however, none so involved her interest and money as the kindergarten and day nurseries, for she believed that "the bringing up of children is the vital question of life—the great problem of the race."21 Shaw was probably converted to the new institution by Peabody during the 1860's. In 1870, when the latter's school appeared ready to close for lack of funds, Shaw provided additional financing and shortly thereafter helped open a charity kindergarten in Boston's North End, followed by two similar ones in suburban Jamaica Plain and Brookline. Within a decade, she was supporting thirty-one such ventures in and around Boston, spending more than $200,000 on them between 1882 and 1889. Even after her kindergartens were incorporated into the Boston public-school system in 1888, she continued her philanthropy, providing funds for training courses for kindergarten teachers, Christmas parties, and related activities.22 The most famous of Shaw's charity kindergartens were those in Boston's densely populated North End. Here at the edge of the harbor and encompassing such artifacts of the city's colonial heritage as North Church and Paul Revere's House arrived Boston's newest immigrants. By 1900, twentyfive nationalities, most recently arrived from East Europe, would make the district the most foreign and poorest in the city. "Its houses are crowded with Poles, Russians, Italians, Bohemians, and peoples of all lands," wrote Francis 21

22

Pauline Shaw to "My Dear Children," Nov. 30, 1916, Women's Rights Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Journal of Education, 14 (1881), 205; Kindergarten Review, 12 (1902), 400, 415; Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 10, 1917, copy in Schlesinger Library. For biographical information on Shaw, see Women's Rights Collection, folders 1042-1045, Schlesinger Library; Alexandra Pierce, "Pauline Agassiz Shaw," typed essay, 1959, in Radcliffe College Archives; Pauline Agassiz Shaw: Tributes Paid Her Memory (Boston, McGrathSherrill Press, 1917). Pauline Agassiz Shaw; Tributes, pp. 32-36; Journal of Education, 27 (1888), 264; Kindergarten Magazine, 2 (1889), 248.

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Parker, former supervisor of primary schools in the North End. "Hundreds of parents turn their children out into the streets in the morning to care for themselves, while they, by selling fruit, grinding organs, begging, or even worse, strive to eke out a miserable existence." To meet the needs of these children, two charity kindergartens had been established in the early 1870's, "to collect," its sponsors wrote, "some of the neglected children who swarm in the streets, while yet too young for the primary schools, and give them facilities for intellectual and moral training at an age most tender and sensitive to every surrounding influence."23 By 1880 Mrs. Shaw had established at least three separate kindergarten classes, receiving permission from the Boston School Committee to hold two of them in rooms of a local public school, at no expense to the Committee. The classes catered to children between twenty-two months and five years of age. Physical needs were met first, each child being greeted by daily face washing, his clothes cleaned, and milk and bread provided. The kindergarten room, one observer of a North End class wrote, "is warm and cheery; bright pictures hang on the walls; on one blackboard is a crayon sketch of swans floating on still waters; on another are notes and words of simple songs; on the shelves at one side of the room is a company of dolls, while various childish treasures are scattered here and there within easy reach of tiny hands." The activities of these classes in the heart of the immigrant ghetto had a certain bizarre quality to them. Children marched and sang about becoming a "little birdie"; they learned that wooden balls come from "the great, tall trees" and talked about pussy willows, the sun, and walks in green fields. Committed to memory were such verses as: I'm an oriole, I'm an oriole, My nest hangs on high, 23

Francis W. Parker, "The Kindergartens of Boston," Kindergarten Magazine, 1 (1889), 334-335; "Kindergartens: The Need of Their Establishment and Support," [1874-1875?], printed copy of letter in Harvard College Library.

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Where the breezes are singing Their sweet lullaby. They rock in their cradle, My birdies and me, And we are as happy, As happy can be.24 But the North End kindergartens were more than play spots dedicated to introducing rural imagery into the life of the ghetto child. Both Shaw and her supervising teacher, Laliah Pingree, were devoted to reaching the neighboring homes. Mothers were invited into the classes; parents' gatherings were held in the evenings to explain kindergarten methods and to suggest improvement in child care. The kindergartners placed great faith in the belief that the habits children learned while under their care would pervade the slum home. Forced to overcome apathy among parents toward the new classes, kindergarten teachers visited the homes of enrolled and prospective pupils, teaching only half a day for this purpose. Kindergartners were enthusiastic about such tales as Lucy Wheelock's "A Lily's Mission" in which two "ragged, dirty children" bring a flower home to their dingy tenement apartment. The mother has failed to keep the house clean; the father is out drinking. Overjoyed at seeing the flower, the mother places it on a windowsill only to discover that dirt prevents any sunlight from shining through the window to the flower. With the window clean, sunlight reveals the filth of the apartment, which is then quickly cleaned, the mother is washed and dressed, and father, overcome by his new environment upon his return home, vows to give up the bottle. Such tales revealed only the most spectacular of powers attributed to the kindergarten as an instrument of reform. "The interest manifested in the children and families," Pingree wrote of the kindergartens, "does much to encourage the 24

Alice M. Guersey, "Schools and Homes," Journal of Education, 18 (1883), 53; Parker, "Kindergartens of Boston," p. 335. On the use of public-school classrooms for Mrs. Shaw's kindergartens, see Boston School Committee, Minutes, 1882, pp. 218-219.

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parents to do something for the children themselves, and to make them more responsible for them. The impression made upon the mothers by the patience and gentleness of the teachers is a deep one . . . " Pointing to the need to instruct slum parents, Pingree told of the kindergarten child who, after being struck by her mother, declared: "God did not give you those to strike me with; he made them to do nice and good things; my (kindergarten) teacher said so." To the philanthropists and settlement workers, the kindergarten thus emerged as a crucial wedge to bring order to the child's growth and to his life at home, on the street, and in the classroom. Through the child, the adult poor would be instructed in the mores of the dominant society. As the kindergarten moved from the organizations of charity to the public schools, it would retain that ideology of reform, but in a considerably different setting.25 Tied to and invigorated by the settlement houses and philanthropists, the kindergarten soon found its way into the public-school systems of urban Massachusetts. By 1914 seven of the ten largest cities and twelve of the twenty largest had public kindergartens. In almost every case they developed out of a philanthropic base and, particularly in the first years of the transition from charity to public education, continued their allegiance to the ideals of social philanthropy and their commitment to the kindergarten as distinctive from the regular school classroom.26 Almost in25

26

Lucy Wheelock, " A Lily's Mission," Voice from the Old Brewery and Five Points Mission Monthly (published by Ladies Home Missionary Society), Oct. 1, 1889, copy in Wheelock Papers, Wheelock College; Liliah Pingree in Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1885, No. 4, pp. 51-52. Similar to the Wheelock story is Annie I. Willis, " A Midsummer Story: The Charity Kindergarten," Journal of Education, 36 (1892), 55-57. For a general summary of kindergarten developments in Massachusetts and N e w England, see Lucy Wheelock (ed.), "The Kindergarten in New England," presented to the Association for Childhood Education, June 26-30, 1935, MS in Wheelock Papers. Of the ten largest Massachusetts cities, Boston, Worcester, Fall River, Lowell, Cambridge,

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variably, the first kindergartens under public auspices focused on the peculiar needs of the slum child and on the role kindergartens could play in elevating his home and neighborhood, while preparing him for the elementary grades. Ultimately, however, the incorporation of early childhood training into urban school systems led to a withdrawal from the broad goals of community reform and revealed an emerging consensus among educators and philanthropists that all education, whatever its social justification, should be centered in the schools. In Massachusetts this would lead in the decades after 1900 to a gradual narrowing, rather than a broadening, of social commitments, a turning away from urban reform. For reasons of economy and theory, public kindergartens began to eliminate mothers' meetings and home visits, while their supporters on the eve of World War I spoke less about reforming and elevating the family and about social amelioration than they did about smoothing the child's progress in grade school and separating him from his social background. The processes of transfer from philanthropic to public and the need for an institutional rationale acceptable to the professional educator worked a subtle but nonetheless radical transformation in the philosophy of the kindergarten. The transition from philanthropic to public occurred first in Boston, and it was there that the initial continuity between schooling and social reform was most clearly apparent. Although the city had briefly experimented with a public-supported kindergarten in the 1870's, preschooling before 1887 remained almost exclusively a philanthropicsocial settlement activity, dominated by Shaw. During the mid-1800's, however, rising costs forced Shaw to cut back her commitments, and she and her associates began pressuring the Boston School Committee to finance its own kindergartens. Receiving strong support from SuperinSpringfield, and Somerville had public kindergartens, while New Bedford, Lynn, and Lawrence did not. Of the next ten cities, Holyoke, Haverhill, Salem, Newton, and Fitchburg had classes. Brockton, Maiden, Taunton, Everett, and Quincy did not.

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tendent of Schools Edwin P. Seaver, Shaw agreed to turn over her program to the city, thereby enlarging charity into a broader public responsibility. The rationale for accepting this responsibility emerged in two areas, one involving the relationship of preschooling to social reform, the other focusing on early childhood education as a prerequisite for future school success. The former reflected a direct transfer of philanthropic ideals to public education. In an immigrant, working-class city like Boston, f e w families could be considered positive agents of socialization, and any improvement in family life depended upon bringing children into more adequate institutions. Calling for the adoption and expansion of kindergarten classes as a regular feature of the Boston public schools, Superintendent Seaver declared that the kindergarten "affords a much-needed protection from the injurious influence of the street." "For those unfortunate children—and they are many, w h o suffer from parental carelessness, indifference, ignorance, or poverty, the Kindergarten measurably supplies what the home does not—kindly nurture in the virtues and graces of a more refined and elevated democratic life." The kindergarten also seemed, simultaneously, an effective way of getting children ready for further schooling. This view was best summarized by an experienced teacher w h o had taught primary school for thirty years and beginners for about twenty years. For the last ten years she had received ten or twelve children each year from kindergarten. Their training "in habits of neatness cleanliness, order, self-reliance, and prompt obedience," she wrote, was "a great saving of time to the primary teacher." The children had "formed habits of observing closely, and using their hands properly." " A l l their faculties" were "so cultivated that no time" was "lost in preparing them for Primary School w o r k . " Those children w h o belonged to cultivated families, she continued, might not need kindergarten training, "but it is almost a necessity for the majority of children under our charge." " W e w h o have from fifty-six to sixty or more children cannot so carefully watch each little one, learn its peculiar traits, temperament, etc., as

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should be done during the first months of school life. Kindergarten teachers do much in this direction." The training in habits of "truthfulness, unselfishness, and thoughtfulness for the rights of others," the teacher concluded, was "of untold value to the children, and a great assistance to the primary teacher." 2 7 Inherent, then, in the Boston School Committee's adoption of the kindergarten, a step taken in 1888, were thus these two interrelated themes: community reform as personified by the social settlements and school achievement defined by adequate preparation for primary grades. Both themes depended upon a consensus among philanthropists, reformers, and educators that urban social life had failed and that the children of the city needed a special institution if they were to learn proper habits of social behavior. While community reform and school achievement initially seemed complementary, however, public education would be hardpressed to achieve either among the poor, and educators would soon be choosing the school rather than the community as their central concern. The dominant role that philanthropy and philanthropic ideals played in establishing kindergartens in Boston also appeared in other cities in Massachusetts. In Cambridge kindergartens were initiated by Shaw in the late 1870's. A decade later, almost simultaneously with the movement in Boston, she and other philanthropists convinced the Cambridge School Committee to incorporate their charity classes into the public schools. Mothers' clubs, evening receptions for fathers, and home visits by teachers remained integral to the Cambridge kindergarten program to the end of the century. This blurring of public and philanthropic similarly occurred in Fall River, where, as late as 1912, Mrs. Spencer Bordon was supplying furniture, materials, and all other equipment to the public-school system's five classes. Even in the wealthy Boston suburb of Brookline, 27

Boston, School Documents, 1885, No. 4, pp. 5 0 - 5 4 ; ibid., 1886, No. 3, pp. 4 6 - 4 9 ; ibid., 1887, No. 3, pp. 2 8 - 3 2 ; ibid., 1887, No. 2 1 ; ibid., 1888, No. 18, pp. 10-13.

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considered by an observer in the 1890's to possess "one of the most unique school systems in the country," where the kindergarten had been part of the school system since 1888 and where in 1896 a kindergarten existed in every public-school building, charity overtones persisted. Discussing educational activities in the town, Superintendent of Schools Samuel Dutton noted that the Brookline Education Society and Child Study Association brought "cultured women" together with "those less favored" to explain the care of children. Dutton, one of the most articulate and active exponents of innovations among the state's professional educators, an adviser to Kindergarten Magazine, and a propagandist for widespread kindergarten education, remained committed, like other educators, to the particular applicability of such classes to "all neglected children and those whose breeding and environment are likely to result in criminal habits." 28 Yet if many Massachusetts' cities established kindergartens as part of their public-school systems before World War I, the élan and vitality that marked the movement's early years waned after 1900. Despite continuing assertions that kindergartens were essential for children of the ghetto, despite affirmations of their importance to all children by secretaries of the state's Board of Education, despite a resolution by the Massachusetts Teachers' Association in 1895 and proposed legislation in 1909 that all cities and towns with populations over 10,000 have public kindergartens, and despite the activities of individual superintendents of schools, public classes showed only moderate growth. 29 While the number of children enrolled in public kinder28

29

Cambridge, School Report, 1889, pp. 28-30; ibid., 1900, p. 41; ibid., 1901, p. 50; Fall River, School Report, 1912, p. 25; Amalie Hoffer, "Brookline Schools—Well-Equipped, Well-Developed, Well-Poised," Kindergarten Magazine, 9 (1896), 282, 285, 288 ; Samuel T. Dutton, Social Phases of Education in the School and the Home (New York, 1899), pp. 213-215, 245-246. Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1884-1885, pp. 90-91; ibid., 1894-1895, pp. 189, 191-192; Massachusetts, Documents of the House of Representatives (Boston, 1909), Nos. 577, 1462, 1538.

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gartens increased from about 3,000 to 14,000 between 1890 and 1900, annual enrollment climbed to only 18,000 by 1914, with Boston and Worcester, the state's largest cities, accounting for half the last figure.30 Whereas Massachusetts in 1898 accounted for 8.8 percent of all children registered in kindergarten in the United States, its proportion gradually dropped to 5.4 percent by 1912. Even where public kindergartens were established, they sometimes catered to as few as 6 percent of the eligible population (ages four to six), although Boston's 22 percent, Cambridge's 31 percent, Springfield's 61 percent, Holyoke's 23 percent, and Worcester's 28 percent were outstanding among the larger cities.31 The kindergarten's failure to become universal in Massachusetts reflected a number of problems. Although many educators continued to argue that the kindergarten inculcated proper habits of behavior, educated urban parents, and introduced children to school, preschooling was costly. Many cities and towns, already heavily taxed and spending between 15 and 30 percent of their municipal budgets on public education, found kindergartens an unjustifiable luxury. Between 1889 and 1909, while enrollment in the Boston kindergartens climbed, the city paid about twenty dollars a year for each pupil. By 1914, however, expenditures had increased to twenty-seven dollars a pupil. Cambridge found itself in a similar situation when instruction per kindergarten pupil increased from $14.78 (1890), to 30

31

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1890-1891, pp. 5 6 57; ibid., 1899-1900, p. 129; ibid., 1913-1914, p. 198. Boston and Worcester contained over half (9,451 of 18,118) the public-school kindergarten children in Massachusetts in 1912, although their proportion of total day public-school students was only about 25 percent. "Statistics of Public and Private Kindergartens," U.S. Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1902), LI; "Kindergartens in the United States," U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1914), pp. 28-29, passim. The Bureau reported that in 1912, 13.2 percent of Massachusetts' children between the ages of four and six were enrolled in kindergartens, placing the Commonwealth behind eight other states and the District of Columbia in the percentage of enrolled to eligible population. Ibid., p. 15.

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$19.33 (1898), to $27.15 (1908), and finally $39.77 (1915) as compared to expenditures per primary school pupil of $12.92, $13.94, $16.11, and $24.46 for the same years. Kindergarten expenses in Fall River went from $12.37 in 1904-1905 to $21.65 per pupil in 1913-1914, while Lowell, which cut its kindergarten enrollment between 1904 and 1914, found that its expenditures per pupil continued to increase. Although these rises reflected a general trend in school costs, kindergartens remained more expensive than the lower primary grades. As distinctive institutions, they demanded special treatment, and to varying degrees they got it. In a study of twenty American cities in 1911, the Boston Finance Commission found that five of the seven cities in Massachusetts analyzed averaged fewer pupils per teacher in kindergarten than in the elementary schools, and in some cases the difference was dramatic.32 Lessening commitment to the kindergarten, however, represented more than a reaction to high and rising costs. Cities were invariably involved in choosing educational innovations or expanding their educational services; kindergartens could have received more priority than they did. "More fundamental (than costs)," David Snedden, State Commissioner of Education wrote in 1915, was 32

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport, 1899-1900, pp. 1 2 6 127; ibid., 1904-1905, pp. 177-178; ibid., 1913-1914, p. 198; Cambridge, School Report, 1890, p. 17; ibid., 1898, p. 19; ibid., 1908, p. 28; ibid., 1915, p. 49; Boston Finance Commission, fleport on the Boston School System (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1911), p. 167. Only Springfield's kindergartens contained more kindergarten pupils per teacher than elementary pupils, while Lynn, the seventh city, had no official kindergarten classes. Whereas Boston averaged forty-three elementary school pupils per teacher, it had only twentysix for the kindergarten. Comparable figures in Lowell were thirtyseven to nineteen, Cambridge thirty-eight to twenty-five, Worcester thirty-four to twenty-two, and Fall River thirty-three to twenty-two. Lawrence dropped its experimental kindergarten in 1898 because of financial pressures. Lawrence, School fleport, 1898, pp. 15-16. Kindergarten advocates recognized their difficulties and attempted to persuade the public that the educational benefits were either worth the costs or compromised their methods to cut costs. See Eastern Kindergarten Association, Does the Kindergarten Pay? (Boston, 1909); and Vandewalker, Kindergarten, pp. 184-185.

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" . . . whether the aims and the field of the kindergarten have been defined to the satisfaction of educators." "It is widely assumed that the chief value of the kindergarten is to compensate for deficiencies of home environment." Such an assumption, the Commissioner claimed, implied that educators knew what the ideal environment for healthy growth was and that the "compensatory functions" of the kindergarten provided such an environment. If this were so, why did the "cities having conditions of environment least favorable to the normal growth of children (the immigrant-industrial cities) have usually the fewest kindergartens." In effect, Snedden argued, kindergarten advocates asserted they offered an ideal environment to overcome home and neighborhood conditions without proving their case to the public. But there was more to the criticism, for implicit in the argument was a sense that the essential failure of kindergartners had been their attempt to establish their institution distinct from the primary grades and that the kindergarten advocates were unwilling to see their programs as simply the beginning of the regular school process. 33 Kindergartens, Snedden suggested, could not be all things to all people. If, as most of their supporters claimed, they had "positive educational functions, quite independent of environmental conditions of the child," functions that applied to "other forms of education for children living in a wholesome and normal environment," then the emphasis upon the slum child had been misplaced. "Children of English-speaking parents living in good environments," Sneeden wrote, could most afford to delay their school work until the age of six, either by remaining at home or engaging in the play activities of the kindergarten. Children of the slums, however, especially the non-English-speaking, needed early exposure to a more rigorous school atmosphere, one that combined certain kindergarten methods with systematic primary school training. 34 33

34

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1914-1915, pp. 48-49. Ibid.

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This issue, the conflict between essentially structured and formalized learning versus "play" learning, effectively undercut appeals for the kindergarten as a distinctive institution. Within the kindergarten movement itself, the distinctions that had developed between the needs of all children and those peculiar to children of the poor and the differences between early childhood schooling for children from healthy homes and those from the urban slum were reflected in controversy over kindergarten methods. As Snedden implied, once educators differentiated among categories of children, methods and goals had to be modified. Those who remained committed to the universal child and Froebel's methods, therefore, came under constant criticism by kindergarten reformers who demanded programs adapted to such categories as the child's nationality, class, age, approximation to normality, physical handicaps, environmental background, and material and social development. Conflict within the kindergarten movement itself thus served to undercut expansion of the preschooling programs. 35 Concern over costs and confusion among kindergartners as to the true nature of their institution soon led Massachusetts' educators to focus on the relationship between primary and kindergarten education, evolving a compromise situation that effectively curtailed the latter's distinctiveness, and helped terminate the philanthropic commitments to social amelioration. The establishment of subprimary classes, or in less defined form, the absorption of the kindergarten by the lower primary grades had particular appeal to those concerned with the slum child. "When . . . children live in crowded quarters," Commissioner Snedden wrote, "and especially if the language of the home be foreign, or else poor English, a twofold gain results from admission at five to a so-called subprimary class. The school 35

Pioneers, pp. 242, 295-301. This is an excellent summary of conflicting tendencies in the kindergarten movement just before World War I. See also Caroline T. Haven, "Changes in Kindergarten Material," Kindergarten Review, 11 (1899), 408-413.

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will provide for a few hours each day a better environment than the street, and a moderate amount of systematic training will give to the pupil such command of English and training in school behavior in general as to enable him, after entering the first grade, to keep pace approximately with more favored classmates." 36 The processes that made the kindergarten simply an adjunct of the first grade occurred throughout the state, but two pertinent examples can be found in Lynn and New Bedford. In the former during the 1890's conceptions of the kindergarten combined affirmations of its unique qualities with assertions that it was a rung on the ladder of school success. Kindergartens, Lynn's Superintendent of Schools wrote, placed children in closer contact with teachers than was possible in primary schools and had "revolutionized modern processes of primary teaching." As such, the city's school board declared in 1895, they should be an integral feature of the public-school system—for all children. Between 1895 and 1910, however, visions of the kindergarten as a separate entity gave way to the notion that kindergarten methods were more effective when incorporated into the primary schools. The process was twofold: recognition that distinctive kindergartens could not be established because of financial restrictions, followed by attempts to introduce kindergarten methods into the first and second grades. Clay and paper cutting, storytelling, recess, and rest periods were thus added to the normal word drill, reading, writing, music, and drawing of these grades. The introduction of such methods, the Superintendent believed, would be a means of implementing the basis of the kindergarten without straining finances and without disrupting the teaching staff. School business could occur as usual without the disquieting questions of kindergarten education being raised. By 1909 the Superintentent considered the experiment of unifying kindergarten and primary classes an unqualified success, though two years 36

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 1 5 , pp. 49-50.

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earlier his school board had noted that many of these classes contained more than fifty pupils per teacher and were located in small, dark, and poorly ventilated rooms. Still, the Superintendent wrote: "That we have successfully solved the problem of the first year work in schools where the means are not available for establishing regular kindergartens preceding the first year course in school, is the general opinion of those who have visited the schools and examined the work." 37 Even more revealing than the situation in Lynn were developments in the immigrant-industrial city of New Bedford. There, rapid population growth—from 40,000 to 96,000 between 1890 and 1910—and large numbers of foreign-born, reflecting the enormous expansion of the city's cotton textile industry, placed great pressures upon the city's school system. In the lower grades, where a majority of the children by 1913 came from homes of non-Englishspeaking parents, conditions were exceedingly bad. It was to these children of New Bedford's immigrant mill population that the first kindergartens in the city were directed.38 In 1894, under the auspices of the City Mission, an aid station for the poor, two charity classes were set up in the mill and immigrant north and south ends of the city. Within two years, pressure developed for public sponsorship of the classes, now accepted as necessary "for children whose home advantages are not of the best." After a minor 37

38

Lynn, School Report, 1890, pp. 45-47; ibid., 1895, pp. 46-51; ibid., 1897, p. 11; ibid., 1905, pp. 10-13; ibid., 1907, pp. 22-25; ibid., 1909 p. 15. Despite assertions to the contrary, primary school teachers were often hostile to the special characteristics of the kindergarten. See Parker, "Kindergartens of Boston," pp. 335-336; and Alan P. Keith, Superintendent, New Bedford Public Schools, quoted in U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1914) pp. 100-101. In 1913, 57 percent and 53 percent of the children in the public first and second grades were from non-English-speaking homes. Between 1890 and 1910, the proportion of foreign-born in New Bedford went from 34.6 percent to 44.1 percent of the total population, except for Lawrence, the highest in the state. New Bedford, School Report, 1913, p. 42.

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skirmish between the City Council which refused to allocate funds and the School Board, three kindergarten classes were established, under conditions, however, that deviated significantly from earlier philanthropic conceptions. The new classes were not to be distinctive institutions, but "should conform somewhat to the plan or organization which rules in all other grades of the schools if they are to become a permanent part of the school system." As was true of primary school teachers, kindergarten instructors were required to conduct two sessions daily, each containing fifty different pupils, though, as a concession to the particular necessities of the kindergarten, two teachers were assigned to every hundred pupils. Teachers' home visits, small classes, and an educational and social ethic distinct from that of the primary schools received little recognition. New Bedford thus initiated its public kindergarten program with virtually no concern for the social reform measures that had previously dominated much of the movement. 39 Even with these modifications, New Bedford's educators were unhappy. None of the three kindergartens was meeting its quota of one hundred pupils per day, making the program more expensive per pupil than originally intended. "I am a firm believer in kindergartens," Superintendent William Hatch wrote at the end of the first year's experiment, "and I have so expressed myself before; but I also firmly believe economical questions must have proper consideration in school administration. The cost of kindergartens under the one-session plan (with afternoons devoted to home visits and mothers' clubs) is too great to warrant their maintenance on that plan. If there is not sufficient appreciation of this class of schools on the part of the parents of the city to support the double plan, as 39

Wheelock, "Kindergarten in N e w England," pp. 14-15; N e w Bedford, "Minutes of the School Committee," July 1, 1895, Feb. 3, May 4, 1896, May 3, Aug. 16, 1897, MS in the Office of the School Committee, N e w Bedford; N e w Bedford, School Report, 1896, pp. 91-94; ibid., 1897, pp. 97-99.

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much as I should dislike to see kindergartens abandoned here, I should feel it my duty to advise their discontinuance." Five years later, in 1902, attendance continued considerably below expectations. With two teachers in each school, Hatch claimed, a kindergarten instructor averaged only fourteen pupils, in contrast to a primary school teacher's forty to fifty. Reflecting growing community concern over school costs, the superintendent contended that the kindergartens created more problems than they solved. While he believed that "it would be an excellent thing if most of the children of our schools could have the advantage of the kindergarten," New Bedford's schools were already overcrowded, with increasing costs "causing dissatisfaction that may at any time affect a more important department. . ." 40 The climax of the kindergarten controversy finally came between 1904 and 1909, when a compromise effectively eliminated kindergartens. In the former year Superintendent Hatch enlarged his criticism from economic to theoretical grounds, claiming that children should not be in school before age six and suggesting that earlier attendance had no discernible effect on school performance. With the city in the midst of an economic depression the following year, the School Board narrowly voted in June, 1905, to continue the kindergartens, though it recognized that they were expensive and insufficiently patronized. Nine months later, however, the Board reversed itself and moved to abolish the classes, an action that was protested by prominent individuals in the city. At a special public hearing a citizens' group headed by the founders of the charity kindergartens of the 1890's declared: "In an industrial city like ours we believe it essential to begin the education of hand and mind of the child at the earliest possible time. We therefore petition your Honorable Board to continue the kindergartens we already have and to establish others where they are needed." Kindergarten supporters claimed that New 40

New Bedford, School Report, pp. 100-101; ibid., 1902, pp. 26, 138-139.

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Bedford's industrial community urgently needed the classes. The Reverend Paul R. Frothingham, who had started the city's second charity kindergarten in the immigrant north end, declared: "There are some cities where the kindergarten is not so necessary as in New Bedford, cities where all the people are well-to-do, where there are small families, and the parents are able to provide for their children. But in a great industrial center, with large families and crowded conditions, a kindergarten, I believe, plays a very important and necessary part." Indeed, the issue was so important that Frothingham called for the elimination of Latin and Greek from the high school rather than drop kindergartens.41 In defense of the School Board's position, New Bedford's mayor claimed that the one kindergarten with a regular and large attendance was some distance from the mill district, while the two in the areas considered most necessary for kindergarten education hardly attracted any children. The Board itself contended that the high school was a physical wreck and funds had to be found to build a new one, that the city government had granted only $90,000 of the Board's $201,000 request for teachers' salaries, and that many of the primary schools were overcrowded and in deteriorating condition. Kindergartens, contended the New Bedford Standard-Times, were simply too expensive in the face of the city's financial plight. The $4,000 annual expenditure, could be better diverted elsewhere.42 Under intense pressure—the School Board received petitions from the boards of directors of the Orphans' Home, Mothers' Club, Woman's Club, and City Mission, all representing prominent New Bedford citizens, as well as petitions from several of the mill corporations—the School Committee engaged in a tactical retreat. In June, 1906, two and a half months after the stormy open hearing, the Board 41

42

Ibid., 1904, p. 142; N e w Bedford, "Minutes," June 15, 30, 1905, Feb. 5, Mar. 5, 19, 1906; N e w Bedford Morning Mercury, Mar. 20, 1906. N e w Bedford Morning Mercury, Mar. 20, 1906; N e w Bedford StandardTimes, Mar. 19, 21, 1906; see also ibid., Mar. 26, 1906.

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voted eight to seven to retain the public kindergartens and within six months had added a fourth class in the south end. The decision in 1906 did not, however, settle the controversy. Confronting a situation in which more than 50 percent of the children entering first grade did not understand English or could do so only with difficulty, the School Board moved to establish half-time subprimary classes for five- and six-year-olds. These classes would continue the game activities of the kindergarten, but would also introduce the children to the routine of school life. No child under the age of seven would be allowed to enter school after the first two weeks of classes unless he was qualified to do so, thus forcing all newly arrived nonEnglish-speaking children into the subprimary classes. New Bedford had found, in essence, that isolating the immigrant child was an effective way of educating him, but that this could best be done by introducing him to the "routine of school life," rather than by establishing distinctive, socially involved kindergartens.43 New Bedford and Lynn were not exceptional cases. They and six other of Massachusetts' twenty largest cities had either eliminated or never established public-school kindergartens before 1914. What is more important, a number of other cities that had maintained such classes were by the second decade of the twentieth century eliminating the kindergarten as a distinctive institution, moving away from the earlier conception of it as a unique environment with socially amelioristic goals. The subprimary movement prominent in New Bedford had received strong support from the state's Commissioner of Education. The emancipatory goals of creative play and self-expression within a structured environment and the humanization of early childhood education had become confused with the need to bring order and discipline to the slum child. Preparation of the child 43

N e w Bedford, "Minutes," Apr. 2, June 4, Nov. 5, 1906, Feb. 3, 1908; N e w Bedford School Report, 1906, pp. 113-115; ibid., 1908, pp. 7 4 75; ibid., 1909, pp. 71-72.

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for the primary grades was becoming the kindergarten's raison d'etre, combining English-language instruction with an emphasis on traditional learning and curriculum. What Francis Parker had called "the most important far reaching educational reform of the nineteenth century" was ceasing to be conceived of as an environment in itself and as a supplement to the child's environment, and, instead, was assuming a position as a preelementary class whose major function was to remove the child from his home environment and lead him into the schools as quickly as possible.44 This tendency did not introduce totally novel themes into existing conceptions of early childhood education. It represented, rather, a subtle change in emphasis, which, in turn, resulted in the radical transformation of the kindergarten as an urban institution. Antagonism to the slum child's background had always existed within the kindergarten movement, and indeed provided a major impetus to its growth. A "social quarantine" movement had even become prominent at the turn of the century, calling for a "strict quarantine for the innocents (that is, "children of the street and of wretched homes"), where the kindergarten influence and gentle training . . . may overcome the moral starvation from which they suffer, and develop in them human potentialities for goodness." 45 But such views had always coexisted with and even been dominated by philanthropic and settlement goals that had seen the child as a means to larger social reform. The mothers' meetings, social gatherings, child care talks, home visits, and a host of other activities had effectively enlarged conceptions of children's schooling. Now, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Massachusetts' cities began to eliminate or deemphasize these as regular features of the kindergarten. Cambridge 44

46

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1914-1915, pp. 49-50; Francis Parker, quoted in Kindergarten Magazine, 1 (1889), 381; Boston, School Documents, 1914, No. 11, pp. 39-41. Kindergarten Magazine, 11 (1898), 14&-150. The front cover of this periodical in 1899-1900 carried as one of its goals support for the social quarantine movement in kindergarten and elementary education.

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instituted a one-year experiment in double teaching sessions for each kindergarten teacher in 1911, necessitating "the dropping of much of the visiting to the homes of the children as well as the mothers' meetings." Worcester believed that kindergarten teachers had to be trained for the primary grades as well as for their particular kindergarten roles, a point reinforced by New Bedford's Superintendent, who noted in 1914 that his city's early experiences had produced "constant friction between kindergartners and first grade teachers." Because of this, he wrote, "the kindergartens were never extended in the system." Boston's Finance Commission undoubtedly offered the most extreme proposal: all-day kindergartens in foreign districts with all four-yearolds attending as the only means of preparing the children for their first-grade work. 46 These public pronouncements reveal the changing conceptions of the kindergarten. As significant was the absence of discussion about the social responsibilities of educators who taught young children. Whereas superintendents of schools had once affirmed the key roles kindergartens would play in slum districts, between 1910 and 1914 such discussion practically ceased.47 Where children of the poor were mentioned, it was now almost invariably in the context of nonEnglish-speaking immigrants who needed aid in being propelled through the school and into the work force, rather than in terms of helping reform the larger society of which they were a part. As they became institutionalized in the urban public school, kindergartners moved from the 46

47

Cambridge, School Report, 1911, pp. 20-21, 29; Worcester, School Report, 1911, p. 71; U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6 (1914), pp. 100-101; Boston Finance Commission, .Report, 1916, pp. 70-71. A number of cities still continued to think in terms of broader social issues, although it is hard to gauge their actual involvement. See Springfield, School Report, 1912, p. 60; Fall River, School Report, 1916, p. 39; Worcester, School Report, 1913, pp. 84-85. In Lowell, for example, between 1910 and 1916 the Superintendent of Schools never mentioned kindergartens except to report that one had been added or dropped from the system. A little more than a decade earlier, Lowell's pride in its kindergartens was unbounded. Lowell, School Report, 1899, p. 56.

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delicate balance they had earlier proposed between freedom and order, emancipation and discipline, to a clear and overriding commitment to control. Slum children, removed from the guiding restraints of healthy, orderly family life, growing up in the anarchic environment of the street, needed discipline above all else, and needed to be prepared for the strict environment of the primary grades. By the time of America's entry into World War I, Massachusetts' educators had resolved the tension that had existed in the kindergarten movement between focusing on the child or using the child for the good of the larger group. They had turned from the child in the slum home to the slum child in school, a far easier and cheaper means of education, and in the process they were ceasing to believe that positive benefits could be derived from the former.

Ill Manual Training: The Search for an Ideology The demand for relevance dominated Massachusetts' educational debates. New high schools, compulsory attendance, the expansion of educational opportunity, and new curricula and teaching methods all had to meet the call for practicality. Do the schools "educate the people practically?" asked a memorialist to the state legislature in 1872. "Do they fit all to become self-reliant and heroic? . . . Do they make it possible for every one to work according to his capacity?" With cities growing larger, their social problems becoming more acute, and with factories now dominating the industrial landscape, schools could no longer adhere to traditional methods and goals. "We should recognize the great social problems of the day," wrote Boston's Edwin Seaver in 1884, "and, as educators, endeavor to ascertain what the school can do toward the solution of these problems." Education had to meet the demands of life. "We have introduced into the public schools the elements of many branches of learning," declared Worcester's Superintendent of Schools, C. F. Carroll. "All this change represents an attempt to bring the child in the schoolroom into contact with life as he will find it later. It is assumed that the child in the schoolroom is already living, and that the conditions and forces of our civilization are here represented." How, Massachusetts' educators asked, could schools prepare youth for the personal and social demands they would confront? How could education further social progress, while assuring social stability? The answers to these questions would shape Massachusetts' system of public schools.1 The most widely discussed late nineteenth-century re1

Lizzie Batchelder, A Memorial on industrial Schools, Delivered Before the Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Legislature (Boston, 1872), p. 4; Edwin P. Seaver, "Industrial Education," Journal o/Education, 20 (1884), 307-308; C. F. Clarke, in Isaac E. Clarke, Art and industry (46th Cong., 2d sess., U.S. Senate, Executive Documents, 1897), VII, No. 209, pt. 3, xxxiv.

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sponse to the demands of relevance was manual education. "Hand learning" attracted pedagogical and social reformers, kindergarten enthusiasts and manufacturers, philanthropists, and school officials. Technical education courses, sophisticated industrial shops, simple woodcarving rooms, school kitchens and gardens, sewing, drawing, and children's play activities all received support as part of the manual education movement. Pedagogical reformers drew upon kindergarten innovations, object teaching, and the introduction of science laboratory practices into the classroom to justify hand activities. Manufacturers demanded that the schools be responsible for teaching basic industrial skills. Uncertain about having industrial practices in their schools, educators nevertheless supported training in the "principles" that underlie all work, while others, more enthusiastic, found in the reproduction of objects through drawing and wood carving a vehicle for uplifting cultural standards and aesthetic tastes. 2 Above all, however, hand learning seemed an ideal means of reconstituting society. With the material advances brought by technology had come threats to traditional values and institutions. Definitions of work, which had once revolved around individual self-direction and the completion of work tasks, had been radically altered by the increased importance of factory production with its external commands and specialized and partial functions. In the urban environment, especially among the poor, families had difficulty transmitting values and skills in homes particularly troubled by conflicts between immigrant parents and their children. The threats affected all involved in urban life and touched by technology's impact. Here lay manual training's strongest justification. By teaching children how to work, transmit2

For a capsule summary of the multiple goals of manual training, see George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York, P. Appleton and Co., 1904), pp. 258-259. See also John D. Runkle, "The Manual Element in Education," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annuo] Report], 1876-1877, pp. 185-192.

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ting the knowledge and values once procured in the shop and home, it seemed a primary means of reintegrating individuals and institutions, providing a link between the past and present, and thus securing the future. As an educational response to the disruptions of an urbanindustrial society, manual training received strong support as a necessity for all children. Yet it was also justified for its special applicability to select groups within that society. "It is interesting to see," wrote Joseph Lee, the prominent social philanthropist and member of the Boston School Committee, "how invariably the men who take up the whole subject of what can be done for a given class of people,—whether they be the blind, the deaf-mutes, deformed children, or youthful criminals; or whether they are the boys of a particular parish or club; or whether they are a whole race, like the negroes or the jews,—are at the present time including industrial training among the things which they find themselves called upon to provide." Those outside the normal and acceptable boundaries of American life, those needing uplift and integration, were those most in need of manual training. Urban families, adopting any means to stay alive, seemed unable to understand that work was ennobling, that it was a matter of pride not economics. They became primary targets of the movement. So too were the factory children who needed special education for their particular problems. Indeed, the poor generally, it was claimed, lacked the discipline that a previous work environment had provided, and to that lack manual training was directed. 3 Manual education thus combined a host of complex concerns, emotions, and methodologies. While particular rationales dominated individual proposals, rarely was any innovation undertaken without a myriad of justifications. Essentially contradictory attitudes often coalesced in support of particular programs; tensions were rarely made ex3

Joseph Lee, Constructive and Preventive Macmillan Company, 1902), p. 204.

Philanthropy

(New York,

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plicit or resolved. While demands for industrial efficiency helped initiate the industrial art movement of the 1870's, they were soon joined by pleas for aesthetic uplift and pedagogical reform, goals not easily made compatible. Manual educators never resolved the tension between the professed goal of hand learning for all children and the peculiar needs of particular groups of children. While all urban families, by the nature of their environment, needed exposure to controlled physical activity, children of the poor required it more frequently and more systematically. Despite the eclecticism and confusion, however, most manual training proposals had a common theme: in a disrupted society whose institutions no longer functioned adequately the school had a responsibility for social restoration. Rarely concerned with the bases of change, the advocates of manual education accepted the need for an industrial economy and the permanence of the city. They did not seek to prevent or undo either. Rather they focused on the manifestations of industrialization and urbanization— the loss of institutional harmony and the threat to social values —and hoped to use the classroom to reconstruct traditional relationships. By the end of the nineteenth century their ideology of restoration through manual activities had achieved widespread recognition. It is ironic, however, that this same ideology would be attacked after 1900 for its inadequate and irrelevant approach to contemporary needs, just as manual education seemed to have reached its high point. Pedagogical reform played an important role in buttressing the manual education movement. The kindergarten was one source of support. Its rejection of immobile and abstract pedagogy, its commitment to learning through physical activity, and its manual activities themselves— drawing, paper folding, clay modeling, block building— blended smoothly with the thrust of hand learning. "Ought not the true elementary course of study," asked Frank A. Hill, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in

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1894, "to recognize the entire environment in a simple, child-appealing way? Ought we not to attack greater importance to the currents of likes and dislikes in the child's, nature,—in short, to respect child interest more than at present? Ought not the work spirit to be developed gradually out of the play instinct?" A year earlier a committee appointed by the Massachusetts legislature to investigate "whether any existing system of manual training or industrial education, or any modification thereof, can be adopted with advantage in any of the public schools of this Commonwealth" found that "Froebel's principles, carried to the full extent of their application, would bring manual training not only up to the high school but through it and even beyond." One committee member wrote, "Give the child a tool, you at once differentiate him from the animal."4 Other pedagogical innovations provided additional support. The object teaching movement, designed to introduce into the classroom real objects that would allow children to observe and define the characteristics of things rather than being told about them, reinforced hand learning's emphasis on the material and its devaluation of the role of books. Laboratory methods of teaching science served a similar purpose. For Frank A. Hill, former principal of the Cambridge English High School and during the 1890's Secretary of the State Board of Education, the manual idea first evolved out of the belief that learning occurred best when students saw how a thing was done, especially by doing it themselves. In this sense, Hill argued, early class* Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1893-1894, p. 146 ; Massachusetts Board of Education, Report of the Committee to Investigate the Existing Systems of Manual Training and Industrial Education (hereafter cited as Report on Manual Training) (Boston, 1893), pp. 3-11, 41, 49, 70, 273; Thomas Tash, "Kindergarten," Journal of Education, 22 (1885), 156-157. An interesting early example of the close association between manual education and the kindergarten was the publication in 1869 of Elizabeth Peabody's "A Plea for Froebel's Kindergarten as the First Grade of Primary Education" as an introduction to Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, The Identification of the Artisan and Artist (Boston, 1869).

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room laboratories contributed to manual training. In the elementary grades the laboratory method could mean studying plant life by spending time outdoors in the fields or bringing plants into the classroom. The underlying idea was participation; the goal, to have the pupils rather than the teacher do the seeing, thinking, and relating. Participation, experimentation, and self-discovery through the manipulation of objects were manual training's methods, and school laboratories and work-shops represented the same processes of pedagogical reform. 5 The kindergarten, object teaching, and school laboratories, while accentuating the physical nature of learning, nevertheless justified themselves as aids in training the mind. Manual education had also to evolve an elaborate rationale to establish a relationship between hand activities and mental growth; it could not justify itself as simply enhancing motor coordination. "Drawing is an intellectual exercise," wrote a teacher in the Boston public schools, "the power of which resides in the head, and not in the hand, as some suppose . . . In learning to draw, there are laws of Nature and Art that must be investigated and understood; and in the representation of forms, however simple, there must be mental effort." Primarily a mental process, drawing depended upon thought and study; it heightened one's ability to observe closely, cultivated neatness and accuracy, and strengthened the intellectual powers of the mind. 6 Such arguments justified a host of other manual activities from sewing and wood carving to complex machine working. Some advocates of manual training went even further and posited a physiological basis for intellectual growth. Sensory perception, they claimed, stimulated the mind into acting through the hand, whose muscular responses, in Martin, Evolution, pp. 241-242; Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1881, No. 5, pp. 8-11; Frank A. Hill, "The Manual Training Idea—Reminiscences of Personal Growth into Its Spirit," Manual Training Magazine, 1 (1899), 1-8, 12. 6 Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual .Report, 1869-1870, pp. 192193, 196. 6

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turn, were implanted in the "motor areas" of the brain. This soon led to efficient reflex acts that allowed the individual's mind and body to respond in complete harmony. 7 Whatever the argument, however, the advocates of manual education agreed on the unity of mental and manual activity. "The child's mind," wrote Samuel Capen, "can be trained through the hands oftimes better than in any other way." Or, more assertively, "Hand culture," concluded Hill, "is really mind culture," simply taking a new direction. 8 Integration of hand and mind was a pedagogical key to manual training's entry into the classroom. With the distinctions between books and tools and between mental functions and physical activities blurred, Massachusetts' educators could accept manual education. The common schools had traditionally used their curriculum for moral and disciplinary rather than intellectual purposes. Books added not so much to the student's store of knowledge as to the discipline of his mental faculties and provided a basis for moral behavior. The schools had differentiated between the scholar's books and the workman's tools because the former more effectively trained the powers of accurate observation. When manual training advocates contended that tools shaped the same powers as books, they thus drew upon a primary theme of American common school education. "The exercises of manual training," wrote Louisa Parsons Hopkins for the Boston School Committee, "are a means not of physical and intellectual but of moral culture. They train to habits of accuracy, neatness, order and thoroughness; they exercise the judgment, will and conscience; they present an incentive to good work in all directions, and offer a moral stimulus and preparation for 7

8

Thomas M. Balliet, "The Psychology of Manual Training," Journal of Education, 38 (1893), 364-365, "Manual Training: Its Educational Value," in Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 18941895, pp. 481-499; Dr. Birch Hirschfelder, "The Value of Instruction in Manual Dexterity as Regards Bodily Development and Hygiene," in Clarke, Art and Industry, VII, pt. 2, pp. 896-901. Samuel Capen, in Journal of Education, 38 (1893), 193; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1895-1896, pp. 170-171.

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usefulness at home and in the community." 9 Support for manual education also came from Massachusetts' industrialists. During the Civil War an unstable supply of raw cotton and a curb on European immigration, and thus on unskilled workers, had raised for the first time serious questions about the state's future industrial growth. Massachusetts imported its raw materials, was increasingly committed to manufacturing—by the end of the 1880's factories accounted for about 91 percent of the total annual wealth created in the state—and was threatened by European and southern production; the state's postbellum economic health seemed to depend upon synthesizing business acumen and skilled labor in the production of high-quality goods. A skilled work force meant either importing qualified European workmen or training Americans. Since the former required retraining to the peculiarities of American industry, was potentially disruptive of the social stability of the native working class, and might lead to costly competition with European employers for their workers, the choice for educating Americans seemed obvious. By the late 1860's, moreover, many of Massachusetts' leading manufacturers had become enamored of German and English claims that industrial growth and technical training were intimately related and that a positive state policy could further both. 10 Hopkins, in Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, p. 49. On moral education as the outcome of a well-rounded common school education, see Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 124-132. Mental discipline in nineteenth-century education is treated in Walter B. Kolesnick, Mental Discipline in Modern Education (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), pp. 10-29. 10 George F. Hoar, Claims of the Free Institute of industrial Science Upon the Commonwealth. Presented Before the Committee on Education of the Legislature of Massachusetts (Boston, 1869); Victor S. Clark, History of Manufacturing in the United States (New York, McGrawHill, for the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., 1929), II, 26-30, 104-107, 145-146, 184, 389-390; Clarke, Art and Industry, VII, pt. 1, pp. cxxxvi-cxxxviii. Concern over competition with Europe, particularly in the comparative training of skilled workers, played an important role in the ideology of the drawing movement. See Massa-

9

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The manufacturers centered their attention on mechanical drawing and industrial design. Calling for public drawing classes in an 1869 petition to the state legislature, they claimed that "every branch of manufactures in which the citizens of Massachusetts are engaged requires . . . some knowledge of drawing and other arts or design on the part of the skilled workmen engaged." "It will be impossible," argued Francis C. Lowell, one of the state's first cotton textile manufacturers, and Edward Everett Hale, initiators of the petition, "for Massachusetts long to maintain any eminence in the higher manufacturers if the great body of workmen of other countries are the superiors to our own in the arts of design, in the drafting of machinery, and in the habits of observation from such accomplishments." Massachusetts' weakness in industrial design was clearly attributable to the unwillingness of public education to take responsibility for the state's industrial future. "At the present time, no wide provision is made for instruction in drawing in the public schools. Our manufacturers therefore compete under disadvantages with the manufacturers of Europe; for in all the manufacturing countries of Europe free provision is made for instructing workmen of all classes in drawing. At this time almost all the best draughtsmen in our shops are men thus trained abroad."11

11

chusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1871-1872, pp. 192-193. Isabella MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal: Boston Public Schools, 1888-1891," unpub. honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1967, pp. 36-37, in Radcliffe College Archives, suggests that the manual training movement of the 1870's was designed to assure the social stability of the native working class by training them as a labor elite. The petition and the responses to it can be found in Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1869-1870, pp. 143-159, 163-217. Clarke, Art and Industry, VII, pt. 1, pp. 37-194, contains a full account of the drawing movement, although the analysis differs from the one offered here. See also Donald Bohn, " 'Artustry' or the Immaculate Misconception of the 70's," History of Education Quarterly, 8 (1968), 107-110. In this context, drawing referred to artwork based on geometric principles rather than pictorial representation. Thus elementary drawing in day schools as well as advanced mechanical drawing for

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The stress on industrial progress was reinforced by the less frequently invoked theme of economic mobility for the workingman. Mechanical drawing—the application of drawing to the productive and industrial arts—reported the superintendent of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in Lowell, one of the state's largest textile manufacturers, "takes the place of a knowledge of reading and writing in the other concerns of life, and is indispensable for giving and receiving intelligible ideas." Supporting the petitioners' call for public drawing classes, he asserted that without such knowledge a mechanic "will almost always be subservient and inferior to one who has it." The subject, declared the Secretary of the State Board of Education, would differentiate the highly skilled from the "uneducated or but partially educated." 12 Drawing also received support for its pedagogical value; as an example of object teaching, it enhanced and systematized the pupil's powers of observation and his ability to act with accuracy. 13 To Charles C. Perkins, one of Boston's most distinguished Brahmins and a member of the city's School Committee, the subject had great cultural relevance. Acknowledging the manufacturers' arguments that "a skilled artisan is a mechanic who knows how to draw, and who, thanks to such knowledge has quadrupled the value of his labor to himself and to the state," Perkins believed drawing would raise society's cultural standards. Indus-

12

13

skilled workers drew upon the same ideal: systematic instruction in geometrically defined exercises that could ultimately be applied to industrial uses. Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1869-1870, pp. 152-153, 164; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1871-1872, p. 192. That education would increase an individual's earning capacity had become a widely accepted tenet by the postbellum period. See Edward Jarvis, "The Value of Common School Education to Common Labor," U.S. Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information (No. 3, 1879). See Boston Superintendent of Schools John D. Philbrick's comments, in "Abstracts of School Committees' Reports," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1874-1875, pp. 167-168.

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trialization had sundered the ties between the artisanproducer and the artist, leaving in its wake aesthetically inferior products and destroying society's aesthetic tastes. An active promoter of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and an authority on art, Perkins found the preservation of art objects in museums and classroom drawing parallel quests to restore society's awareness of form, shape, contrast, and beauty, thereby allowing cultural standards to survive.14 Perkins' pleas for schooling in aesthetics, a few educators' willingness to accept drawing as a pedagogical reform, and, especially, the businessmen's demands for industrial education combined to produce legislation in 1870 requiring that drawing be taught in the public schools of cities and towns having more than 10,000 inhabitants and that free industrial drawing classes be offered to all persons in those municipalities over fifteen years of age. The coalition that forced through the statute, however, had failed to recognize its divergent aims. Perkins was committed to reconstructing traditional handicrafts; he rejected the industrial values proclaimed by the manufacturers. The latter only adopted drawing instruction as a means of furthering industrial progress. When they discovered that Massachusetts' economic growth did not depend upon such instruction, they quickly withdrew their sponsorship. Educators never really committed themselves to drawing as anything other than a pedagogical addition to be used for traditional ends. By the late 1870's the subject had ceased to be a source of controversy in public education, replaced by larger questions 14

Clarke, Art and industry, VII, pt. 1, pp. ccxxviii, 343-346; ibid., pt. 2, pp. xxxviii-xli; "Charles Callahan Perkins," Dictionary of American Biography, XIV, 464-465; Charles C. Perkins, "Art Education in America," Journal of Social Science (1871), pp. 37-57, and "Art Schools," ibid., pp. 95-104. Neil Harris perceptively points out that people like Perkins were more concerned with upgrading the values of popular culture than with preserving any particular cultural standards. "The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement," American Quarterly, 14 (1962), 545-566. For an interpretation of the industrial art movement as an attempt to reintegrate fine arts and industry, see Charles A. Bennett, History of Manual and Industrial Education to 1870 (Peoria, Manual Arts Press, 1926), pp. 374-442.

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about the relationship of manual training to social and industrial progress through schooling. The drawing movement raised the issue of special schooling for particular groups, but it did so by focusing primarily on adults. In the elementary grades drawing was applied to all children; it met the requirements of mental discipline through manual training. As such, it remained faithful to the notion of commonality, which lay at the core of the public-school ideology. Educational reform had to be applicable to all; innovations were valid only with reference to the general needs of schoolchildren. Most schoolmen and apparently the public at large were unwilling to establish special forms of schooling for particular groups. In the late 1860's and early 1870's, however, a few educators in Massachusetts raised serious objections to these assumptions. They went beyond urging special classes for the "preparation of industrial workers" and proposed separate compulsory educational institutions for a particular segment of the urban working class: children of the mills. The education of youthful factory workers had long received considerable attention. During the 1820's and 1830's the broad cultural and social environment created for the mill girls of Lowell and Waltham and the attempts to create a model factory town in Lawrence seemed to provide a unique setting for cultural and moral uplift. The ideal was soon shattered, however. Immigration from Ireland and Canada repelled native youth from the mills and, in conjunction with technological changes, helped create an industrial proletariat whose most pronounced feature appeared to be its permanence. Child labor laws and compulsory attendance statutes thrust the state into the traditional relationship between employer and employee and demanded more formal institutions of education than those provided the Lowell mill girls. Legislation in 1866 prevented youth under ten from working in any industrial establishment. More important from the standpoint of public education, a statute in 1867 required that children aged ten to fifteen

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attend school for thirteen consecutive weeks annually prior to industrial employment.15 Compulsory attendance in mill areas never worked as effectively as its proponents hoped. During the mid-1870's Carroll Wright, director of the state's Bureau of Statistics of Labor, reported that more than 25 percent of the children aged five to fifteen constantly failed to attend school, with the overwhelming number of these at work in manufacturing establishments. Public officials, mill agents, and parents—the last, Wright wrote, because they needed their children's income to survive—tended to ignore the requirements of compulsory schooling. Nonetheless, the legislation forced upon authorities the formal obligation to educate mill children, and thus complicated the workings of the schools. "The law relating to children in manufacturing establishments," reported the Andover School Committee, "does honor to Massachusetts. In it we see the State assuming the relation of parent to the poor and helpless child. But like all other good laws, it sometimes seems to clash with the interests of our schools." Mill children came to and left school "at the stages of the term," constantly interrupting the normal classroom order. "Without any habits of study, unused to school order and discipline, coming by compulsion and not by choice, with no prospect of remaining longer than the law requires, and joining classes for which they had no real fitness," the School Committee wrote, their admission "into our graded schools has embarrassed them."16 16

16

Lucy Larcom, "American Factory Life—Past, Present and Future," Journal of Social Science, 16 (1B82), 142; Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931), pp. 199-203, 213-235; Katz, irony, pp. 7-8, 93-101. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1873, pp. 381, 388-389, 392-395; ibid., 1875, pp. 40, 47-48, 442-443; "Abstracts," Andover School Committee, in Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1868-1869, p. 58. For statements similar to Andover's, see "Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1874-1875, p. 30; and N e w Bedford, Annual fleport of the School Committee [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1885, pp. 21-22.

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Fearful of integrating mill children into the regular public schools, concerned with the disruption caused by the thirteen-week attendance requirement, and worried about the educational fate of youthful factory labor, some school committees in the late 1860's opted for separate facilities. In 1868-1869 Salem and Springfield established half-time schools, patterned after the English system, which combined daily attendance at school and part-time factory labor for youth between the ages of ten and fifteen. The mill agents in both cities agreed to incorporate those attending school into their work force at two-thirds to three-fourths of their regular pay, establishing what was looked upon as a highly promising cooperative arrangement. Fall River, New Bedford, and Lowell, three of the state's major industrial cities, also established special classes for mill children, but these required full attendance at school for three consecutive months, followed by nine months of full-time factory work. This caused, theoretically, minimal disruption in individual mills since a quarter of the child labor force could attend classes on a rotating three-month basis, and it would provide for more intensive and therefore more effective schooling of the children. "Here," Fall River's School Committee wrote, "the factory operatives are furnished with the facilities for making accessions to their scanty acquirements. The rudiments of the common branches are taught by competent teachers, and there is every reason to believe that many children have obtained, and others are obtaining therein, a knowledge of reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic, which will be of great service to them in future life." Many who came, explained the Superintendent of Schools, looked upon their classes as a vacation from the long, hard hours of the mill. "There is no class of young persons within the city limits which should be better cared for in all that will aid them in acquiring knowledge, than those whose circumstances compel them to spend their tender years in manufacturing establishments. If there is a class of children among us that should be provided with commodious schoolrooms, well lighted, well heated, well

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ventilated, and well furnished, these are the children."17 To a great extent the mill and half-time classes depended upon the cooperation of mill agents. The half-time schools required agreement to a daily disruption of the unskilled work force, proportional wage payments, and a willingness not to hire children who did not attend the school. "The fear is," wrote the Springfield School Committee a few months after establishing its half-time school, "that our manufacturers may not appreciate such an influence upon their operatives, and upon the character of their villagers, and so not feel that they can afford to pay such wages for so few hours of work." The Committee's fear was well founded. The economic depression after 1873 led to demands by mill agents and parents for a full day's work and a full day's pay for mill children, thus closing the half-time school in that year. In New Bedford school officials rarely demanded strict adherence to attendance requirements by the mills. When state legislation in 1876 extended compulsory schooling from thirteen to twenty weeks annually for children under fourteen before industrial employment, the School Committee responded by declaring: "It is a grave question, in the light of expediency, to what extent this law shall be enforced, so far as the School Committee have the power to enforce it. The change from existing provisions would involve so great an alteration in the basis of employment of children in the mills, that the agents might reluct to institute it, and the cooperation between them and the committee, to which the systematic education of mill children is now largely owing, be broken up." 18 17

18

"Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 18681869, pp. 34-35, 37-39, 113, 116-117; "Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1869-1870, pp. 46-48; "Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1872-1873, pp. 23-25. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1873, pp. 395-396; ibid., 1875, pp. 28-37, 370-371, 395-396. On English half-time schools, see ibid., pp. 7 - 2 4 ; and Bennett, History of Manual . . . Education, pp. 293-296. "Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 18681869, pp. 113-114; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1875, p. 37; New Bedford, School Report, 1874, pp. 1 8 - 1 9 ; ibid., 1875, pp. 18-19; ibid., 1876, pp. 23-24.

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The problems of economic survival for immigrant factory laborers added to the tenuous existence of the mill and halftime schools. The wages of Massachusetts' workingmen, reported Wright in 1875, were hardly sufficient for their families, forcing dependence upon working children for one-quarter to one-third of a family's income. Parents thus sought to evade the requirements of compulsory schooling. "Why are they not there," asked the Mill School Committee in New Bedford, "and how do they evade the law with so many efficient officers and law-abiding agents to enforce it?" Daily attendance at New Bedford's mill classes appears to have hovered between thirty and sixty through the 1870's and somewhat higher in the 1880's. In Fall River, in 1875, just prior to the termination of the mill school's existence, average attendance equaled 185 out of an enrollment of 1,051, and undoubtedly many more children managed to avoid registering. Although truancy was not limited to the mill schools—school officials in all parts of the state complained about absenteeism—mill classes highlighted its problems by focusing on the group of students least likely to attend school, forcing schoolmen explicitly to confront the efficiency of separate facilities for such children.19 More important, however, in undermining the mill schools than the general problem of truancy—the unwillingness of the mills to cooperate in enforcing child labor and compulsory attendance statutes and the economic needs of factory families—was the schools' rejection of commonality as an ideal of public education. For a social reformer like Wright, segregated schools for the poor denied the ideal of equal educational opportunity for all children. To the public the mill classes were supposed to serve, such schools appeared to be institutions for children officials considered defective or delinquent. Denying this was the case, Fall River's School Committee nevertheless admitted that it was 19

Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1875, pp. 442-443, and, more generally, 191-450; New Bedford, School Report, 1881, pp. 36-37; New England Journal of Education, 1 (1875), p. 52.

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abolishing its factory schools "because the reasons for their establishment were sometimes misconstrued, and a consequent prejudice excited against them by parents who were expected to send their children to them." It was feared their tendency was to impart the feeling, that the children who work in our mills are expected to obtain only the minimum amount of instruction, and that to be acquired in separate schools; and that by this process of isolation and restricted opportunities,—deprived of the usual methods of mingling with the mass of the pupils of the city on equal terms and under similar educational conditions,—they would eventually regard themselves as a separate class in the community, occupying a relatively low position in society, and not equally responsible with its more favored members for its good order and prosperity. Such conceptions on the part of the public were not misguided. The mill classes did have limited goals. As Fall River's Superintendent noted in 1870, they were designed to reach a class of children who could be reached in no other way, and, as New Bedford's School Committee suggested, they provided "those elements of knowledge which would best apply to the necessities of the probably circumscribed future of these children."20 Indeed, the origin of New Bedford's mill school cogently revealed the validity of parental hostility. Segregated classes emerged in the city in 1872 as a synthesis of two distinct but related educational experiments. In 1869 the School Committee opened an ungraded school for youth who "cannot consistently be sent to the ordinary schools to mingle at will with their as yet uncontaminated members, and drop in the innocent paths of others the slime of their unfortunate deprivation. If we would preserve the purity and 20

Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Annual Report, 1875, pp. 57-63; Fall River, School Report, 1876-1877, pp. 6 - 7 ; "Abstracts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1869-1870, pp. 46-48; N e w Bedford, School Report, 1883, p. 23; Sylvia Chace Lintner, "A Social History of Fall River," unpub. diss., Radcliffe College, 1945, pp. 265-266.

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good standing of the public school system, such depraving association must not be!" Almost simultaneously, the city's evening schools were opened to mill children under fifteen years of age, thereby mingling adults and youth. In both cases, however, the experiments quickly ended. The former was too explicitly a penal institution to be favorably received as a school, while the latter drove adults out of the evening classes and raised hostility over requiring night school attendance for children who had labored all day.21 The mill classes thus emerged from a dual concern to isolate delinquent children and to provide classroom education for mill youth. In many people's eyes, the two groups— delinquents and mill children—were synonymous. To claims that the mill school was dominated by truants and delinquents, the School Committee responded by declaring that neither group attended. Rather, the student body consisted of immigrant children unable to speak English, an affirmation that probably did little to reassure the public. Moreover, while the mill school was designed to provide the same basic elementary education necessary for all children but denied factory youth, it needed, wrote the Superintendent, a course of study "specifically adopted to meet the wants of the class of pupils who attend them. The elements of a few essential branches thoroughly taught is worth more to these pupils than any attempt at the more extended course of the graded schools." In short, the problems of teaching mill children were so complex, their social and economic horizons so limited, that one could not measure progress by the regular standards of the common schools.22 The brief time span and restricted popularity of the mill and half-time schools, from their inception in the late 1860's to their disappearance in three of the five cities that had them by the end of the 1870's, caution against undue em21

22

New Bedford, School fleport, 1869, pp. 4 0 - 4 1 ; ibid., 1870, pp. 4 9 - 5 0 ; ibid., 1871, pp. 1 9 - 2 0 . lb id., 1881, pp. 3 9 - 4 0 ; ibid., 1882, p. 3 4 ; ibid., 1884, pp. 2 7 - 2 9 ; ibid., 1889, pp. 7 9 - 8 0 .

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phasis upon their importance. In the cities in which they appeared (Salem, Springfield, Fall River, Lowell, and New Bedford) their enrollments were limited and their relationship to the public-school system tenuous. A variety of reasons—their explicit class basis, the frustrations of cooperating with the mills, the highlighting of problems of absenteeism by focusing on the class of students most susceptible to truancy, and widespread feeling among the populace that they were preserves for delinquents—undermined whatever potential for expansion they possessed. But the mill classes are important, for they reflected the emergence among a number of Massachusetts' urban educators of the notion that mill children needed special schools for their particular problems and that the public-school system itself was best served by such isolation. In this stark form, these conclusions were not widespread, but in a more generalized and amorphous form they would become pervasive. With the expansion of the compulsory education requirement—in 1876, children under fourteen had to attend school for twenty rather than thirteen weeks before industrial employment, and after 1883, no child under twelve could be employed in the mills at any time—children of the factory became regular participants in the school process. Compulsory education meant that the difficulties of teaching children of immigrants, once cited as reasons for separate schools, became endemic to the public schools of every major city in Massachusetts. Under these conditions the demand for special kinds of education to meet the particular needs of working-class children became, in the late nineteenth century, a major buttress of the manual education movement. The movement away from the traditional public-school curriculum to manual training only occurred when Massachusetts' educators began applying previously accepted methods for schooling social deviants to poor and immigrant children. In the decades after the Civil War, school

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officials enthusiastically supported manual instruction for the emancipated southern blacks. Such training, wrote the headmaster of a Boston grammar school in 1887, was mandatory for Negroes who lacked adequate home training and needed instruction in basic labor skills to survive. "In schools where negroes and Indians are educated," wrote Brookline's reform-minded Superintendent of Schools, Samuel T. Dutton, "the results of combining manual and intellectual training are most significant. It is freely acknowledged, by those who have studied the problem most thoroughly, that the only hope of elevating the Indian and the African lies in a sort of industrial reformation."23 Considerably more important in affirming the relevance of manual training was its applicability to the education of delinquent children. Even before the Civil War, manual instruction had become integral to progressive reform attitudes toward delinquents, part of a new approach to the rehabilitation of youthful victims of poverty and corruption. Massachusetts had founded a state reform school for boys in 1848 that sought to transform the individual's character by reconstructing an environment of rural family life for manual and moral training. The state, wrote George Martin, referring to the Lyman School for Boys (1848) and the Industrial School for Girls (1856), "has made ample provision to win back to lives of rectitude and usefulness (by judicious restraint and the regenerating influences of learning and labor) boys and girls who have taken the first steps in crime." A philanthropic industrial school for girls declared that its object was "to remove from their miserable homes children whose circumstances surrounded them with temptation, and whose education furnished them with no means of resistance; to train them in household labor; and to exert a moral influence and discipline over them which should fit them to be faithful and efficient in domestic serv23

H. D. Hardon, "School, Home, and Life," Journal of Education, 25 (1887), 53; Samuel T. Dutton, Social Phases of Education in the School and the Home (New York, 1899), p. 217.

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ice, or in any probable mode of gaining their own livelihood."24 The idea that manual training in rural and handicraft skills was a counterforce to evil tendencies and actions among delinquents had become an accepted feature of Massachusetts' educational ideology by the 1880's. Hesitant to recommend manual training in his public schools, Fall River's Superintendent, in a representative statement in 1885, declared his opinion "that it should be introduced into our Truant School in some systematic form, so that the boys may acquire some knowledge of how to perform some kinds of manual labor."25 A few supporters of manual education objected to this frequent association of hand learning with defectives and delinquents. "It is proposed," declared T. C. Amory of Boston, a strong advocate of public-school manual training, "to teach boys in the reformatories mechanical employments. Would not this be placing a stigma on these industries, if no such instruction is provided anywhere else? It would be to reward the less meritorious for not being as good as the rest." More often, however, evidence of success with society's acknowledged defectives justified expansion into the public schools. "Have we not, then, abundant proof that this element (manual training)," asked Dutton, "which operates so powerfully in the enlightenment of the heathen and the savage, and in the reformation of the vicious and defective, should be a constant and somewhat prominent factor in public education?" After recounting the benefits obtained by manual education among young inmates of the almshouse (usually there as a result of petty delinquencies), the mayor of Cambridge stated in 1887, "If 24

26

Martin, Evolution, p. 225; Industrial School for Girls, Dorchester, fleport of the Board of Managers, 1873, pp. 5-60; Katz, Irony, pp. 163-166, 185-206. Fall River, School Report, 1884-1885, p. 38; Samuel T. Dutton, "Education as a Preventive and Cure of Crime," American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings, 1886, pp. 22-24. See also David Snedden, Administration and Educational Work of American Juvenile Reform Schools (New York, Columbia University, 1907).

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this is the result with boys very young, most of whom are so incorrigible as to have utterly failed in other schools to make any progress,—how promising its success, if introduced as part of our public school system!"26 In a previous era these assertions, this broadening of manual training's ideology from defective and delinquent to the community at large, would have been achieved only with the greatest difficulty. Massachusetts' common schools were designed to inculcate the common values of a broad spectrum of American life. Those outside that spectrum, whether antisocially deformed by environment or heredity, needed special care. The resolution of their particular problems would not have been applicable to the mass of healthy Americans. To give the child of the common school the same treatment accorded such social defectives as the delinquent and emancipated slave would have seemed a ludicrous reversal of common sense. During the 1870's and 1880's the dominant question thus confronting manual education, and its major hurdle into the public schools, was whether it could overcome the connotation of special education for deficient children. Manual training as pedagogic reform helped in that process, for it made hand learning applicable to all school children. Industrial drawing, whose original purpose was to produce more efficient workers, had to be metamorphosized into drawing for mental and moral discipline, and thus also justifiable for all schoolchildren. In this context, mill schools, which explicitly proposed special and segregated education, were unacceptable. The identification of manual training with social defectives would similarly have undermined it. By the late nineteenth century, however, Massachusetts' educators had concluded that the city itself contained large numbers of actual or potentially defective children. The children of immigrants, now dominating the state's urban school systems, seemed the victims of an environment 26

Amory, quoted in Boston Transcript, Jan, 17, 1880; Dutton, Social Phases, pp. 217-218; Cambridge, Inaugural Address of Mayor, 1887, p. 29.

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and social condition that precluded healthy growth and social stability. Living in a society in which traditional relationships were being sundered, all children, but especially immigrant children, needed training in such basic values as work and self-reliance. What had been useful for the newly emancipated southern slave and the delinquent was now going to be used to reconstruct the urban child. It was this ideology—the sense of urban institutional deficiencies —that made manual education acceptable to Massachusetts' educators and propelled it into the public schools.

IV Manual Training and the Restoration of Social Values

Manual training had been favorably received, Boston's Superintendent of Schools Edwin Seaver wrote in 1893, because it reaffirmed the traditional notion that "work and . . . habits of industry are indispensable elements in the right education of every boy or girl." Work and learning were not separate and hostile categories. Indeed, "outwardly productive and useful work of the hands" was essential to the "right intellectual and moral training of children, essential to the right training for citizenship in a free State." In an earlier rural, nonindustrial environment, the integration of the physical, the intellectual, and the moral occurred through the shared participation of the home, shop, church, and school. Each contributed something distinctive to the individual's growth, but each also drew upon and complemented the others in the learning process. Now, however, the harmony of that environment had been sundered. Industrial demands, Professor John D. Runkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported, "led to competition, to the invention of special tools to cheapen production, to a greater subdivision of labor, and to the concentration of the individual upon a very narrow range of work." Previously, "the shoemaker made shoes, the carpenter built houses. Now a shoe operative repeats one process upon one given part of the shoe, and it takes about one hundred shoe operatives to make one shoe. The carpenter may be a floor layer, a door and sash maker or a finisher, but rarely will he be a carpenter and joiner." With machinery having replaced hands, labor had moved from the artisan's shop, often an adjunct of the home, to the factory. The contemporary laborer neither understood the work process; nor was he able to teach a work skill to his children. In the factory he was functionally isolated from his fellow workers, with little comprehension of the relationship between raw material and finished product. Under these conditions, the

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historic tie between pride in work and moral growth had been broken.1 The city aided in this disintegration of the work habit. An artificial environment, it fostered immorality and neglect. "Our city civilization is weak and protoplastic," Worcester's Superintendent of Schools told a National Education Association audience in 1896. Unable to commune with nature and its orderly processes, children could not test their minds and bodies and had to resort to the street for their recreation. They lacked "that continuous bodily effort . . . essential to the establishment of character or the training of the will." The new environment had momentous consequences for the public school. No longer could the latter assume a commonality of purpose with other social institutions. The school and shop, once complements, Runkle declared, "have become so widely separated, that they are no longer material helps, as in the past times, in developing the highest capacity or the highest manhood." "The city school," Seaver added, "has merely filled with more book learning the gap left by the departed home employments. The traditional balance between 'learning and labor' has been upset, and 'learning' has taken the whole time." To offset city life and the impact of industrialism, Massachusetts' educators argued, the school had to teach children how to work. "The systematic introduction of Manual Training appears to be the only remedy for this enervated condition of our city population; the only universal stimulus to ambition and original effort on the part of our children." Through manual training, children would 1

Massachusetts Board of Education, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Existing Systems of Manual Training and Industrial Education [hereafter cited as Report on Manual Training] (Boston, 1893), pp. 26-30, 58-68; John D. Runkle, "The Manual Element in Education," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annual fleport], 1876-1877, p. 186. (A revised version of Runkle's paper was published in Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1880-1881.)

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learn the traditional values of labor: pride, industriousness, and thrift. 2 While the advocates of manual education idealized the New England artisan, they did so less in terms of his skill as a craftsman than as the product of an integrated environment. Standing in sharp contrast to the unskilled, immigrant factory laborer, the artisan personified the cultural values seemingly common to all segments of that earlier society. Now, however, these values were being threatened, in part because industrialization had widened the polarities among social classes. Pride of work and industriousness when taught in the melting pot of the public school would restore—to rich and poor, native-born and immigrant alike—a common value system. Manual training, social worker Robert Woods declared, by bringing "the children of the wealthier classes in more intimate relationship with manual labor," would "bridge the chasm now broadening so rapidly between the wealthy classes and the breadwinners." "It is not so much the creation and endowment of separate schools," M.I.T.'s Francis Walker reiterated the same point, "as the gradual conversion of all existing schools of the land to this use through the grafting of certain studies and exercises upon the traditional curriculum." All children, whatever their parental background and future goals, needed some acquaintance with systematic manual labor, and in the city that seemed to mean classroom instruction. 3 2

3

Worcester Superintendent, in Isaac E. Clarke, Art and industry (46th Cong., 2d sess., U.S. Senate, Executive Documents, 1897), VII, No. 209, pt. 3, xxxvi; Runkle, "Manual Element," p. 186; Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, pp. 29-30; Francis A. Walker, "Manual Education in Urban Communities," National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (Washington, D.C., 1887), p. 200. Robert Woods, "A Broader Education Required," Arena, 1 (1890), 627-628; Francis Walker, quoted in Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, p. 38. See the suggestive comments in Isabella MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal: Boston Public Schools, 1888-91," unpub. honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1967, in the Radcliffe College Archives, pp. 81-83.

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The ideology of social restoration quickly became the primary justification of manual education. Hand learning was not directed at industrial efficiency or economic growth; nor did it train skilled labor, although these rationales were frequently presented. Instead, its proponents focused on salvaging traditional social values in a rapidly changing urban-industrial environment. Drawing upon a preindustrial ideal, they looked to the schools for restoration and stabilization. Accepting the material accomplishments of industrialization—they were not Luddites—manual educators sought systematic and controlled physical activity to protect values being lost in late nineteenth-century Massachusetts. To advocates of hand learning, the apprenticeship system offered an example of how older ideals could be used in a modern setting. At its best, apprenticeship had integrated technical knowledge, practical trade experience, and moral discipline within a familial environment. But the system had also been economically inefficient and had too often failed to teach particular skills effectively. Industrialism had rendered these deficiencies intolerable. It dissociated productive work from the home setting, disrupting the continuity of family-based trades. It placed a greater emphasis on economic efficiency than had the preindustrial environment and made the systematization of work its primary concern. The factory divided the productive process into a series of logically connected tasks, each adding to the complexity of the product as it moved from basic to more advanced stages. In human terms, however, the factory failed because only the product and not the individual underwent this process. The worker remained fixed at a particular position. His work specialized and simplified to promote greater efficiency, he was prevented from comprehending the stages through which the product traveled. Without this understanding, he soon came to denigrate his role in production and, ultimately, labor itself. Simultaneously, those outside the factory saw the individual worker as a simple cog in the broader industrial process and

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reached a similar attitude toward manual labor. 4 Manual education acknowledged that the factory's systematization of the work process was necessary. It accepted the premise that movement from simple to complex through a series of carefully constructed and graded steps was the most efficient means of production, but it argued that more attention had to be given to the human element. Since each stage of manual training was incorporated for its instructional rather than economic value, providing insight into the linkage between steps and training in the disciplinary values of work, efficient productivity could be temporarily foregone. Drill in the exercises of work, not completion of the object or knowledge about the trade, became the system's mainstay. In an industrial society, whose needs rapidly change in unpredictable ways, learning how to work and discovering the principles that underlie the processes of production would be manual education's contribution to social stability. 5 How this worked in practice can be seen in the woodworking programs, the most popular of the manual training experiments adopted in Massachusetts before 1900. Woodworking seemed ideal as a pedagogic innovation. Its basic material was inexpensive, readily available, and familiar. Simple wood exercises could be conducted in the standard classroom by the regular corps of female teachers, thereby limiting the need for additional financing. 6 Of the various woodworking programs adopted between 1884 and 1900, one of the most popular was "sloyd." Originating in Norway and Sweden around 1870 as a movement to revive 4

5

6

Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, pp. 7 2 73; Charles A. Bennett, History of Manual and Industrial Education to 1870 (Peoria, Manual Arts Press, 1926), p. 266; Berenice Fisher, Industrial Education: American Ideals and Institutions (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 79-80. Runkle, "Manual Element," p. 188; Charles A. Bennett, History of Manual and Industrial Education. 1870 to 1917 (Peoria, Manual Arts Press, 1937), pp. 13-47. Gustaf Larsson, Elementary Sloyd and Whittling (New York, Silver, Burdett and Co., 1906), p. 5; Massachusetts Board of Education. Report on Manual Training, pp. 23-24.

102

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rural handicrafts, sloyd was first introduced to Massachusetts' educators by M.I.T. Professor of Mathematics John Ordway in a series of papers published in the 1881-1882 Annual Report of the State Board of Education. In Scandinavia sloyd involved a wide variety of manual activities done with simple tools aimed at producing finished products for sale in the open market or to supply the schools. Originally taught in separate training institutions, the subject did not flourish until the end of the 1870's when it was introduced into Sweden's common schools, usually financed by local ad hoc sloyd education committees. It then began to lose some of its breadth and to concentrate upon specific activities deemed most suitable for the classroom. By the early 1880's sloyd instruction had become highly formalized in work exercises rather than concerned with making useful products. Its major goal turned from a restoration of traditional Scandinavian handicrafts to training the hand and mind and reinvigorating attitudes toward manual labor. In Massachusetts, largely through the teaching of Gustaf Larsson, an emigrant from Sweden, sloyd received support for its synthesis of physical labor, respect for work, selfreliance, and habits of order, accuracy, and neatness. The reproduction of objects by carving models in wood created an allegiance to orderly forms of beauty and to acceptable aesthetic standards. Larsson's sloyd method depended upon a series of carefully graded and systematically constructed exercises which forced the student to move from the simple to the complex, from the raw material to completed object, in the basic interests of efficient education.7 7

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1881-1882, pp. 1 6 3 213. The development of sloyd in the United States, w h e r e it centered in Massachusetts, is discussed in Ray Stombaugh, A Survey Movements

of the

Culminating in Industrial A r t s Education ( N e w York, Colum-

bia University, 1936), pp. 90-102. Otto Salomon, the Scandinavian proponent of sloyd as pedagogy rather than production, is discussed in Gustaf Larsson, "Otto Salomon, 1849-1907," Manual Training 10 (1908), 104-109; and Clarke, A r t and Industry,

Magazine,

VII, pt. 2, pp. 884-

888. Larsson expounded his system in numerous books, articles, and addresses. See Gustaf Larsson, Sloyd (n.p., 1902), Sloyd for Schools (n.p., 1894), and Elementary

Sloyd and

Whittling.

American

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Woodworking programs patterned after the Russian workshop system also proved popular. Advocated by John D. Runkle, these emphasized exercises even more than Larsson's sloyd curriculum. Woodworking meant the carving of corners on a block, the chiseling of straight lines, the fitting together of joints. "It will be noticed," a report on a Boston woodworking class declared, "that no specific article was made in the school. The variety of manipulations and changes of patterns were enough to maintain the freshness of the scholars' interest, without introducing the manufacture of any article of trade or commerce." Although an initial period of conflict occurred between sloyd and the Russian system—largely over whether students gained more from completing useful objects or by simply doing formal exercises—woodworking's attractiveness was not affected. By the mid-1890's, only six years after Larsson had introduced sloyd to Boston, the subject was being taught in nine of fifty-five Boston grammar schools, as well as in the public schools of New Bedford, Haverhill, Medford, Dedham, and Milton. Graduates of Larsson's Boston normal school course, given gratuitously to any schoolteacher desiring it through the sponsorship of Mrs. Quincy Shaw, were introducing the subject throughout the state. Other woodworking classes were being offered in Boston, Springfield, Northampton, Waltham, and Salem. At the end of the nineteenth century instruction in the value of work and the orderly processes, which underlie all work taught through the systematic manipulation of wood, was becoming a regular feature of Massachusetts' public schools.8 Just as the male had once secured his vocational and moral training in the shop and home, so the family had 8

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1876-1877, pp. 188, 195; Larsson, Sloyd, pp. 13, 17-18, 33-34, 56-57, and SJoyd/or American Schools, pp. 3-4, 11-12; Manual Training Magazine, 2 (1900), pp. 55-56; Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, pp. 24-25, and Appendixes B, C, H, and M; Bennett. History of Manual . . . Education, pp. 402-411.

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traditionally provided for the female. There girls learned the values and vocational skills of homemaking, guaranteeing continuity between generations. Girls rarely looked outside their homes for work, for in the family they found their roles. To Massachusetts' educators this was no longer possible. With the male's work segregated from the home, the family ceased to exist as an economic unit. Increasing numbers of women entered the job market, threatening the traditional harmony between work and homemaking. The city itself with its allures and hardships made child rearing difficult. Women could not depend upon the external environment to reinforce the home. And, among the immigrant poor, educators had serious doubts that mothers knew or were concerned about inculcating the principles of moral family building in their daughters. 9 The belief that females should be acquainted with the fundamentals of domestic life was hardly novel to postbellum Massachusetts. Social reformers before the Civil War called upon mothers to practice and teach thrift to their daughters by engaging in sewing at home. Concerned about the state of family life, the reformers even recommended that sewing instruction be given in the common schools, a proposal that received little implementation before the war. During the mid-1860's, however, interest in the subject was renewed in Boston when Mrs. Mary Hemenway, a prominent philanthropist, offered to finance instruction for older girls in the Winthrop Grammar School in the workingclass South End. Almost simultaneously, the headmaster of the Shurtleff Grammar School in another working-class district of the city ordered sewing instruction for all girls in the three lower grades of the school, the girls bringing the materials, except in cases of dire poverty, and the school system providing the teacher. A decade later the School Committee moved to expand instruction. After a brief legal controversy during which the Committee was denied 9

Clarke, Art and industry, VII, pt. 2, p. 6 2 ; Arthur Dean, The Worker and the State (New York, Century Company, 1910), pp. 6 2 - 6 5 .

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authority to provide school funds for a subject not required in the state syllabus, the state legislature opened the way for extensive instruction by resolving in 1876 that sewing could be taught in the public schools of any city or town at the discretion of the school committee.10 Until 1876, then, sewing, while recognized as necessary for females, had not been integral to the curriculum of the Boston public schools or those of any other city in Massachusetts. It made little headway because most educators assumed that sewing was or should be taught at home. By the end of the 1870's, however, that belief, based on the notion of stable family life, had been undermined. With the new legislation of 1876, sewing moved to a regular though still tangential place in the public schools of Massachusetts' major cities. In Boston all girls in the fourth through sixth grades were authorized to attend sewing classes, and by 1888 there were thirty special teachers of the subject. Four years later 12,225 students (594 boys) in the city's public schools received sewing instruction from one to t w o hours per week. " N o part of manual training," wrote the Superintendent of Schools in 1888, "is more satisfactory in its immediate results than the sewing." "This instruction is useful to all, both rich and poor, encouraging habits of carefulness and industry; developing a taste for quiet, regular employment; furnishing a resource against idleness; and adding largely to the power of self support." But if sewing had utility for all, its particular applicability to the poor provided its most important rationale. H. C. Hardon, headmaster of the Shurtleff School, enunciated an emerging consensus in 1876 when he declared, "there are thousands of girls in those schools where sewing is popular, clad in garments that their own hands had wholly or largely made in the public schools. Where pinching poverty and 10

Boston, Annual fteport of the School Committee and Superintendent of Schools [hereafter annual reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Beport], 1888, pp. 72-74; Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1881, No. 24, pp. 6-10.

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family care are too much for the mother's strength, who shall say that some of these girls are not now alive by means of self-help, ready to praise God, and take courage for their success in fighting the tiger of want." The subject, he concluded, had therefore achieved popularity "among the poorest."11 In other cities in Massachusetts, sewing's identification with the needs and failings of the poor was even more pronounced. In Worcester the subject was introduced in 1878, and a special committee stated that while the goals of the subject were universal, including healthful recreation as a stimulant to school work, gains in personal tidiness and cleanliness and training of the hand and eye to precision and neatness, they had a particular applicability to the children of the poor. "Nothing adds more to the household comfort, is more indispensable to the tidiness and decency of home, than this poor despised, neglected, and among our poorest people, lost art of good hand-sewing. That it might be revived, and made a reformatory power through the homes of our school-children," the Superintendent of Schools reported, "was my desire in introducing elementary sewing into Worcester public schools." In Fall River sewing was first offered in 1875 in the schools catering to the children of factory workers because the girls who worked in the mills lacked the opportunity to learn at home. New Bedford's Superintendent claimed that ignorance of sewing caused the "unthrift and ragged shiftlessness of many homes" and prevented girls who "go out to service, from obtaining any except the lowest places." It prevented home manufacture of clothing, and thus increased the cost of living among the poor. These conditions helped destroy self-respect and led to general unhappiness and discomfort. Although sewing instruction would cause some disruption 11

Boston, School Documents, 1881, No. 24, pp. 1 0 - 1 7 ; Boston, School Report, 1888, pp. 7 4 - 7 5 ; Boston, School Documents, 1892, No. 12, pp. 3 6 - 4 2 ; H. C. Hardon, "Scholarship in the Boston Schools: Is it Advancing or Retrograding?" New England Journal of Education, 3 (1876), 1 - 2 .

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of the regular classwork, the Superintendent wrote, the school's responsibility to remedy some of the social conditions of poverty demanded action. The conflict lay between "character-training and mental-training," and the former depended upon sewing in the schools. In May, 1883, at the urging of ladies "connected with the charities of the city," the New Bedford School Committee voted to require the subject in grades three through six for one hour a week. Two years later a committee member declared: "It is with feeling almost exultant that we realize that one half at least of the children in our schools are being taught one thing which will obtain them a livelihood when other resources fail." 12 Although sewing's advocates occasionally referred to this vocational aim, they tended to stress the subject's value for character building and social redemption. Like the kindergarten slum child, daughters of the immigrant and the poor trained in the mechanics of "plain" sewing would bring to their homes the values of systematic work and thus reinvigorate the family life of the impoverished. Not until after 1900 would vocational goals become a prominent feature of the sewing movement, and then they involved the use of Sewing machines and altogether different conceptions of work and the school's relationship to work. As part of the manual training movement before the turn of the century, however, sewing reflected a commitment to moral elevation, industriousness, the resuscitation of family life, and an attempt to integrate the urban poor into society through instruction in traditional skills rather than as a basis for economic mobility and social advancement. 13 12

13

"Report of the Committee on Sewing in the Worcester Schools," in Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1878-1879, pp. 3 4 9 - 3 5 0 ; Sylvia Chace Lintner, " A Social History of Fall River," unpub. diss., Radcliffe College, 1945, p. 295; New Bedford, School Report, 1882, pp. 8 6 - 9 1 ; ibid., 1883, pp. 3 6 - 3 7 ; ibid., 1885, pp. 3 1 - 3 2 . In Lowell and Cambridge, sewing entered the public schools as an extension of existing charity classes. Cambridge, School Report, 1877, p. 9 ; ibid., 1879, p. 1 6 ; ibid., 1889, pp. 3 1 - 3 2 ; Lowell, School Report, 1890, p. 48. Boston, School Documents, 1887, No. 17, p. 37.

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Cooking, like sewing, began as a philanthropic response to the disorientation and fragmentation of the family. It taught the poor thrift, nutrition, and cleanliness; for the rich, acquaintance with the tools of the kitchen provided an introduction to the joys of domestic life and eliminated too frequent dependence upon a servant class. Like other manual training activities, cooking was thus seen as a means of blurring class divisions, but it too quickly became directed at the social conditions and cultural mores of the poor. In the immigrant North End, Boston's supervisor of cooking found conditions "are such as to make it desirable to extend instruction in cookery and the household arts." "It is believed, among those conversant with the domestic life of those of the lower rounds in our great cities," concluded Hardon, a strong supporter of sewing instruction, "that, among some, not a little part of the inefficiency, sickness, loss of time, desire for drink from insufficient nutrition, is caused by a badly chosen use of money in the purchase and in bad preparation of food . . . To reform the household, among those whose knowledge of cooking stands nearly at zero, is a reformation worth working for . . ," 14 Initiative for classroom instruction came from Boston. Following a brief experiment with privately sponsored free classes on Saturday mornings and evenings in the early 1880's, Mrs. Mary Hemenway, already supporting sewing, opened a cooking class in a working-class district school in 1885. With the city providing the room, Hemenway met all expenses "with the expectation that the results would be so satisfactory that the committee would soon take the responsibility of this, as well as start others, as needed, in different parts of the city." In a basement room, thirty-two 14

Ibid., 1892, No. 21, pp. 19-20; ibid., 1903, No. 3, p. 182; H. C. Hardon, "The School as It Is, and the Necessity for Manual and Industrial Training," American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings, 1889, pp. 92-93. See also Robert Woods, The City Wilderness (Boston, 1898), pp. 71-72; Anna Barrows, "Is the Cooking School Needed?" Journal of Education, 33 (1891), 4 - 5 ; Springfield, School Report, 1903, p. 15.

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feet by thirty feet, fitted as a "first-class kitchen" with a gas stove, twelve individual burners, various kitchen utensils, and a "museum of analyzed foods," thirty girls received daily instruction in cooking and housekeeping. "Especial pain," reported the school's principal, "is continually taken to inculcate habits of neatness as well as economy." Within a few months, following the pattern of the sewing classes a few years earlier, a second "School Kitchen" was opened in the North End at the North Bennet Street Industrial School, with the costs assumed by the kindergarten philanthropist, Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw. By 1887 four "School Kitchens" jointly supported by the school system and philanthropists provided instruction for 900 Boston schoolgirls in "plain cooking of the common and inexpensive articles of food" for one to two hours per week. Within a few years the number of students had doubled to 1,800, unevenly spread through the city with concentration in the immigrant and working-class districts.15 Developments in other cities in Massachusetts paralleled those in Boston, following the latter by about a decade. After observing classes in Boston and Cambridge, Haverhill's School Committee instituted limited cooking and sewing instruction as "universal needs" as well as sloyd for grammar school children in 1893. In the same year Springfield and New Bedford opened their cooking classes, occasions that the Superintendents of both cities believed of the highest significance. Thomas Balliet of Springfield considered the classes "the most important step in education taken this year," while New Bedford's William Hatch thought it "an event of mark in the history of our schools," and one whose good effects would be quickly felt in the homes. A year earlier Lynn responded to pressure from the city's Associated Charities, which had maintained a cooking 15

Granville 24 (1886), ibid.. No. pp. 5 - 1 1 ;

B. Putnam, "Boston School Kitchens," Journal of Education, 383; Boston, School Documents, 1886, No. 3, pp. 5 2 - 5 3 ; 15, pp. 4 - 5 ; ibid., 1887, No. 22, p. 8; ibid., 1889, No. 3, ibid., 1903, No. 3, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 1 0 .

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class in cooperation with the School Committee, by requesting the incorporation of cooking into the school curriculum.16 As the nineteenth century ended, then, the education of females for domestic life had received substantial justification as an integral feature of public education. "Upon the education of the American school girl," wrote a leading sponsor of domestic economy classes, "depends the future of the American home." Necessary to preserve the stability of urban family life, to inculcate the values and discipline of work, sewing and cooking became particularly applicable to the poor. To a great extent, both subjects entered Massachusetts' public schools through charitable and philanthropic agencies, and, indeed, institutionalization as school subjects was largely dependent upon the initial financing by these external agents. 17 Manual training as an educational movement—woodworking, school gardening, as well as sewing and cooking —thus sought to restore social values disrupted by the city and industrialization, with the public schools acting as the agencies of restoration. The movement significantly expanded the responsibilities of the school and reflected growing doubt that healthy learning could occur in traditional settings: the home, workplace, and church. "In tenement-house districts," wrote Robert Woods in phrases reiterated by almost every manual education advocate, such training is corrective and uplifting. If the streets and gang life tend to make boys irresponsible and destructive, then there is specially needed in the tenement-house neighborhoods some interesting creative work. Children left to their natural impulses, provided they have the materials, always turn to making things. Unfortunately, the boys of this 16

17

Haverhill, School Report, 1893, pp. 28-33; Thomas Balliet, in Journal of Education, 38 (1893), 123; N e w Bedford, School Report, 1893, p. 85; Lynn, School Report, 1892, pp. 33-34. Ellen H. Richards, "Domestic Economy as a Factor in Public Education," in Massachusetts Board of Education, Report on Manual Training, Appendix N.

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locality have few tools or little material with which to make things. Circumstances develop their destructive side. Manual training . . . is the enemy of indifference and willfulness, because every step requires self-control, thoughtfulness, care. A thing created means for the boy added self-respect . . . All this is not merely theory; five years experience in manual training with just such boys as have been described verifies every statement made. Massachusetts' educators often hesitated to claim that the benefits of manual education to the children of "tenementhouse districts" were qualitatively different from those gained by other children. But while they tended to argue that city life threatened the institutions and values of all, and therefore all were aided by instruction in the principles of manual labor, they frequently added that the immigrant poor were most in need of such training. By supporting the broad needs of urban children, they kept disparate groups committed to a common school ideology which demanded that pedagogy and curriculum have some applicability to all children, while offering manual training to those they considered particularly deprived. 18 The initiative and early responsibility for manual education, like the early stages of the kindergarten, came from social philanthropy. This policy of private initiative and cost sharing between philanthropists and city government appeared throughout Massachusetts. In Cambridge, for example, Frederick Rindge provided the city with a public library, a city hall, and a manual training school. During the 1890's Fall River's mayor proudly asserted that his city's high school manual training program owed its existence to the munificence of a single individual. In 1891 Lowell's School Committee hoped "that in this city, where there is so much wealth and where industrial achievements have been so remarkable, we may have some citizens who will give a sum of money to inaugurate" manual education. A year later the Committee again pleaded with the city's 18

Woods, City Wilderness, pp. 237-238; Barbara M. Solomon, Pioneers in Service (Boston, Associated Jewish Philanthropies, 1956), p. 22.

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affluent, so that the school system would not have to undertake any experiments on its own. The practice of philanthropic aid to public education in support of manual training had become so widespread and popular by the 1890's that the Journal of Education asked the state's wealthier citizens to continue and even increase their contributions.19 These activities revealed the amorphous line between public and private in late nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Groups concerned about the deterioration of cultural standards presented cities with libraries and museums as a public service. Urban governments burdened by increasing social service costs willingly accepted contributions from individual donors and only hesitantly moved to a conception of public responsibility differentiated from philanthropy. This was particularly evident in education where limited facilities, sharp criticism of existing conditions, and expanding responsibilities accentuated pressures for costly innovations. A n excellent example was the founding in 1888 of the Manual Training High School in Cambridge. Woodworking classes for boys had been introduced in Cambridge as early as 1880 by a philanthropically established Industrial School Association to provide instruction "as a charity, with the hope of benefitting such poor boys as attended no other school, or were not advancing well in the literary work of the public schools, and who, it was hoped, might be reached and improved or reclaimed by manual 19

Fall River, Inaugural Address of the Mayor, 1895, pp. 19-20; Lowell, School Report, 1891, p. 15; ibid., 1892, pp. 50-52; Journal o/Education, 38 (1893), 64. See also L. H. Marvel, Manual Education in the Public Schools (Boston, 1892), p. 22, on the philanthropic introduction of woodworking into the Gloucester public schools; and Industrial Education Association, "Manual Training at Springfield, Massachusetts," Educational Leaflet #4 ( N e w York, 1888). A convenient summary of the introduction of woodworking into the Boston schools in is Bennett, History of Manual. . . Education, pp. 402-411. Philanthropic initiative was not unique in Massachusetts, although it appears to have been undertaken more prominently there than in other states. See Stombaugh, Industrial Arts Education, pp. 47-50, 61-68. For some suggestive comments on the role of philanthropy in "uplift" and education, see Berenice Fisher, "Education and Philanthropy," Teachers College flecord, 68 (1967), 622-630.

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training." Financed through private donations and a onedollar fee for twenty two-hour lessons and provided with a rent-free room by the city, the Association opened its afterschool classes in January, 1880, to seventy-two boys. The program, however, soon proved inadequate. By June attendance was down to twenty-six, and for the next three and a half years the proportion of losses each semester continued or increased. Moreover, the Association found the wealthier students and those already succeeding in their regular schoolwork more responsive to the instruction than the poor. While separate classes at a tuition charge of five dollars were being established for more affluent children, boys either delinquent or unsuccessful in the public schools were expelled as disciplinary problems. Finally, four years after the inception of the program, the Association offered to furnish the equipment and to finance manual instruction if the public-school system agreed to incorporate hand learning into its curriculum. The city accepted. Two years later, in 1886, the School Committee assumed full responsibility for the manual training program, and the Industrial School Association expired. 20 The establishment of the Cambridge Manual Training High School two years later marked a significant expansion of philanthropic innovation. As mentioned above, in June, 1887, Frederick Rindge, the only surviving son of a wealthy Cambridge businessman and banker, offered land and construction costs for a new public library. Four months after the offer concerning the library, Mayor William E. Russell, a Harvard classmate of the philanthropist, asked Rindge to add the land adjoining the proposed library to his gift for the construction of a new public high school. Rindge obliged and also agreed to construct the new school as well as a new city hall. To make each of these three public buildings a "monument to truth," he requested that the walls be inscribed with various didactic statements. As to 20

Cambridge Chronicle, Feb. 23, 1884; Cambridge, School Report, 1884, p. 18; ibid., 1886, pp. 2 2 - 2 3 ; ibid., 1888, pp. 2 7 - 2 8 ; ibid., 1894, pp. 55-60.

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the new high school, he urged, "I wish the plain arts of industry to be taught in the school. I wish the school to be especially for boys of average talents, who may in it learn how their arms and hands can earn food, clothing, and shelter for themselves (and later for their families)... I wish also that in it they may become accustomed to being under authority, and be now and then instructed in the laws that govern health and nobility of character. I urge that attendance to said school be given only to strong boys who will grow up to be able workingmen." 21 The school grant, while munificent, did not, on the surface, break with what had become an accepted arrangement for educational innovation in Massachusetts: the use of private funds to support public education. The new school, which was seen as a place where the "children of humble parents" could receive secondary schooling, provided the students with three hours of hand learning daily. It drew its pupils from Cambridge English High School, the less academically oriented of the city's two high schools. With three-fourths of Cambridge English's entering class in 1 8 9 0 1891 attending Manual on a part-time basis, school officials considered the latter a public school, although they controlled neither the school's financing nor its administration. Through a committee appointed by Rindge, the philanthropist retained full authority over curriculum, appointments, financing, and all administrative details. The school's position within the public system was thus anomalous in the extreme. "Although the manual training school is supported by private munificence," the Cambridge School Committee explained in 1895, "and the mechanical work is carried on under the direction of a superintendent responsible only to the founder, it is, nevertheless, in its essential features, a part of the public school system. All 21

Cambridge Chronicle, June 18, Oct. 29, Nov. 19, 1 8 8 7 ; Cambridge, School Report, 1887, p. 2 6 ; Ashton R. Willard, " T h e Rindge Gifts to Cambridge," New England Magazine, New Ser., 3 (1891), 7 6 3 - 7 7 8 ; John W . Wood, "Frederick Hastings Rindge," Cambridge Historical Society, Publications, 34 (1951-1952), 9 7 - 1 1 0 .

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who take the regular course are enrolled as pupils of the English high school, and their academic work is carried on under the direction of the principal of that school." In practice, Rindge exerted little influence over Manual Training's daily operations, and the possibility of tension over a privately controlled school within the public system never emerged. Manual Training thus never tested the distinctions between philanthropic and public responsibilities. In 1899, ten years after the school's opening, Rindge turned full responsibility and control of it over to the city, eliminating the ambiguity of a decade. 22 Even more revealing of the impact of philanthropic initiative upon public education than Rindge's school was the North Bennet Street Industrial School in Boston's immigrant North End. The central agency of charity for Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw, by the 1880's Boston's leading benefactor of education, North Bennet Street included on its Advisory Board leading Boston Brahmins and educators like G. Stanley Hall, Francis Walker, and Edwin Seaver. It received financial support from a host of prominent citizens, and for its charitable and educational endeavors it achieved national recognition. The school's experiments in manual training strengthened the association between hand learning and the educational needs of the immigrant poor while laying the foundation for expanded manual learning and other innovations in Boston's public schools. The adoption of a "released-time" program for manual training by North Bennet Street and the Boston School Committee, moreover, continued the existing confusion between public and private education well into the twentieth century. 2 3 22

23

Cambridge, School Report, 1888, p. 4 3 ; ibid., 1895, p. 4 3 ; ibid., 1899, p. 3 5 ; Willard, "Rindge Gifts," pp. 7 7 5 - 7 7 6 . Among the members of the School's Board of Advisors in 1888 were Mr. and Mrs. Henry L. Higginson, George Higginson, Amy M. Homans, William Endicott, Jr., Henry Lee, Mrs. Louis Agassiz. In the 1890's visitors to the School included John Dewey, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., school officials from other Massachusetts cities, and at least two European educators. North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report,

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The North Bennet Street School originated in the early 1880's as an outgrowth of the Associated Charities movement, a federation of Boston charity organizations begun in 1879 and committed to the rationalization of relief and the elimination of poverty. Charities sought the former by registering all welfare recipients at a central source, thus preventing duplication of aid and excessive welfare freeloading. The elimination of poverty was more complex, but the federation's sponsors approached the problem by viewing the poor as "worthy" or "unworthy." The former had become dependent through circumstances beyond their control, and their lot could be improved by a combination of welfare and educational measures. Among the unworthy, the origins of social misery lay in an aversion to labor and an unwillingness to engage in work while other means of survival were available. Under the motto, give "not alms, but a friend, not gifts, but employment," volunteer agents of the Associated Charities—"friendly visitors"—tried to differentiate the deserving and undeserving by providing odd jobs, especially sewing and laundering, and home visits for moral sustenance.24 Centering much of its energy in the North End, this experiment in eliminating poverty was threatened from its

24

1888, "Visitors Book, 1893-{1903)," and "Annual Subscriptions," 1888-1899. An excellent summary of the School's history can be found in a series of articles by Mario DiLeo published in the Boston Italian News, Apr. 26-Nov. 8, 1963. Unless otherwise noted, all North Bennet Street Industrial School material is on file at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. See Robert Woods's favorable comments on the School in Americans in Process (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1902), p. 345. The goals and methods of the Associated Charities movement can be found in Robert Treat Paine, Jr., Address of the President of the Associated Charities of Boston (Boston, 1879); Associated Charities of Boston, Circular Letter to Sewing Societies (Boston, 1879); First Annual Report (Boston, 1880); Rules and Suggestions for Visitors of the Associated Charities, revised (Boston, 1884). See also Nathan I. Hugins, "Private Charities in Boston, 1870-1900," unpub. diss., Harvard University, 1962, pp. 82-120. On the development of "scientific philanthropy," see Robert H. Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 89-104.

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inception. "The people did not want to work; and if, by chance, any of them had ambition to do something, they did not know how." Finding neither their laundry nor their sewing adequately done, and confronted with widespread apathy toward their relief program, the ladies of the Associated Charities moved to combine work opportunities with training in skills by establishing a small laundry and a sewing instruction-production class. With a motto, "Might we not train these unskilled masses, and thus create a demand for them and their labor?" the laundry room (with a small fee for the soap, starch, and facilities) and the sewing program (which provided instruction for young girls with machines sold to them at reduced cost) became the focus of organized charity in the North End. A committee of the Associated Charities simultaneously called for the creation of "a public feeling in favor of introducing into the public schools . . . simple and fundamental industrial training" to help instill work values before individuals had to call upon charity. 25 The North End Industrial Home was opened in 1880 ; its sewing and laundry programs quickly expanded to incorporate other activities. To care for the children of those who worked, a nursery and kindergarten were established. To improve the domestic life of the poor, a kitchen-garden, cooking classes, and a cafe' preparing economical and wholesome meals for workers were opened. The same conditions that led to the establishment of the sewing and laundry rooms—aversion to work and lack of skills—also led to carpentry and printing classes for young males, which similarly combined instruction and production. A circulating library, and reading and amusement rooms soon provided for the cultural and social improvement of the district. 25

North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1881, pp. 9-10; Associated Charities, Report of the Committee on Industrial Training, May 16, 1881; "The North End Industrial Home," Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 4, 1881, p. 3 (in North Bennet Street Industrial School files at Schlesinger Library); DiLeo, "North Bennet Street Industrial School," Apr. 26, May 10, 1963.

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Such innovations, however, were never undertaken haphazardly. The goal of differentiating the deserving and undeserving poor was always kept in mind. The sewing classes which had been opened indiscriminately to 150 girls were soon made available only to widows, deserted wives, and wives with sick husbands. Donations of cast-off clothing functioned as material for learning and as payment for a "moderate equivalent in work." Each woman in the laundry room paid a fee equal to 10 percent of her income for the facilities, and once having learned the art of laundering and "having earned enough to supply herself with necessary furnishings," her place went to another who showed the desirable work qualities. The garden, cooking classes, and cafe' drew upon one another to function as economic units. At the North End Industrial Home, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine reported in 1881, "the unskilled poor, young and old, male and female, are taught things practical, whereby to earn bread to render them independent of alms, and to keep them out of the horrible clutches of beggary . . . In the very midst of the North End . . . women, girls, and boys of the very poor classes are taught a variety of things and from which they graduate better workpeople and better able to fight the hard fight for life." 26 The Industrial Home thus provided a setting within which the deserving poor could simultaneously learn and earn. Increasingly, however, the sponsors turned away from the provision of work and the use of facilities for production and income, and turned toward formal instruction. By the mid-1880's the work of adult women and outof-school youth had taken a secondary place to the teaching of practical arts to school-age children. "One of the first lessons learned here, as elsewhere," a report of the Home declared, "has been that the inability to do anything well is the cause of most of the poverty and much of the crime in the world ; hence to give industrial training, with all its 26

North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1881-1887, pp. 2 4 - 3 0 ; "North End Industrial Home."

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invigorating and educating influences, to those who are both willing and young enough to learn, has become the first, but not the only aim of the work." Between 1885 and 1887 the laundry as a workshop and place of business was eliminated, the sewing classes, now instituted in the Boston grammar schools, dropped, and in recognition of its changing function, the Industrial Home's title changed to the North Bennet Street Industrial School. And, most important, emphasis on its teaching functions led the Industrial School into an intimate relationship with the Boston public-school system resulting by the end of the 1880's in its attainment of a prominent place in the city's educational structure. 27 The movement toward involvement with the public schools reflected a synthesis of Boston's growing concern for manual training and the Industrial Home's dissatisfaction with the progress of its first few years. During the 1870's and 1880's Boston adopted sewing and cooking as part of its public-school curriculum. At the same time the city had become engaged in an ad hoc arrangement with a philanthropically sponsored Industrial Education Association to provide woodworking in a working-class district. In 1881, under an agreement between the Association and the School Committee, thirty-six boys were released from their regular classrooms for two hours a week and given manual instruction in a basement room in the Dwight School, with the Association financing the experiment. The North End Industrial Home was, almost simultaneously, recognizing the deficiencies of its educational projects. The district's populace attended the Home irregularly, and the work of the charity agents was "regarded with little respect." Beginning to focus explicitly upon formal instruction rather than work production, the sponsors of the Home also sought to regularize attendance while adding to the number of participants. Acknowledging the role of philanthropy within the public system, already exemplified by the Winthrop 27

"North Bennet Street Industrial School, [1886,]" newsletter in school's files; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 18811887, p. 5.

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and Shurtleff Schools' sewing and the Dwight School's woodworking classes, the Industrial Home reversed procedures and brought public-school pupils into a philanthropic environment, entering into an informal agreement in September, 1883, with the headmaster of the nearby Eliot Grammar School to receive a small group of boys for two hours a week of woodworking instruction. 28 In February, 1885, the North Bennet Street Industrial School moved to open its manual training classes to a broader spectrum of public-school pupils in the North End and surrounding areas. With the support of Superintendent of Schools Seaver and the headmasters of the Eliot, Hancock, and Winthrop schools, the latter two for girls, Mrs. Shaw offered to finance classes in printing, cooking, housekeeping, and laundering for 150 girls, and printing, carpentry, and shoemaking for an equivalent number of boys, provided that they be released to attend the Industrial School during normal school hours. Before approving the request, only one substantive question was raised: "Can the School Committee legally send children of the public schools, in classes of 15, to the North Bennet Street Industrial School for the purpose of receiving industrial training during school hours?" When Boston's legal counsel responded that since manual training was not included in the state's required course of study schoolchildren could not be compelled to attend classes, the School Committee sanctioned the "released-time" arrangement providing parental consent was first obtained for each participating child. 29 This decision effectively established the North Bennet Street School as an essential participant in public education in Boston and provided a base of stability and strength for the five-year-old philanthropic institution. What is more 28

29

Boston, School Documents, 1881, No. 26, pp. 2 8 - 2 9 ; ibid., 1882, No. 1 5 ; ibid., No. 21, pp. 2 6 - 2 8 ; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Reports, 1 8 8 1 - 1 8 8 7 , pp. 5 - 6 ; DiLeo, "North Bennet Street Industrial School," May 24, 1963. Boston, School Documents, 1885, No. 3 ; DiLeo, "North Bennet Street Industrial School," May 24, 31, 1963.

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important, it transformed manual education from a charitable enterprise into a public-school subject. It meant that philanthropic work with the poor had played an important role in shaping a major program of public education. "The connection of manual training with the work of the public school at once changed the estimation in which it was held by both parents and children, its recognition there giving it a dignity in their eyes, where it had before been regarded with little respect. The regular attendance of good numbers was at once secured, and the steady growth began . . . " The new arrangement made explicit North Bennet Street's role as a proving ground for manual training. In its 1888 Annual fleport the Industrial School declared that it existed "primarily for the purpose of giving manual training to large numbers of pupils of varying ages, and it does this with constant hope that by its work and experiments the day may be hastened when such training may be more fully incorporated into the Public School system of Boston." 30 During the first two years after the experiment's approval, North Bennet Street conducted carpentry, shoemaking, printing, clay modeling, and cooking classes for between 800 and 900 public-school pupils weekly from eleven North End and neighboring district schools. By March, 1888, more than 1,000 schoolchildren were attending manual training classes each school week, and North Bennet Street continued to press for hand learning as a required feature of the public-school curriculum, a decision taken in 1892. The Boston School Committee's decision to make manual training a required public-school course of study, however, did not lead to a sharp distinction between philanthropic and public education. Although formally committed to providing manual training, the School Committee continued to depend upon philanthropy. "This building, with its thorough equipment," wrote North Bennet Street's director in 1892, "is now meeting as genuine a need as ever, as the School 30

North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Reports, 1 8 8 1 - 1 8 8 7 , p. 6; ibid., 1888, p. 3.

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Board, while it has made manual training compulsory, is not yet able to furnish a sufficient number of workshops for the needs of the whole city." With public-school facilities in the North End totally inadequate, classes in woodworking and cooking continued to be held at North Bennet Street. Throughout the 1890's, 600 to 1,000 schoolchildren annually attended the Industrial School on a released-time basis for manual education, now compulsory in the Boston system. As late as 1899 the School continued to provide the only specially equipped manual training rooms for publicschool pupils in the North End. 3 1 The attempts to make philanthropic and public responsibilities synonymous caused friction. North Bennet Street's instructional staff was warned on a number of occasions that its teaching did not meet public-school standards. Neighboring schoolmasters and teachers frustrated the School's work. In September, 1889, the director of the School reported that some masters demanded that a whole grade level be taught simultaneously, refused to break up their classes, and thus caused severe overcrowding at North Bennet Street. Shortly thereafter, the director criticized the faculty of one public school for using its "influence in keeping the children away" from the manual training classes, a problem that also extended to the parents of the district. On another occasion he criticized masters for withdrawing their pupils during the closing weeks of the school year. Similar problems arpse over discipline, how it was to be administered and under whose authority: "The subject of discipline at times becomes with us a perplexing one and not easily managed. Each master stamps his own individuality upon his school . . . so that a separate school has a distinct system of government. This is right, but it makes 31

Ibid., 1888, pp. 4 - 9 ; ibid., 1889, pp. 3, 1 7 ; ibid., 1892, pp. 3 - 4 ; Boston, School Documents, 1894, No. 1, pp. 7 - 8 ; ibid., 1901, No. 4, p. 11. Attendance figures can be found in the North Bennet Street Industrial School Annual Reports throughout the 1890's. After 1892 costs of instruction, save for heat and rent, appear to have been paid by the city.

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it a difficult matter for us, to adapt ourselves to all these different methods." 32 Yet these difficulties made little appreciable difference on North Bennet Street's sense of itself as an important contributor to public education. The Boston School Committee's decision to add manual training to the public-school curriculum simply strengthened the Industrial School's selfesteem and political prominence. "The two rooms which have been taken from us (and are now used as publicschool classrooms) seemed at first to narrow our borders and leave us with but meagre equipments for the battle against the ignorance and apathy of which we are in the midst," declared the School's director. "But there is no cause for mourning as (the classrooms') influence is still a power here with the weight of the School Board behind it to strengthen it in the minds of the doubting and shortsighted." The gradual adoption of philanthropic activities by the Boston School Board, however, raised questions about the most efficacious use of the School's resources. Increasingly, after 1900, the answers involved an emphasis on social rather than educational activities. "In the course of its mission, the School, while retaining its industrial and educational features at their best," the 1905 Annual Report declared, "is developing more and more as a social settlement. As a result of such development, new needs have arisen, and among the hoped for extensions of the near future, are a roof garden, an improved gymnasium, shower baths, an attractive room for social purposes, and more resident apartments." 33 32

33

North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Teachers of the North Bennet Street Industrial School," from A. W. Fiske, Secretary, Board of Managers [1885]; North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Reports of the North Bennet Street Industrial School, 1888-96," Sept., Dec. 5, 1889, Feb. 21, May 2, June 20, 1890; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1890, pp. 7-8. North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Reports, 1888-96," Feb. 3, 1893; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1905, p. 4; North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Report of the Meetings of the Board of Managers," Feb. 17, 1905.

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By the first decade of the twentieth century the North Bennet Street Industrial School had moved toward establishing itself as a broadly based social settlement in the middle of Boston's densest immigrant neighborhood. Having played a major role in instituting manual training in the city's public schools, it had begun to assert a distinction between the concerns of philanthropy and those of public education. Yet that distinction was never fully developed, for public education had become dependent upon philanthropic innovation. Through the sponsorship of prevocational classes, a placement bureau, the institution of more advanced sewing machine instruction, and programs directed at potential school dropouts, North Bennet Street remained an influential force in Boston's public schools. In 1917, then the "only institution operating under private auspices which enjoys the privilege of cooperating with the Boston Public Schools," Superintendent of Schools Franklin B. Dyer declared, the school "is invaluable in trying out the newer phases of education under such conditions as will determine their availability and general application." Assistant Superintendent Frank V. Thompson stated, more succinctly: "It is impossible for the public schools to carry on to any great extent educational experiments. The North Bennet Street Industrial School is the only institution of its kind which is doing this work. I regard it as a necessary supplement to the educational advancement of our young people in public schools."34 Part of a broadly based movement to restructure urban public education, to make the schools more relevant and meaningful by helping individuals cope with the changed relationships of their environment, manual training helped set the tone of change in the state's educational system. Based to a great extent on philanthropic enterprise subsequently transferred to the public schools, manual educa34

North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Reports, 1888-96," Feb. 3, 1893; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1905, p. 4; ibid., 1909, pp. 50-54; ibid., 1910, pp. 14-24; ibid., 1915, pp. 3-7.

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tion posed without fully resolving the complex question of a universal curriculum. While hand learning received support as a broadly conceived pedagogical reform and as a form of learning useful for all children, its roots in urban charity and the education of juvenile delinquents and emancipated slaves suggested its applicability to those deemed deficient or deformed by society. Manual educators neither fully confronted nor resolved this confusion. Rather they diffused the tension by incorporating philanthropy into the public schools, thereby broadening the definition of charity and removing the onus of poverty attached to it. With so many schoolchildren in Massachusetts coming from immigrant homes, it became an accepted tenet that the goals of philanthropy and those of public education were almost synonymous. As such, manual educators emphasized the readjustment of social values. They sought a more adequate inculcation of the work ethic as a means of eliminating poverty and unemployment. Hand learning thus made schools responsible for correcting social ills without committing them to substantive social reform. Manual training did not go unchallenged. Its opponents attacked the ambiguity of its goals, sought to delay its implementation, and frequently undermined already established programs. They rightly understood that the debates over hand learning involved the goals and meaning of public education itself. No Massachusetts schoolman articulated his opposition more vociferously than Albert P. Marble. Superintendent of the Worcester public schools for almost a quarter century before being ousted in 1894, President of the National Education Association in 1889, and considered by the Journal of Education "without exception the keenest educational writer and talker in America," Marble was one of the nation's most respected educators. His approach to schooling blended strong conservatism with a mild willingness to implement change. He urged teachers to use objects in their classrooms and emphasized spontaneous and imaginative teaching, but he also believed that pedagogy was becoming too material, that it too often depended upon

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what children could touch or see, and thus failed to respect abstraction and the intellect. While he supported kindergartens, he criticized systematic play, claiming that it repressed the spontaneity of childhood. Willing to acknowledge glaring defects in the public schools, he accepted educational innovation—the kindergarten, pedagogical reform, curriculum changes—only as a means to greater ends, "invaluable helps" in strengthening the goals of schooling. At issue in the manual training debates, Marble believed, was precisely this question of goals, for, he argued, among its advocates hand learning was becoming an end in itself. 35 Marble's conclusions about American education drew upon the same assumptions as his manual training opponents. He accepted their vision of a harmonious and homogeneous past with institutions sharing responsibility for education and moral growth. With the breakdown of the rural community, changes in the nature and kinds of work available, and the deterioration of institutions, schools now faced novel and momentous burdens. Marble diverged from many of his colleagues, however, over the question of whether the public school should or could accept those responsibilities: 36 "There is a class of social reformers who look to the public schools for the cure of every evil that invests society—evils for which these schools are in no way responsible, and with which they are not specially fitted to cope." Public education, he contended, was fragmenting under the demands of particularist groups who sought special consideration for their social problem. Numerous schemes for revolutionizing society and reforming the world, seek to attach themselves to the school 35

36

"The Worcester Situation," Journal of Education, 38 (1893), 272; Albert P. Marble, Discussions on Manual Training and on the Blair Bill, presented to the National Education Association, 1888 (Boston, 1888), pp. 5-6, 10-12, 15, passim, and Presumption of Brains (Boston, 1887?), pp. 5 - 6 ; Worcester, School Report, 1884, p. 45; "Albert P. Marble," Boston Transcript, Mar. 26, 1906, p. 3. Marble never explicitly confronted the corollary: whether other institutions could be reinvigorated to reassume their social responsibilities, although his arguments implicitly suggested they could.

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system. Instead of leaving the schools to their legitimate work, many enthusiasts see, in the splendid equipment and the consistent system of the schools, a means and a powerful instrument to be seized upon for the furtherance of charitable work in the broad domain of sociology. Temperance, trades and religion, all have their advocates who wish to attach these issues, good in themselves, to the car of the common schools. The necessity for practicing economy is useful in keeping within reasonable limits such tendencies. School savings banks, for example, which had the laudable aim of encouraging habits of frugality, threatened to turn the teacher into a "cashier." Temperance instruction, introduced under the unproven assumption that knowledge about alcohol would prevent drinking, opened the way for a host of other schemes of social amelioration. "From the prevailing discussions within the last dozen years," Marble told a National Education Association audience in 1887, "one might be led to suppose that all social institutions were about to be merged, or ought to be merged, in the public schools; for no sooner is some evil of society displayed in unusual prominence, than some zealot, ambitious for distinction, proposes some new attachments to the school system." 37 Social change had disrupted the smooth integration of children into the larger society, but the schools could not act as surrogates for other institutions even if they so desired. "Education is something by far more comprehensive than schools. It is acquired not alone in schools; they aim at education, but they do not secure the whole of education, only a part of it." To a gathering of educators in 1880, Marble cautioned that "a child is in school only a part of the day. Great as the influence of the teacher may be, 37

Albert P. Marble, "The Unattainable in Public School Education," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1880, pp. 4 0 - 4 2 ; Worcester, School Report, 1884, p. 44; ibid., 1885, p. 2 1 ; Albert P. Marble, Industrial Education as Part of the Common School Course: Address to the New England School Superintendent's Association (Boston, 1885), p. 4, and "Evening Schools," National Education Association, Proceedings, 1887, p. 186.

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the home influence is greater. The street and society have a powerful influence upon young minds. These, the school can but partly resist. Other causes besides school must share largely in the credit or discredit of a community's morality." Two years later he admonished parents for forgetting "that the duty of training the children morally, physically, industrially and to a considerable extent intellectually, still rests largely with them." The public schools "can not immediately bring on the millennium." 38 Marble contended that considering the school an agent of immediate social reformation undermined the one certain strength it possessed: its role in training the intellect. "It is indeed quite possible," he wrote in 1884, "that the social fabric may need some reconstruction with respect to the preparation which a child needs for active business . . . It is far more clear, however, that the public schools . . . cannot successfully accomplish what they may and ought in the direction of intellectual culture and a broad and general training useful in any business, and at the same time undertake with any reasonable hope of success to supply the place of the old apprenticeship system." The quality of civilization depended upon society's ability to engage in intelligent and abstract thought, and the school's contribution to that goal depended upon its function as an agent of mental stimulation. Too often, he concluded, contemporary attitudes toward education assumed that the brain was "non-existent or not to be disturbed." 39 Hostile to the transformation of the school into an agency for social change and emphasizing the limits of the school in affecting social values, Marble directed his most withering attacks upon the advocates of manual training. He 38

39

Albert P. Marble, "School Supervision," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Heport, 1884-1885, p. 225, and "Unattainable in Public School Education," pp. 35, 38; Worcester, School Report, 1882, pp. 3 1 - 3 5 ; Journal of Education, 12 (1880), 163. Worcester, School Report, 1884, pp. 4 4 - 4 5 ; Marble, Presumption of Brains, pp. 8-9, 15, and Discussions on Manual Training, p. 15.

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rejected any valid association between hand learning and arguments for economic efficiency and the training of skilled workers, since both could be more effectively accomplished in special schools. He thus supported technical schools such as the Worcester Free Institute for Mechanics and asserted that individuals seeking skills would establish their own educational institutions. Even more striking to Marble was the limited support manual training received among the working class. "The demand, so far, does not as a rule come from that class of people at all. It is heard mostly from theorists who anticipate a stratification of American society into classes similar to the older European communities." "The demand for manual training," he told a gathering of New England superintendents of schools in 1885, "does not come from the people for whose children the training is designed; it comes chiefly from a class of selfconstituted philanthropists who are intent upon providing for the 'masses' an education which shall fit them for their 'sphere.' 40 Marble also criticized the advocates of manual education for the limits of their commitment, the disparity between their rhetoric and their willingness to implement. The values attributed to hand learning hardly seemed likely to be inculcated by instruction for one to two hours a week. Manual classes were frequently taught in inadequate facilities ; Boston's Dwight School woodworking course, for example, was in a dark and poorly ventilated basement room. Although manual training was justified for its benefits to the poor and working class, Marble noted, the earliest experiments chose among the best students, those who seemed least likely to need such instruction. Class size often went beyond the limits declared feasible by manual educators, while the argument that manual learning provided an outlet for pupil interest Marble considered no more relevant 40

Worcester, School Report, 1884, pp. 4 5 - 4 7 ; ibid., 1885, pp. 5 0 - 5 2 ; Marble, Industrial Education, p. 3.

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than student enthusiasm for hockey and roller skating. 41 Marble's addresses and writings were the most extensive attack on manual education offered by a schoolman in Massachusetts. Yet it was clearly a losing battle. By the late 1880's opposition to hand learning was on the defensive, its voices becoming increasingly strident. Those who had been opposed or ambivalent, like the State Board of Education and the Journal of Education, had either ceased active opposition or became firm supporters. At a National Education Association gathering in 1888, the question under discussion, "How, and to What Extent Can Manual Training be Engrafted in our System of Public Schools?" Marble noted, assumed that the issue had become how and h o w far rather than whether. That same year, in a symposium on manual education conducted by the Journal of Education, ten of the state's thirteen superintendents of schools who responded to the question of whether there were any dangers in introducing the subject into the public schools declared either no or only slight danger. Only three, one of whom was Marble, refused to concede that manual training was an important intellectual activity. 42 John Dickinson, who had supported Marble while Secretary of the State Board of Education between 1873 and 1893, was replaced by Frank A. Hill, a manual training advocate and

41

42

Marble, Industrial Education, pp. 4 - 6 ; Marble, "Manual Training in Public Schools," Journal of Education, 11 (1888), 147-178. As late as 1912, almost all elementary school cooking and manual training classes in Boston were given in basement rooms, often damp and poorly lit. Mary Crawford, "Basement School Rooms," Boston Common, Jan. 20, 1912, pp. 6-7. Marble, Discussions on Manual Training, pp. 3 - 4 ; Journal of Education, 27 (1888), 388-389, 393. On the changing attitude of the Journal of Education, see New England Journal of Education, 1 (1875), 162; ibid., 10 (1879), 292; Journal of Education, 26 (1887), 216; ibid. 27 (1888), 152; ibid., 47 (1898), 88. (After 1880, the New England Journal of Education dropped "New England" from its title.) On the State Board of Education, see Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1881-1882, pp. 11-12, 155-159; ibid., 1883-1884, pp. 16-17; ibid., 1891-1892, pp. 13-14.

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former headmaster of Boston's Mechanic Arts High School.43 In 1894 Marble was removed as Superintendent in Worcester and was replaced by a strong proponent of manual education. That same year the state legislature required that all cities of 20,000 people provide manual training in their high school curriculum; within a decade the requirement extended to elementary schools. Where implementation lagged, it was for financial rather than ideological reasons. As the nineteenth century ended, A. E. Winship, editor-publisher of the influential Journal of Education, attested to the enthusiasm when he declared manual training the "one great triumph of the New Education." 44

43

44

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1882-1883, pp. 1 1 2 126; ibid., 1885-1886, pp. 123-128; John W. Dickinson, Principles and Methods of Teaching: Derived from a Knowledge of the Mind (Boston, 1898), pp. 9-10, 197-202. On Frank A. Hill, see Manual Training Magazine, 1 (1899), 53-54; ibid., 5 (1904), 105-108. A. E. Winship, in Journal of Education, 47 (1898), 88; "Worcester Situation," ibid., 38 (1893), 272. Data on the implementation of manual training can be found in the Annual Reports of the Massachusetts Board of Education; see e.g., ibid., 1894-1895, pp. 372-385, 392-413; and ibid., 1904-1905, pp. 94-96. On the question of financing versus ideology, see Lowell, School Report, 1890, pp. 45-46; ibid., 1899, pp. 19-21. Marble's replacement in Worcester discusses manual education in Worcester, School Report, 1894, pp. 30-31.

V From the Principles of Work to the Teaching of Trades By the end of the nineteenth century, manual education had achieved an ideological consensus among Massachusetts' educators. Pedagogically sound, a creative synthesis of physical activity, pupil interests, and socialization, it seemed an effective way of inculcating social values without hindering and, indeed even enhancing, academic learning. Most educators looked to manual training to correct the disharmonies brought by technology and urbanization. Although they differed over the extent to which hand instruction should be given, few schoolmen rejected the notion that such classroom activities as sewing and woodworking would inculcate values being lost in the city, particularly among children from or destined to enter—the two categories were usually assumed synonymous—the ranks of manual labor. The public school was seen as the key agency in a society whose institutions were no longer functioning adequately. Concerned about the stream of non-English-speaking peoples now enlarged to flood proportions, philanthropists and educators turned from private benefaction to more systematic and institutionalized programs under public auspices. Manual activities in the classroom—the reintegration of the head and the hand and instruction in the principles and values of work—offered a means of achieving social stability. Precisely at this point, however, manual education was undergoing a seemingly endless barrage of criticism, most strikingly from those the movement had once called its staunchest friends. Criticism emerged, in part, from those concerned about the inadequate instruction offered. New Bedford's Superintendent of Schools complained in 1905 that state legislation requiring manual education in the city's high school had been "persistently ignored" for a decade. Of the twenty-seven cities and towns in Massachusetts in 1904-1905 with populations of at least 20,000, five offered no manual training in their grammar schools, only one gave instruction for more than two hours a week,

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and most offered it for an hour or less. In the same municipalities, despite the presence of manual training high schools and special courses, manual instruction at the secondary level was almost as inadequate. Nine of the twenty-seven cities and towns offered no high school course work, six gave less than five hours per week, and the remainder between five and ten hours, though one or two may have offered slightly more than ten. Under these conditions, hand learning's social utility could hardly be argued with assurance. 1 Some early supporters continued to press for more and better instruction. They criticized the false economy of inadequate implementation and the undue emphasis upon academic learning. After 1900, however, criticism addressed itself to new forms of hand learning. Rejecting the social reconstitution goals of manual education, the critics called for commitments to trade training, job placement, and industrial efficiency, themes previously muted and subordinate. This transition from the principles of work to the learning of trades significantly altered the shape and assumptions of public schooling in twentieth-century Massachusetts. The shift in goals after 1900 was exemplified by Frank M. Leavitt. Appointed one of Boston's first manual training teachers in 1889, Leavitt assumed responsibility for organizing that branch of instruction in all the city's schools during the ensuing decade. His service on the executive committee of the Children's Mission continued, simul1

These figures undoubtedly overstate the amount of manual training being given, since they were responses by superintendents of schools to show compliance with state legislation. Nor do hours per week reveal whether new equipment, sufficient supplies, or special teachers were provided. In municipalities of less than 20,000 people, manual instruction was even less frequently offered. N e w Bedford, Annual Report of the School Committee and Superintendent of Schools [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1905, pp. 137-138; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annual fleportj, 1894-1895, pp. 365-414; ibid., 1904-1905, pp. 96-103, 293.

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taneously, the early ties that linked philanthropy and hand learning. In 1906 Leavitt became president of the manual training department of the National Education Association, and two years later president of the Eastern Manual Teachers Association, before moving to the University of Chicago as Professor of Industrial Education. 2 Leavitt had begun by defending the implementation of manual training and by seeking its expansion wherever possible. Like his associates in the movement, he argued that industrial and social change required the school to meet the demands of social stability and social progress, and he believed that manual education balanced those demands. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, he had begun to question the emphasis on social amelioration. Whereas hand learning had once been thought necessary for all children, with special applicability to the poor and deviant, industrial education—manual training related to industrial processess—"frankly recognizes that all cannot have and do not need the same education." "It means a thorough revision of our school system with the purpose of furnishing for the working classes an education which bears somewhat the same relation to their prospective life work as does the college education to the future work of the professional and managerial classes . . . It means, in the final analysis, the fitting of a particular boy for a particular job, and it is therefore strongly individualistic." 3 By justifying manual education for its cultural value and as an aid in training the mind, Leavitt contended, hand learning had been divorced from industrial needs. But, he argued, it was as valid to teach job preparation as cultural values and schools thus had to integrate schoolwork and the factory. Teachers should not have to meet artificial "scholastic requirements." "Before a man could teach machine-shop work in a high school," Leavitt declared, 2 3

Manual Training Magazine, 9 (1908), v. Frank M. Leavitt, Examples of Industrial Education (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1912), pp. iii, 2.

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"he had to pass an examination in English and American literature, algebra, demonstrative geometry, a foreign language, etc., etc. The result was that in time the work fell into the hands of men who were trained in the traditional school subjects rather than in the practical work which they were to teach." In sum, manual training had never been an aid to industrial growth or job placement, but instead had been undercut by a myopic concern for social reformation and an ossifying commitment to academic respectability.4 The attempt to turn manual education toward industrial training and vocational placement had appeared before 1900. The manufacturers who had proposed industrial art education, while considerably less articulate, placed industrial efficiency and job opportunity at the center of their proposals. The North Bennet Street Industrial School reported similarly, in 1889 that it was under heavy pressure to teach trades rather than to emphasize manual training's broad educational goals. Nevertheless, the ideology of manual education, as North Bennet Street's director noted, centered upon a commitment to social restoration and intellectual stimulation. Leavitt's complaint that manual educators had adopted oblique rationalizations to overcome opposition failed to account for the faith those same educators placed in their rationales. Manual training, they believed, did train the head through the hand. It inculcated the principles and values of work, not specific job functions. Cooking classes were not designed to create cooks, but taught domestic economy and the elements of science: chemistry, botany, physiology, anatomy, and physics. "Where properly incorporated into the curriculum," wrote Charles F. Carroll, the strong manual education enthusiast who replaced A. P. Marble as Superintendent of the Worcester schools in the mid-1890's, "manual training would harmonize class feelings being engendered by work dis* Ibid., pp. 11-13, 1 7 - 1 9 , 5 9 ; Frank M. Leavitt, "Industrial Education in the Elementary Schools," Manual Training Magazine, 9 (1908), 3 7 9 380.

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tinctions in the industrial society." "Many a wealthy parent would be glad to have his boy take such a course of hand work . . . and every boy's opportunity in life would be indefinitely advanced by such . . . training . . ." 5 By suggesting that manual educators adopted the ideology of social restoration as a temporary expedient advanced until industrial and vocational goals could be asserted, Leavitt had misinterpreted the roots of the earlier movement. Yet his conclusion received widespread support in the first decades of the twentieth century. His attack on manual training became representative of Massachusetts' educational thought, and his commitment to an ideology that called upon the school to adapt itself to and support the industrial economy in which it functioned, and to prepare its students for particular roles in that economy, became the distinctive feature of the industrial education movement.6 Throughout the nineteenth century, public education in Massachusetts had been engaged in a frenetic quest for institutional security. Educators argued in a variety of ways that the public school was a social necessity. In this, compulsory attendance became crucially important. How far, asked John Dickinson, Secretary of the State Board of Education in 1874, may the state "compel the attendance of its children upon its schools? If it has a right to punish idleness and crime, may it not prevent these by guarding against them? . . . The State is a party to the relation which a parent holds to his children, and he has no more right to rob those children of what they need to perform their 5

6

North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report of the Director, 1889, pp. 10-15, in Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; C. F. Carroll, quoted in Isaac E. Clarke, Art and industry (46th Cong., 2d sess., U.S. Senate, Executive Documents, 1897), VII, No. 209, pt. 3, p. 1095. T w o excellent surveys of the industrial education movement are Berenice Fisher, industrial Education: American Ideals and Institutions (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); and Sol Cohen, "The Industrial Education Movement, 1906-17," American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 95-110.

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duties as good citizens, than he has to steal from the public treasury." Refusal to comply with such legislation—the act of truancy—by either parent or child was thus not simply an individual decision; it was a grave threat to the school as a social institution. Lawrence's Superintendent of Schools phrased in 1878 the fundamental question to which all other issues were secondary: "Are the children of school age at school?"7 Through the 1870's and 1880's the answer to that question remained unsatisfactory. "The States," Board of Education Secretary Joseph White contended in 1871, indirectly referring to Massachusetts, "cannot afford to let 20 or 25% of their children obtain their education in the streets or at the corner groceries and railroad stations, and in our manufacturing establishments." When the proportion of schoolage children not attending school was only moderately reduced a decade later, another Secretary warned that the number was "much too large for either the safety or the prosperity of the State," and he called for a more vigorous commitment to the enforcement of the compulsory education statutes.8 By the turn of the century, however, truancy had become considerably less significant. Despite some inconsistencies, attendance laws were being enforced or, more accurately, were being accepted in most parts of the state. Statutes had increased the age at which children could work in factories and mercantile establishments to fourteen, coinciding with an apparent decline in industry's demand for child labor. While still a problem, particularly in rural areas, truancy in practice represented more a nuisance than a fundamental threat to public education. Even a compre7

8

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1873-1874, p. 215; Lawrence, School Report, 1878, p. 10; John Dickinson, "Compulsory School Attendance," Journal of Education, 18 (1883), 6 - 7 ; John W. Perrin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England (Meadville, Pa., 1896), pp. 57-62. White's comment is in American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses, 1871, p. 19, but see also pp. 18-35; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1880-1881, p. 75.

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hensive survey of school attendance by the State Board of Education in 1894-1895, undertaken to elicit support for more efficient enforcement of truancy regulations, admitted that average attendance in the state's public schools equaled 92 percent of the enrollment, and the proportion was even higher—between 95 and 98 percent—in the largest cities. As the twentieth century opened, truancy had become a subordinate issue in the hierarchy of Massachusetts' urban educational problems.9 High levels of attendance for children under fourteen, the minimum age of compulsory education, while satisfying, nonetheless exposed the severity of a number of related and complex issues, particularly those involving the problem of the dropout. While schooling was deemed beneficial to the individual and society, many children continued to leave at fourteen and fifteen. Children moved slowly through school, many arriving at the limits of compulsory education without reaching the upper grammar grades. Less than 10 percent of the state's schoolchildren attended high school. Were the schools failing to communicate their advantages, or were the children incapable of comprehending them? At the beginning of the twentieth century, this question was not entirely novel. The manual training movement had partially justified itself by asserting that hand learning would keep children in school longer because of its inherent interest and relevance to later vocational needs. But questions relating to the dropout had never been raised as explicitly nor with such urgency. They forced Massachusetts' educators into a basic réévaluation of their assumptions and goals, a reanalysis that became embodied in the movement for industrial-vocational schooling. The problem of the dropout began with the question of attrition, the withdrawal of children from school as they progressed through the various grades. Despite growth in the proportion of pupils graduating from grammar school 9

George Walton, "Report by the State Board of Education on School Attendance and Truancy in Massachusetts," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1894-1895, pp. 527-601.

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and entering high school in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number who failed to do so remained higher than most educators in Massachusetts willingly accepted. Estimates varied, but a study in 1897 by the State Board of Education found 6.7 percent of the school enrollment in the state's ten largest cities attending high school, with a high of 10.3 percent in Worcester and a low of 4.4 percent in the immigrant-industrial city of Fall River. Fourteen years later a Boston Finance Commission survey estimated that 9.6 percent of the school enrollment in seven of the state's largest cities were in high school, with Springfield topping the list at 11.3 percent and Fall River low at 5.5 percent. The trend was thus upward, but with only a slowly increasing percentage of students reaching secondary school levels. Equally disturbing was the large number of children who never moved beyond the primary grades. School superintendents reported between 40 and 50 percent of their total enrollment in the first three or four grades as compared to the six grammar and four high school classes. Again, while the situation improved after the turn of the century, it was not dramatically altered.10 The small proportion of children in grammar and high school as a percentage of total enrollments could have been produced by a constantly growing birth rate. But to Massachusetts' educators it more realistically suggested that their goal of full community schooling was being inadequately fulfilled. Attempting to assess progress through school, the State Board of Education conservatively estimated in 1898 10

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1896-1897, pp. 1 0 0 102; Finance Commission of the City of Boston, Beport on the Boston School System (Boston, City of Boston Printing Department, 1911), p. 166. The comparison of primary to grammar and high school enrollment is based on data compiled from the annual school reports of Boston, Haverhill, Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, and Worcester between 1889 and 1910 and from material on Massachusetts' cities in "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," U.S. Immigration Commission, .Reports, XXIX-XXXIII (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911). As late as 1913, 65 percent of N e w Bedford's eight-year public elementary school pupils were enrolled in the first four grades. N e w Bedford, School fleport, 1913, p. 42.

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that 75 percent of all public-school pupils failed to enter high school and that more than one-half did not reach the last year of grammar school. The following year, a study of Cambridge and Somerville revealed that of those who began school, 47 percent in Cambridge and 36 percent in Somerville failed to reach even the fifth grade. The situation was considerably worse in Fall River, undoubtedly the city with the poorest provisions for schooling in Massachusetts. A survey in 1892 found 60 percent of the student body in that city not going beyond the third grade and 80 percent leaving before the sixth grade. One of the more comprehensive studies of attrition undertaken in Boston in 1905 probably summarized conditions in the more successful urban school systems. Attempting to trace the annual decline in class size beginning with an entering primary school class in 1892, the city found that 61 percent of those who began school in that year finished the fifth grade, 32 percent graduated from grammar school, and 21.5 percent entered high school. The overwhelming number of pupils in Massachusetts' cities thus never reached high school, and, more important, the majority left school before having completed the requirements for a grammar school degree.11 Closely related to attrition rates was the problem of overage children, commonly referred to after 1910 as retardation. Boston's Superintendent of Schools, Edwin P. Seaver, waged throughout the 1880's and 1890's a virtual one-man campaign to alleviate a situation he deemed detrimental to the morals of young children and disruptive of the smooth functioning of his school system. "The presence of pupils, especially boys," he wrote in 1887, "who are eleven, twelve, and thirteen years old in primary schools ought not . . . to be tolerated any longer." Five years earlier Seaver had reported that more than one-half the fourteen-year-olds in 11

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1897-1898, p. 18; ibid., 1898-1899, pp. 111-118; Fall River, School Report, 1892, pp. 19-20; Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1905, No. 11, chart opposite p. 27.

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Boston's public schools were in the seventh grade or lower when they should have been enrolled in the ninth grade. Although the school system was so structured that nineyear-olds should have entered grammar school (their fourth year of schooling beyond the kindergarten), more than one-fifth of Boston's primary pupils were already nine or above. 12 Seaver argued that the problem was, in part, one of entry. Parents often neglected to enroll their children for a year or two beyond the regular starting age of six. More significant, however, were the delays encountered as children progressed through school. In the early 1880's almost 40 percent of the city's grammar school graduates had taken more than six years to complete what was nominally a sixyear course. Delays might be accounted for by personal and environmental deficiencies—children incapable of doing the required work on time—but Seaver focused instead on structural defects—the inefficient administration of the school system. After carefully analyzing the problem in individual grammar schools, he concluded in 1882 "that the presence of comparatively large numbers of old pupils in the lower grades indicates inefficient teaching, or deficient management, or both. In other words, the more judicious and efficient the management of the school the more nearly will the pupils be found in the classes corresponding to their ages, and at the same time properly qualified to be there."13 Seaver's argument that the cure for the problem of overage children, and by extension the problem of the dropout, lay in revising the modus operandi of the schools—through standardized tests and grading procedures, uniform promotion requirements, closer supervision of teaching stan12

13

Boston, School Documents, 1887, No. 3, pp. 5 - 6 ; ibid., 1882, No. 4, pp. 24-26. On the use of the term "retardation," see below, Chap. VII, n. 4. Boston, School Documents, 1882, No. 4, pp. 22-39; ibid., 1887, No. 3, pp. 5 - 6 ; ibid., 1890, No. 7, pp. 39-51; ibid., 1892, No. 12, pp. 8-10, 17-26, 69-171; ibid., 1895, No. 4, pp. 11-35.

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dards, the establishment of special ungraded classes for the overaged, and a strengthened centralized bureaucracy to assure all of this—reinforced similar arguments by advocates of manual training who had contended that hand learning would make schooling more attractive and more useful and would thus lead to more regular and longer attendance. Yet even where hand learning had been implemented, large numbers of children continued to advance through school slowly and to drop out as soon as possible. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Massachusetts' educators directed their energies toward a resolution of these problems, and in the process evolved an ethos for industrial schooling. Concern over the high rates of attrition, irregular progress through school, and the problem of overage children was the backdrop to the industrial education movement. Wherever they looked—in the best and the worst of urban school systems—Massachusetts' educators found large numbers of children leaving school at the ages of fourteen and fifteen, with little regard to the grade levels they had reached. Why? Where did they go? What happened to them? What relationship did schooling have to their lives? These were the significant questions posed by the dropout problem, and in 1905-1906 a young sociologist attempted to provide Massachusetts' educators with some of the answers. A by-product of the report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Susan Kingsbury's study of "The Relation of Children to the Industries (of Massachusetts)" seemed to offer strong evidence in support of trade training. The Commission regarded the report as "the most thorough inquiry into the relations of children to the industries of the community which has yet been made in this country." Kingsbury and her staff of five young women "who were especially fitted to gain the confidence of the parent and to portray the points of vital importance with regard to conditions, attitudes of mind and financial status of the family" conducted their investiga-

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tions in forty-three cities and towns in Massachusetts, 354 industrial establishments representing fifty-five industries, and included 5,459 children from 3,157 homes. Their primary concern, however, lay in the condition and fate of the estimated 25,000 children ages fourteen to sixteen in the state—five-sixths of whom had failed to complete grammar school, one-half not going beyond the seventh grade, and one-quarter receiving less than a sixth-grade education—who were either at work or idle.14 Free from legal compulsion, Kingsbury found, children left school at fourteen out of "necessity for self-support" or dulled by the "inactive school life," the latter, she argued, considerably more influential than the former. Massachusetts' economy forced the school dropout into seeking industrial employment where learning was unsystematic and where jobs in "industries of the better class"—clean, better paying, nonimmigrant, and with opportunities for advancement—were becoming scarce for those under eighteen. "Our investigations have shown . . . that the grades of industry entered by the child between fourteen and sixteen are of the lowest order." Unprepared for the "practical school of life," these children, victims of the "wasted years" syndrome, took undesirable and unskilled positions, their economic mobility limited and their prospects for future success dim.15 There were, Kingsbury recognized, variations in the prevailing conditions. Job opportunities for the young varied by industry and locality. In communities with a high proportion of skilled occupations, the percentage of school dropouts was lower than in unskilled industrial areas. Commercial centers kept their children in school longer 14

15

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report (Boston, 1906), pp. 2-3; "Report of the Sub-Committee on the Relation of Children to the Industries," ibid., pp. 25-31. Personal interviews by Kingsbury's staff were actually conducted in sixteen of the forty-three municipalities reported on. On Susan M. Kingsbury, see J. W. Leonard (ed.), Women's Who's Who of America, 1914-15 (New York, American Commonwealth Company, 1914), p. 459. "Relation of Children to the Industries," pp. 32-34.

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than the textile mill cities. While 68 percent of all fourteento sixteen-year-olds who began work entered unskilled industries with little opportunity for advancement, 12 percent of the total worked in skilled industries, although most held unskilled jobs. The dropout and "dead end" job situation was worst in the textile centers. In North Adams and Lowell about one-half the fourteen-to sixteen-year-olds were at work, 70 to 80 percent in the mills or related unskilled occupations. In New Bedford and Fall River the proportions were even higher, with almost all working children in the cotton textile factories. As a group, these towns exemplified the worst characteristics of the "wasted years." 16 Although the child under sixteen entered the textile mills at relatively high wages—between $3.50 and $4.00 a week —within two to four years he reached a plateau of $6.00 to $8.00 and occasionally $10.00 a week. In contrast, children who delayed entry until sixteen rapidly attained a similar level, usually within two years. In both cases, however, further advancement seemed unlikely; wages at age twenty were about those earned at age forty. Other than moving between mills, youthful workers remained at their original jobs, subject to the industry's periodic layoffs. Even more portentous for native working-class youth, unskilled textile labor was "passing gradually to poorer and poorer classes of foreigners" and thus seemed certain to become even less remunerative and more of a dead end. The future for children who left school at fourteen or fifteen to enter the textile mills, Kingsbury thus argued, rarely varied: relatively good wages upon entry reached a low plateau within four years, with mill work experience providing little in the way of transferable skills or opportunities for economic mobility. 17 16 17

I bid., pp. 35, 39, 43, 85, 87-89. Ibid., pp. 35-47. While Kingsbury differentiated between the cotton mills and the somewhat better conditions in the woolen mills—a work force of fewer immigrants and cleaner, though not higher paying, work—her overall assessment of the textile industries was hardly

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In the state's four largest commercial centers—Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and Cambridge—Kingsbury found a less depressing and more confused situation. The department store "cash and bundle" girls, errand and messenger service boys, confectionary factory workers, and youth engaged in other light goods production were considerably more difficult to generalize about than the textile workers. While poorly paid and rarely seeming to advance, the white-collar department store girls, for example, stood in sharp contrast to the immigrant and lower-class candy factory labor. Yet despite the heterogeneity of available employment in the commercial cities, Kingsbury's conclusions paralleled her assessment of the textile industries : minimal wages with little possibility of advancement. Although department store girls and errand boys sometimes moved up in the job hierarchy, such occasions occurred haphazardly and infrequently. The best that Kingsbury could say about the opportunities for unskilled fourteento sixteen-year-olds in the commercial centers was that some children appeared able to move into other employment as they got older, a condition not apparent in textiles.18 That employment for children ages fourteen to sixteen was almost valueless seemed clear. That the low wages, poor working environment, and low quality personnel also exposed youth to immoral temptations and practices seemed equally apparent. As important, Kingsbury argued, there were alternatives; one could ask "What these years might have meant if they could have been spent in desirable occupations or in school." For one, and in many ways this was the most controversial finding of the investigation,

18

touched by the distinctions. The other textile industry in the state, silk, was in somewhat the same condition as wool, but it hired so f e w young employees that the report took little notice of it. /bid., pp. 4 7 - 5 4 . Kingsbury also briefly surveyed Brockton and Lynn, the state's most important shoe manufacturing cities, and the jewelry center of Attleborough. In the t w o industries represented, however, she found f e w children employed under sixteen, although she suggested that the years fourteen to sixteen could be profitably spent systematically preparing for the trades. Ibid., pp. 55-56.

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most families could afford to keep their children in school. The $2.00 to $4.00 a week that fourteen- and fifteen-yearolds earned amounted in practice to less than $1.50 when working expenses and loss owing to idle periods were accounted for. The vast majority of working-class families interviewed by Kingsbury's staff—very few poor immigrant families were included in the survey—could easily survive without the child's income, particularly if postponement brought economic benefits in the future. Most children, "except for the lower foreign element," left school, Kingsbury wrote, of their own volition: "It is dissatisfaction on the part of the child which takes him from school . . . " "Read with the visitor history after history of the child and of the family, and you will find that the child left school from choice, and that the parents objected."19 The consequences of that choice led Kingsbury to propose curricular innovations more responsive to student interests and more immediately related to vocational goals. A physically active school program, earlier urged by manual educators, would end boredom. Teaching industrial skills, "practical training in specific industries," would provide the economic incentive for staying in school. Kingsbury thus adopted an already established tenet of American education: continued schooling led to more intelligent workers who produced higher quality goods, and on that basis the workers could demand higher wages. But she added the assertion that schooling had to include specific job instruction if it were to achieve its economic expectations.20 Seemingly scientifically arrived at—Kingsbury had just received a doctoral degree in sociology from Columbia University—including a large sample, and forcefully argued, Kingsbury's conclusions were to exert wide influence within and beyond Massachusetts. Yet her commitment to the notion that schooling enhanced occupational mobility 19 20

Ibid., pp. 44, 48-54, 57-69, 86-87. Ibid., pp. 45-46, 6 4 - 9 3 .

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led her to overlook the ambiguities of her data. In some cases, age of job entry appeared more important than grade level attained in school. Family background—a father or relative already in the trade—appeared to open some semiskilled and skilled job opportunities more readily than continued schooling. While Kingsbury admitted that occupational comparisons between technical school and mechanic arts high school graduates on the one side and grammar school dropouts on the other were invalid, she nonetheless presented them to justify trade school training. She concluded that a working-class family did not need the labor of its children if its weekly income was three dollars per family member, a questionable assumption. The report consistently sought, in addition, to differentiate Massachusetts' working class from the "Shiftless and unambitious" poor, most of whom were immigrants. Its recommendations thus neglected a crucial element of the dropout problem particularly in the state's industrial cities. The tragedy of youth in the cotton mills, Kingsbury wrote, was not simply economic, but the association of children "with our most undesirable population." Despite the ambiguities and despite the neglect of and the bias against the immigrant poor, and to a lesser extent against trade unions, however, Kingsbury's argument that industrial schooling would resolve the dropout problem and foster occupational mobility became the sociological basis of Massachusetts' movement toward vocational education. 21 21

ibid., pp. 27 n., 35, 38-43, 45, 57-58, 64-69, 81-84, 90-93. Kingsbury's findings that 75 percent of Massachusetts' children who left school could have been supported by their families during a period of extended schooling received both confirmation and criticism after 1906. A U.S. Department of Labor survey of dropouts in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama and a study of 800 Iowa boys placed the percentages economically able to remain in school at 60 percent and 67 percent, respectively, lower than Kingsbury's estimates but still considerably above a majority. When substantial numbers of poor immigrant families were included, as was done in studies of the Chicago stockyards, less than a majority were found who could afford to dispense with the earnings of their fourteen- to sixteen-year-old children. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor,

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"The Relation of Children to the Industries" gained much of its prominence from its publication as a supplement to the report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education. The Commission had emerged in 1905 in response to Governor William Douglas' call for more adequate forms of trade education. As a leading shoe manufacturer who had received political support from labor organizations, Douglas contended that cheap and efficient production depended upon a trained labor supply. In May the state legislature authorized the Governor to appoint nine individuals "representing manufacturing, agricultural, educational and labor interests" to a Commission on Industrial and Technical Education. "The Commission," the legislative resolution declared, "shall investigate the needs for education in the different grades of skill and responsibility in the various industries of the Commonwealth. They shall investigate how far the needs are met by existing institutions, and shall consider what new forms of educational effort may be advisable . . ." 22 That the new forms would be biased toward trade training was a foregone conclusion when Douglas announced

22

Conditions Under Which Children Leave School to Go to Work: Report on Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1910), VII, 104-105, 123-124; Ervin E. Lewis, "Work, Wages, and Schooling of 800 Iowa Boys in Relation to Problems of Vocational Guidance," in Meyer Bloomfield, Readings in Vocational Guidance (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), pp. 237-240; Ernest L. Talbert, "Opportunities in School and Industry for Children of the [Chicago] Stockyards District," ibid., pp. 397, 430-432; Louise Montgomery, "The American Girl in the Stockyards District," ibid., pp. 471-472; Sophinisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, "The School and the Working-Child," ibid., pp. 486-487. "Annual Address of the Governor . . . to the Legislature of Massachusetts," Massachusetts Senate, Documents (Boston, 1905), No. 1; "Resolve of the Committee on Education," ibid., No. 264; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report, pp. 1 - 2 . On Douglas, see Richard Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics, 1900-1912 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 105-108, 119-121; Henry Bedford, Socialism and the Workers in Massachusetts, 1886-1912 (Amherst, Massachusetts University Press, 1966), pp. 113, 206-207, 220-223.

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his appointments. From the shoe center of Brockton came two friends, George E. Keith, a fellow shoe manufacturer, bank president, and influential figure on the School Board, and Warran A. Reed, lawyer and wealthy municipal court judge. Simeon B. Chase, a banker and textile manufacturer, and John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers of America, were both from Fall River, where management and union were cooperating in support of a textile training school for supervisory personnel and evening trade training. Nathaniel I. Bowditch, wealthy trustee of the Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst, an institution already committed to advancing vocational education, represented agriculture. Mary Morton Kehew, President of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, was similarly involved in extending trade training to females in the Boston area, while the Commission's chairman, Carroll D. Wright, former director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor and U.S. Commissioner of Labor and recently appointed president of Clark College, had already established himself as a supporter of technical industrial schooling. The only potential opposition to trade schooling on the Commission centered primarily in George H. Martin, Secretary of the State Board of Education, a moderate educational reformer who had hesitantly come to accept limited manual training programs, in John P. Murphy, general organizer of the Lynn Boot and Shoe Workers' Union, and to a lesser extent in Golden, the latter two union representatives fearful of schools that might flood the skilled labor market. 23 The Commission conducted twenty public hearings in twelve Massachusetts cities between September and December, 1905, while appointing Kingsbury to investigate industrial conditions and the educational needs of the state's 23

Brief biographies of the Commission's members may be found in Massachusetts Department of Education, The Douglas Commission and the Commission on Industrial Education (Boston, 1935), in Massachusetts State Library. Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 218-221, discusses the Commission.

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fourteen to sixteen-year-old children. The hearings revealed the crosscurrents of conflicting and self-interested attitudes toward industrial education, with representatives of labor and management, schoolmen, and assorted citizenry calling for educational commitments to satisfy their own needs. Manufacturers and employers, contending that the skilled and semiskilled labor pool was inadequate, asked that more extensive support be given to industrial education for specific work skills. Social reformers argued for schooling directed explicitly at the immigrant poor and the working class, although they tended to keep the two groups distinct. Labor leaders, fearful of a too rapid increase in the supply of trained workers, rejected the notion of schooling in trades and demanded training for those already on the job designed to advance workers to supervisory positions. Agriculturalists sought schooling in farm techniques and at a minimum asked for school gardens in urban schools. Hearings in individual cities—Lynn and Brockton were outstanding examples—exposed conflicts among school officials, manufacturers, and union representatives only tangentially related to schooling.24 24

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report, pp. 2-3; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, "Hearings," passim, MS in Massachusetts State Library. The hearings are a mine of information on educational concerns of the period. On the manufacturers' support of trade schools, see the testimony of George A. Denison and Charles Bosworth (Oct. 18), H. C. Wood (Oct. 19), Albion Bartlett (Nov. 13), and T. J. Evans [Nov. 10). On the fears of organized labor, see statements by Frank Foster and Albert Hibbert (Oct. 24), and by labor representatives in Lynn (Nov. 3), Lawrence (Nov. 8), and Brockton (Nov. 10). For the support of textile schools by members of the Textile Union, see their testimony in Fall River (Nov. 27). The social reformers were best represented by Robert A. Woods (Sept. 22). Testimony in favor of agricultural education occurred on November 22, but should be supplemented by the remarks of Walter D. Ross, a dealer in agricultural supplies (Oct. 19) and Herman Dressel and George Hastings, school officials in Great Barrington and Fitchburg, respectively (Nov. 1). The hearings that produced the bitterest conflict among manufacturers, labor, and school officials took place in Lynn (Nov. 3) and Brockton (Nov. 10). Some of the hearings were reported in the Boston Transcript, Sept, 12, 22, 24, 29.

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More revealing, however, was the consensus that emerged from the hearings and within the Commission itself. Adopting as already established what educators had claimed for more than two decades, the Commission found that the balance between job learning (the apprenticeship system) and school learning had been destroyed, that "in place of two systems of training, balancing each other and mutually cooperative, there came to be but one, absorbing all the time and thought and interest of the children and youth,— a system of education isolated and onesided." Aggravated by the congestion of population in the cities, children were becoming increasingly isolated from productive labor, their schooling neither aiding their economic future nor that of the state. Since local communities could not aiford to correct this situation, the state, as European countries had already shown, had to provide industrial schooling.25 The Commission also condemned existing manual training programs. Too infrequently given, without any recognizable standards of instruction, poorly equipped, and taught by individuals unable and unwilling to convey its industrial uses, manual education had become a caricature of modern industrialization. Its commitment to reconstituting cultural values ignored the economic needs of the laboring class and the state. "It seems as if the old academic idea that there was something unacademic in studying anything that would later on be a means of earning bread and butter has been exaggerated in the development of the manual training system," Robert Woods told the Commission. Adopting Woods's position, the Douglas report concluded that manual education had become "a cultural subject mainly useful as a stimulus to other forms of intellectual effort,—a sort of mustard relish, an appetizer,—to be conducted without reference to any industrial end. It has been severed from real life as completely as have the other school activities." 25

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, fleport, pp. 3-10, 16-19. On the Commission's assessment of conditions in Europe and testimony by European experts, see ibid., pp. 129-178.

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"The present public school system," the Commission declared, "is aimed primarily to secure cultural and not industrial or vocational effects . . . " 2 6 The demand for vocational training was not new. Schooling for a specific job, the report argued, had already become accepted in the state's educational system. Confusing occupational categories with individual vocations, it asserted that a "large part of the burden of high school maintenance" was devoted to college preparation and thus was vocationally directed toward the professions. Bookkeeping, typing, and stenography courses had as their only justification jobs in commercial establishments. Advanced training in industrial and agricultural techniques occurred at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Worcester Polytechnical Institute, and the Massachusetts Agricultural College, as well as at the textile schools in Lowell, New Bedford, and Fall River. Actual productive processes, however, were "only touched educationally in their most advanced and scientific forms." Although a number of private and philanthropic agencies taught trades, "no instruction whatever is furnished at public expense in the principles or practice of farming, dairying, gardening, the building trades, cabinet making, machine shop practice, boot and shoe making, tanning, printing, book binding, dressmaking, millinery, embroidery, design." Massachusetts school children, the Commission suggested, could and indeed had to be taught how to produce. This, combined with Susan Kingsbury's conclusions that fourteen to sixteen-yearolds would benefit from industrial training, provided the 26

Statement by Robert A. Woods in Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, "Hearings," Sept. 22; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, fleport, pp. 14, 23. See also the remarks by F. A. Bagnall, Superintendent of Schools in Adams, and Carroll Wright (Dec. 19). The question of why manual training was so inadequately taught was raised on a number of occasions during the hearings, but was never pursued. See the remarks by George Martin (Sept. 29), Charles T. Woodbury, Principal of the Fitchburg High School (Nov. 2), and the testimony given in Pittsfield (Nov. 1).

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Douglas Commission with its recommendations. 27 In the elementary schools, children should be instructed in the elements of productive industry. Work in the high schools should be modified "so that the instruction in mathematics, the sciences and drawing shall show the application and use of these subjects in industrial life, with especial reference to local industries, so that the students may see that these subjects are not designed primarily and solely for academic purposes, but that they may be utilized for the purposes of practical life." The Commission also recommended that new elective industrial courses be provided in the high schools, that evening classes be offered to persons already employed in the trades, and that part-time day classes be made available for "children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years who may be employed during the remainder of the day, to the end that instruction in the principles and the practice of the arts may go on together." 28 Although the Commission strongly criticized manual education, most of its recommendations were not a major break with the earlier movement. Industrial education in the elementary schools was still to be "of such a character as to secure from it the highest cultural as well as the highest industrial value." The desire to bring industrial associations into the academic curriculum, to widen elective alternatives, and to apply traditional subject matter to industrial problems had been apparent since the 1880's and 1890's, though in less pronounced form. Similarly, evening trade programs and requests for part-time education for school dropouts were not novel, although, again, they had rarely received such prestigious support. What did represent a dramatic break with the past, however, was the recommendation that a Commission on Industrial Education be established that would stand outside the bounds of the 27

28

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report, pp. 10-20. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

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traditional public-school authorities and would have full power to implement industrial schooling under public auspices. The new Commission "shall be charged with the duty of extending the investigation of methods of industrial training and of local needs," and would have the power to establish independent industrial schools. Money appropriated by the state and municipalities was to be expended under its direction, entirely free of existing public-school officials.29 With this proposal, the Douglas Commission altered the nature of Massachusetts' educational discussions. Manual training versus academic schooling and manual versus vocational education now became debates of the past. Challenged by a threat to their power from an independent commission, Massachusetts' schoolmen quickly accepted the arguments for vocational training and directed their concern toward questions of control. Locked in a struggle for power, the state's educators agreed that vocational education should be implemented, but determined to wrest implementation from the autonomous Commission on Industrial Education. The implications of that decision were momentous. School reforms designed to correct the social disharmonies of a threatened society became training for particular places in that society. Whereas educators had been ambivalent about industrialization, their defense of vocational education led to a glorification of industrial practices. Equality of educational opportunity moved from the provision of a common education for all to separate kinds of instruction for different kinds of pupils. The significance of these changes remained unclear during the fierce struggle for control of the state's school system, which immediately followed the Douglas Commission report. After 1910, however, with that struggle concluded, a consensus on this new ideology of public education would emerge.

29

Ibid., pp. 20-24.

VI The Politics of Vocationalism The Douglas Commission closed an era and was the "precipitating event" in a wave of demands for industrial education. It summarily dismissed superficial manual training exercises as inadequate for industrial needs. Henceforth manual education as social restoration would be irretrievably linked with academic subjects as part of traditional culture-oriented schooling. Vocational education now became synonymous with training in industrial processes and, to a considerably lesser extent, with agricultural instruction. The Douglas report, wrote Charles R. Richards of Columbia Teachers College, a prime mover in the organization of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, stood "in striking contrast" to earlier educational documents. It "extended far below the operation and results of the present meagre provision for industrial training to the relation of the school to the whole problem." The report made clear that public-school authorities were incapable of providing truly vocational education, while its call for independent industrial schools provided the basis for "special training for a special class for a special place in the social order." The report, another commentator declared, "bids fair to be an epoch-making document, chiefly by reason of its radical recommendation in favor of an industrial school system apart from the public school system of the state . . . No one anxious to be in touch with the increasing movement toward industrial training can afford to ignore it." 1 With only slight modification—a three-year rather than a five-year term of appointment and state funds only for industrial schools independent of public-school systems rather than for new industrial courses in already existing schools or new schools under local school committees—the 1

Charles R. Richards, "The Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education," Manual Training Magazine, 7 (1906), 185-195; James Haney, ibid., 224-225, 247-248; Edward A. Krug, Shaping of the American High School (New York, Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 214, 217, 223.

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Douglas Commission's recommendation that a Commission on Industrial Education be created was quickly implemented. The members of the new Commission were appointed in August, 1906; they strikingly resembled those on the previous Commission, with one notable exception. Whereas George Martin, the moderate Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, had represented the state's public schoolmen on the Douglas Commission, the only educator on the new Commission and its dominant figure was Chairman Paul H. Hanus, Professor of Education at Harvard University, one of the state's leading advocates of vocational schooling. Joining Hanus on the Commission were A. Lincoln Filene, businessman and Chairman of the Board of William Filene's and Sons, Charles H. Winslow, Vice-President of the Massachusetts State Federation of Labor, Carlton D. Richardson, member of the State Board of Agriculture, and Mary Morton Kehew, a carry-over from the Douglas Commission and President of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union.2 The Commission's definition of its role in the state's educational system quickly became apparent in its search for an executive secretary. Committed to differentiating the old program of manual training as social education from the new industrial schooling as vocational preparation, Hanus expected the Commission's appointee to have had technical training, "successful experience in at least one important industry, . . . a decided interest in industrial education, and, if possible, . . . some educational experience [italics mine]." Recognizing the existing confusion over the kind of industrial education needed and how it was to be implemented, the new secretary would have to "take the initiative in investigations . . . into various in2

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1907, pp. 7-9. Massachusetts Department of Education, The Douglas Commission and the Commission on Industrial Education (Boston, 1935), contains biographical sketches. Legislative hearings on the proposal to establish an independent industrial education commission were reported in the Boston Transcript, Apr. 30, 1906.

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dustries of Massachusetts, with a view of determining the kind or kinds of education that may be helpful to employers and employees." Since the Commission would also assume responsibility for establishing industrial schools and programs, the secretary would have to "advise and co-operate as only a well-trained expert can." The requirements demanded of its executive secretary—experience in industry, a background in advanced technical training, investigatory and research capabilities, and political tact— also encompassed, on a broader scale, the needs of the new Commission. With the choice of Charles Morse, Superintendent of the Rindge Manual Training School in Cambridge, after a nationwide search, the Commission hoped to satisfy those needs. 3 Morse seemed ideal. Forty-six years old, a state normal school graduate, and a former grammar school teacher and principal, he came from within Massachusetts' educational establishment. In 1889 his joint appointment as a faculty member in Cambridge's English High School and head of the academic department of the Manual Training School reflected the city's belief that it could integrate manual training and academic learning. While teaching physics and electricity at Manual Training, Morse took advanced technical courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became an accomplished machine worker and cabinetmaker, and was placed in charge of the city's electrical power systems. Since 1895, he had been Superintendent of the Rindge School, while continuing to act as an electrical and mechanical consultant to various engineering firms in the Boston metropolitan area. Morse thus combined an acquaintance with the newest industrial innovation—electricity—and more than a decade's experience as head of Cambridge's highly regarded manual training high school. His appointment revealed the Industrial Education Commission's desire to advance industrial education while dis3

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual 1907, pp. 1 0 - 1 1 .

Report,

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pelling fear among the state's public educators. 4 Despite Morse's obvious capabilities, however, he never assumed leadership of the Commission. Within that body and to the public at large, the dominant voice for industrial schooling in Massachusetts was the Commission's chairman, Paul Hanus. A childhood emigrant from Germany and a graduate of the University of Michigan in 1878, Hanus had spent most of his pre-Massachusetts career as a high school and college teacher in Colorado. In 1891 he was appointed Assistant Professor of the History and Art of Teaching at Harvard, responsible for organizing a new department of education. In the next decade and a half Hanus became one of the state's leading professional educators, an aggressive and articulate spokesman for the science of pedagogy and systematic schooling. A strong advocate of trade education even before the Douglas report, he regarded the Commission's recommendations as "nothing more nor less than the establishment of a new kind of public education on a foundation as secure as that of the existing public schools, but with a different motive. It means the establishment of schools for vocational training . . . distinct from the existing public schools . . ." Defining "good citizenship" in terms of "self-support and the capacity for increasing usefulness, and hence an increasing wage or salary," Hanus claimed that the public school's major function should be "preparation for a vocation." "There is no greater blessing in this world than a steady job with increasing efficiency and hence increasing wages . . . " The only sure way to that "happy state," he wrote, was to give the individual "the training for some skilled vocation in life whether it be in business, in a trade, or in a profession." 5 Citing Susan Kingsbury's study of school dropouts, Hanus 4

5

Ibid., pp. 11-12. On Morse's views, see Charles Morse, "Elementary Trade Teaching," in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Industrial Education, 23 (1909), 33-41. Paul Hanus, Adventuring in Education (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 247-251, passim, "Industrial Education, under State Auspices, in Massachusetts," Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Bulletin No. 8, 1908, pp. 3 - 5 (reprinted in Paul Hanus, Beginnings in Industrial Education and Other Educational

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argued that public education had become undemocratic because it neglected the vocational future of the majority. Believing that Massachusetts' economic future depended on the skill of its workers, he agreed with the Douglas Commission that the schools failed to "directly prepare the majority of our young people for self-support, with the prospect of steady work and the means of progressive wellbeing." Social stability depended upon vocational preparation, and the dominant question confronting the school, therefore, was being raised by the fourteen- and fifteenyear-old child: "What shall I do to ensure early self-support and progressive well-being as I grow older?" The answer, Hanus concluded, had to be industrial schooling for vocational placement, a "specific education . . . for a particular calling."6 With Hanus shaping its policies, the Commission directed its efforts toward informing the public of the value and goals of vocational schooling, investigating programs in the United States and Europe, and aiding communities in establishing independent industrial schools. Its most ambitious activity was a series of extensive surveys of European and American industrial and agricultural schools undertaken in 1907 and 1908. Executive Secretary Morse toured the eastern and southern United States reporting on projects in Tuskegee, Alabama, Columbus, Georgia, Hampton, Virginia, and New York City. Commission member Richardson similarly visited agricultural schools in the northwestern United States and Canada, while Morse and

6

Discussions [Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908], pp. 29-52), "Public Trade Schools," Bulletin of the Winona Technical institute, 5 (Aug., 1909). Hanus was also a prime mover in the founding of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1920. Adventuring, pp. 214-227. Hanus, "Industrial Education," pp. 5-14, and Adventuring, pp. 169-170; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1907, pp. 13-14. The essentials of Hanus' views on industrial education are presented in Beginnings, pp. 4-86. Hanus tended to be less extreme on vocational education when he was not specifically discussing the subject. See his balanced analysis of secondary education in Educational Aims and Educational Vaiues (New York, Macmillan Company, 1908), pp. 71-138.

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the labor representative on the Commission, Winslow, investigated educational conditions in Western Europe. The European visits were undoubtedly the most comprehensive of the investigations and made clear the Commission's desire to establish a broadly based rationale for governmentsponsored vocational schooling, for uniform and systematic trade training, and for the economic advantages of industrial schooling to the state, employer, and worker. 7 Since the 1870's, when the industrial drawing movement had placed great emphasis upon the relationship between technical schooling and industrial progress in England, France, and Germany, Europe had become increasingly prominent in American educational debates. By the turn of the century, European examples were commonplace, and the Douglas Commission had unhesitatingly sought testimony from English technical training advocates and drawn upon studies of European industrial conditions and education by the United States Commissioner of Labor and the United States Department of Commerce and Labor to support its arguments for vocational schools. Enumerating the widespread support for such schooling abroad, the cooperation of government, industry, and labor, and the "universal recognition of the necessity of special education for every form of industrial life," the Douglas Commission concluded that European industrial education far surpassed American practices. "The scope of this education is so broad," wrote the Commission, "its forms are so multifarious, its methods are so scientific, its hold upon public opinions is so complete, the impulse which it is giving to industrial leadership is so powerful, as to entitle it to the most thoughtful and respectful study." 8 7

8

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1907, pp. 1 4 - 1 9 , 2 9 - 4 5 ; ibid., 1908, pp. 1 3 - 1 6 , 2 0 - 2 1 , 3 4 - 5 7 , and Appendixes A, B, E, F, and G. Hanus, Adventuring, pp. 1 6 8 - 1 7 4 , is a retrospective view of the Commission's work. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, fleport (Boston, 1906), pp. 13, 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 2 9 - 1 7 7 .

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These conclusions undoubtedly stimulated the trip of Morse and Winslow to nineteen Western European cities in 1907. Expecting confirmation of what the Douglas Commission had already reported, the two Americans found in European solutions suggestions for Massachusetts' problems. Yet if their report on their European adventures was generally enthusiastic, it was also tempered by some confusion, a bit of uncertainty, and, in the case of England, the country in which they had the least difficulty communicating, much doubt about the progress and uses to which industrial education could be put. England was the first stop, and the Americans were obviously disappointed and even irritated over what they found. Legislation in 1899 and 1902 had led them to expect a national commitment to the technical training of the working class. In addition, the Douglas Commission had declared that industrial education had widespread support among employers and trade unions and that its only serious obstacle was "the poor general education of the English workman." Firsthand acquaintance, however, elicited significantly less optimism. Appalled by the poor elementary schooling for the children of workingmen, widespread apathy toward industrial training among employers and workers, and, worst of all, the explicit antidemocratic bias used to justify training for a particular place in a highly stratified class society, Morse and Winslow saw little hope for major advances in either industry or education among the English. " W e have not the enthusiasm for education . . . which you possess," one government technical school official told the Commission's investigators. "I can quite believe you are 25 years ahead of us . . . Even teachers here are often pessimistic over technical training. They have the knowledge that a boy will most likely have to do one certain job all his life, so they are inclined to ask, What is the use of training him technically?" The best English facility, the Manchester School of Technology, housed in a new building costing $1,500,000, had been in operation so long that it found itself encumbered by obsolete machinery.

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"Parenthetically," the Americans wrote, "the opinion expressed by one of the Manchester authorities, that the equipment of the New Bedford Textile School in Massachusetts was the best that he had ever seen, is interesting." Even London, whose industrial schooling they commended, directed its major effort toward "some 8,000 destitute children," recalling philanthropic rather than industrial-vocational goals. England was, in short, a major disappointment, its workshops inefficient and hardly moving toward change, its industrial schooling inadequate and being undermined by the acceptance of a stratified class society.9 The investigators from Massachusetts found industrial education considerably more satisfactory in the other European countries; this could be accounted for partially by the fact that language difficulties prevented as close an analysis as they had given England. Defining European practices in terms of the problems confronting Massachusetts, they perceived the heterogeneity of the Continent as reflecting a universal movement toward nationally subsidized trade schooling managed independently of the already existing educational establishment. Whether discussing Holland where sharp controversy was occurring over trade schools, France where a long tradition of artisan schooling existed, or any of the other countries they visited, the Americans found the same trends: government subsidies, industrial education outside the control of educators, and immediate economic benefits resulting from trade instruction. "In Germany, as in the other European countries," the Massachusetts Commission summarized its investigators' report, "the State takes the liveliest interest in the encouragement of local industries. It has been distinctly recognized that there must be a proper blending of purely educational and purely industrial forces in order to produce the desired effects in industrial education. Nevertheless, in this combination it is the industrial force which has had the administrative duties to perform; the purely educational force 9

Ibid., p. 130; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1908, pp. 40-41, 97-159.

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has been active chiefly in an advisory capacity." 10 Although apparent throughout Western Europe, these themes were most evident in Germany, the center of the industrial education movement. The Douglas Commission in 1906 had sought to relate Germany's industrial accomplishments to industrial schooling: "Trade education has made great progress in Germany during the last few decades, and its development has corresponded with a most remarkable advance of scientific knowledge and industry." A year later the Commission on Industrial Education published a highly laudatory report by Chairman Hanus on industrial continuation schools in Munich. Commending the city for successfully maintaining "a unique and wholly admirable system of technical continuation schools, whereby those who must leave school at about thirteen or fourteen years of age are well trained for the several callings on which they enter," Hanus acknowledged Germany's leadership in trade instruction and suggested that it was worthy of emulation. Based on the "general principle universally recognized in Germany,—that efficiency in any calling, from chimney-sweeping to watchmaking, requires special training for that particular calling," the Munich continuation schools were compulsory for all elementary school graduates, six to ten hours per week for three to four years. Children attended the school applicable to the trade or business in which they were employed. While the "whole series of schools is too new to enable them all to be equally efficient," Hanus admitted, "yet it is safe to say that no more promising educational scheme has ever been set on foot anywhere; and the success attending the opening of the first of these schools in 1900 led the city to extend them with constantly increasing success, until now there are forty of them." 11 10 11

Ibid., pp. 41-50, 159-419. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report, p. 138; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual ¡Report, 1907, pp. 46-51. The Commission also published more detailed studies by Hanus on the continuation schools. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Bulletins Nos. 1 - 6 (1907-1908).

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The Munich continuation schools thus seemed a promising solution for "the problem of how to keep under appropriate educational influence during their period of adolescence that great body of youth who are obliged to leave^school when only thirteen or fourteen years old." Compulsory attendance meant a punctual and regular student body; industrial goals were kept uppermost; and the schools' governing boards included representatives from the trades and business, assuring instructional contact with "actual contemporary needs." "The schools embody a well-defined policy that underlies all forms of activity in Germany; namely, that every efficient worker, whether in trade, business or profession, requires general education, and also technical preparation, for the particular work he is to do." 12 With these conclusions before them, it was hardly surprising that Morse and Winslow should proclaim that the "technical industrial schools of Germany are justly celebrated for their thorough, systematic and comprehensive instruction." The Americans found that all was not perfect, however. Variety revealed a lack of uniformity, made standards difficult to ascertain, and raised serious questions about efficiency. Unwilling to criticize a model system, the Americans revealed the dilemma of their confusion when they noted the heterogeneity within one type of school : "Perhaps it would be permissible to say that these schools are all intended to fulfill the same general object, but that differences in details arise from different ideas as to the manner in which results may be attained, as well as the different local conditions which exist and the different classes of persons to be provided for." Instruction, more-

12

In retrospect, Hanus revised his views of the Munich schools, suggesting that they were limited by their role in a stratified society: "The merits of these vocational continuation schools were great, but the schools were not intended to help workers to rise above the stations in which they had been born. They were intended to make good workmen, not to enable a worker to become a manager or other executive." Adventuring, p. 167. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1907, pp. 46-51.

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over, occasionally seemed too theoretical. Many of the continuation schools met in the evenings and Sundays rather than during the workday, a retrogressive step to the Massachusetts' day trade school enthusiasts. 13 The American investigators had gone to Europe in search of reinforcement. Looking for examples and parallels to the existing situation in Massachusetts, they were, not surprisingly, most struck by active state involvement, industrial education's immediate economic rewards, and the placing of industrial schools under autonomous bodies reflecting industrial needs rather than under the already functioning educational establishments. Yet their report was equally revealing for what caused it displeasure and for what it left unsaid. Morse and Winslow were highly critical of the acceptance of a class-structured society in England and the uses of different kinds of educational training there to retain that structure. They made no attempt to ask whether industrial education reinforced or undermined rigid class structures. Questions about the nature of a democratic educational system seemed best unraised. Morse and Winslow also had little to say about modern industry, about the factory and industrial worker as distinct from the workshop and artisan. Most excited by such skilled artisan training institutions as the Estienne School for the Arts and Industries of Book Making in Paris and the school for watchmakers in Geneva, they focused their praise continually upon the restoration of the handicraftsman in an industrial society. In their voluminous report of what they had seen in Europe, the two investigators left untouched the crucial question of the relationship between the factory and the industrial school.14 The Commission on Industrial Education centered its efforts to implement industrial trade education on two possibilities: the coordination and institutionalization of evening trade classes, and the establishment of industrial 13 14

I bid., 1 9 0 8 , pp. 4 4 - 4 5 , 2 5 8 - 3 2 5 . ibid., pp. 1 7 3 - 1 9 3 , 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 , 3 2 5 - 3 2 9 .

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day schools independent of local public-school authorities. Although initial expectations had placed a higher priority upon the latter as the more significant innovation, in practice the former received more attention. By January, 1908, evening trade programs in architectural and mechanical drawing, machine shop work, dressmaking, millinery, and electricity had been established in Beverly, Cambridge, New Bedford, Waltham, and Taunton, while other classes were under active consideration in Attleborough, Boston, Lawrence, and North Adams. Yet if the Commission proudly offered these classes as significant progress in industrial schooling, the evening schools were hardly distinctive. Most represented mild revisions of already existing programs, now nominally transferred from the jurisdiction of the local school committee to the Commission on Industrial Education in order to qualify for state financing. Indeed, the change was so limited that the state legislature initially refused to recognize most of the evening industrial classes as independent schools and delayed the payment of state funds until 1910.15 Considerably more controversial was the Commission's mandate to establish day industrial schools. Despite intensive propagandizing by Chairman Hanus and Executive Secretary Morse and some initial movement toward such schools, few cities in Massachusetts actually instituted them under the Commission's guidelines. Even with the proffered state aid, Lowell's Superintendent of Schools reported in 1907, separate industrial schools meant additional large expenditures which most cities could ill afford. Similarly, while Worcester's Superintendent applauded the work of the Industrial Education Commission, he felt that the local school committee should undertake "an important part in this new education." These difficulties—additional expenses demanded by new industrial schools and the unwillingness 15

ibid., pp. 66, 77-84, 86-89; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual fleport of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annual fleport], 19081909, pp. 143-153.

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of local school authorities to release control over a significant portion of public education—almost invariably dulled the Commission's ability to achieve its expectations. Nevertheless, when a superintendent and school committee were committed to industrial education, compromises could be worked out and an industrial school established, as events in New Bedford revealed. 16 By the fall of 1908 the New Bedford School Board had reorganized and transferred its evening classes in electrical training to the Commission on Industrial Education and had formed an advisory committee of "employers, employees, practical men, members of a craft, and . . . members of labor unions" to oversee and enlarge the night school program. In mid-October Superintendent of Schools Allen P. Keith consulted Hanus and Morse about the possibility of opening a day industrial school whose independence of the School Committee would only be nominal. The Commission, in the midst of controversy and concerned about its limited success in stimulating industrial education, was obviously unwilling to rebuff potential friends. Morse responded by agreeing that a subcommittee of the New Bedford School Board could act as the new school's trustees and could appoint Keith as the school's superintendent. "There could also be no objection," Morse wrote, "to the pupils of the independent industrial school making use of the same assembly hall as that used by the pupils o f . . . the classical high school." With these assurances, New Bedford opened its day industrial education classes in September, 1909. 17 16

17

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1908, pp. 86-92; ibid., 1909, pp. 74-79; Lowell, Annual Report of the School Committee [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1907, pp. 36-38; Worcester, School Report, 1908, pp. 42-44. Morse's letter is in New Bedford, "Minutes of the School Committee," Oct. 19, 1908, MS in Office of the School Committee, New Bedford. For the events surrounding the industrial school's founding, see ibid., Nov. 4, 1907, June 15, July 1, Sept. 8, Oct. 19, Nov. 23, 1908, Feb. 17, 1910; New Bedford Standard-Times, Oct. 1, 3, 20, 1908; New Bedford, School Report, 1908, pp. 72-73. The school's operation is

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The quid pro quo worked out by Morse and the New Bedford school officials was a response by the Industrial Education Commission to the political controversies surrounding its activities. From its inception agitation over who would control public industrial schooling severely curtailed the Commission's ability to maneuver. The Douglas report had foreseen this. An autonomous commission for industrial schools would undoubtedly conflict with local school authorities and the State Board of Education, but independent industrial schools were necessary, the report declared, "because the present public school system is aimed primarily to secure cultural and not industrial or vocational effects, while the departure recommended . . . secures a development of the principles of industrial instruction . . . " Recognizing the probability of conflict, however, proved insufficient, for the new agency never overcame the hostility of either the State Board or local school officials. "From time to time, when we tried to get a community interested in founding a vocational school," Hanus later reported, " . . . we found that an agent of the state board . . . had cultivated public opinion against such a school. . ., the agent having stated in effect, that there was no need of a separate local board . . . to do what the local school committee could do with the help of the state board—the state board being an old and well-established authority." Although George Martin, Secretary of the Board of Education, insisted that he had always desired to cooperate with the Commission, Hanus had correctly pointed to his most important opponent. Martin and most of the Board's members consistently fought the division of educational authority. Favoring industrial education, the Secretary told a legislative committee, he felt that it "must be carried on side discussed in "Report of the Trustees of the N e w Bedford Industrial School," in N e w Bedford, School Report, 1909, pp. 89-93; and ibid., 1910, pp. 5-30. The school's first director, Charles R. Allen, later became a national spokesman for vocational education. See Charles A. Prosser and Charles R. Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy (New York, Century Company, 1925).

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by side with general education by the local school authorities, and as an integral part of the public school system." 18 The Commission's political problems were further complicated by the dual role state Senator Clinton Q. Richmond played as chairman of the legislative Committee on Education and member and advocate of the State Board of Education. In January, 1908, Governor Curtis Guild, Jr., a strong supporter of the Industrial Education Commission, suggested that the agency be made a permanent and autonomous department of the state's public-school system. Two separate bills to that effect were immediately introduced in the state House of Representatives and were referred to Richmond's Joint Committee on Education. Here, however, events took a marked change. Richmond, a close associate of Martin on the Board of Education, moved to limit the Commission's tenure, proposing instead of permanency a simple two-year extension of the original term. Making no criticism of industrial education and, indeed, commending its importance, Richmond contended that the state "cannot have two commanders to the educational army" and that the educational agencies should move toward union. Disclaiming any intention of hampering the Commission's work, but hostile to an independent board, Richmond asserted that the goal of a single agency charged with responsibility for the state's public system could best be approached by continuing the Commission on Industrial Education on a short-term basis.19 Richmond's proposals elicited heated protest, and in a 18

19

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, fleport, p. 23; Hanus, Adventuring, pp. 171-172; George H. Martin, "Remarks . . . Before the Legislative Committee on Education in Opposition to the Proposed Plan to Abolish the State Board of Education," Mar. 17, 1909, in Massachusetts State Library; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1907-1908, pp. 12-14. "Annual Address of the Governor," Massachusetts Senate, Documents (Boston, 1908), No. 1; ibid., No. 335; Massachusetts House of Representatives, Documents (Boston, 1908), Nos. 801, 985; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, "Hearings on Technical Education, May 15, 1908 on Senate Bill #335," pp. 51-55, typed MS in Massachusetts State Library.

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hearing on his bill in May the Commission's supporters came out strong. Executive Secretary Morse found the Richmond bill incomprehensible since no one—neither the governor nor the members of the House who had proposed making the Commission permanent—had raised the issue of a short-term extension. To enact the Richmond bill, Commission Chairman Hanus declared, would signify a withdrawal of Massachusetts' heretofore avowed commitment to industrial schooling. Cities and towns, he testified, would be even more reluctant to allocate funds once they became uncertain of additional state financing. Morse claimed that he had to visit a town "20 times before you would get a school established." "I have got to talk with all parties. I have got to appear before the town meeting on the subject, and the whole town has got to be aroused to the necessity before they will vote the money." Any limitations on the Commission's tenure, he argued, would severely undermine the prospects for vocational training. Other witnesses rejected Richmond's implication that publicschool educators—the State Board of Education or local school officials—should have control over industrial schooling. Frederick Fish, President of American Bell Telephone and a dissident member of the Board of Education, claimed that the state's superintendents of schools "did not know the first thing about industrial education" and thus could not be expected to supervise it adequately. "I have the greatest possible respect for the Board of Education . . . and there is no organization in the state that I am more proud of," Fish declared, "but like all other organizations that have lived and lived with a set type of education they simply cannot see the reading on the wall. They cannot see the necessity for this industrial education in the form which it has got to come." Industrial education, affirmed Commission member A. Lincoln Filene, had to have a board "unhampered by very much of the traditions of the past." 20 This conflict, between an educational agency—the State 20

"Hearings on Technical Education," pp. 2-3, 5, 8-9, 15-17, 20-24, 33-34, 40-43, 49-51.

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Board of Education and by extension local public-school officials—steeped in the past and a board thoroughly commited to the present and future, defined the issue for the supporters of the Commission on Industrial Education. Their perception of what was at stake was succinctly summarized by Robert Woods, who called the Commission "the most important educational new departure that has been made in the United States during the last decade." On the one side, Woods contended, were those primarily desiring that industrial education be integrated into the present educational system. The other side, "represented by those of us who are addressing you just now," was particularly concerned with relating industrial training to the state's industrial needs. We feel, Woods concluded, "that it is ten times more important that the system of industrial education should dovetail in properly with our industries than that it should dovetail in with the technical arrangements which we have for carrying on our public schools." 21 Despite this strong defense by the Commission's supporters, Richmond maneuvered his bill through the Senate and into the House where it passed after some attempts at amendment. More important, continuing public friction between the two educational agencies forced Governor Eben S. Draper, a manufacturer who actually favored separate industrial schools, to recommend in 1909 a merger of the State Board of Education and the Commission on Industrial Education. With the help of a series of compromises—reorganization of the State Board, including the appointment of a new Commissioner of Education to replace Secretary Martin, a special division of vocational education within the Board, the placing of Hanus on the reorganized Board, and a continuation of state financing of industrial schooling—the legislature voted to abolish the Commission on Industrial Education as of July 1, 1909.22 The problems confronting vocational education were not 21 22

Ibid., pp. 3, 39. Massachusetts House of Representatives, Documents, 1908, No. 1665; Massachusetts House of Representatives, Journal (Boston, 1908), pp.

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entirely political. They also involved the question of applicability : what kind of training had the most worth. The movement demanded economically relevant schools, but the achievement of that relevance in a rapidly changing economy remained uncertain. Moreover, despite assertions to the contrary, vocationalism remained tied to what were derogatorily called cultural values. Nowhere were these difficulties more evident than in the industrial training of females. By comparison, vocational instruction for males was simple: how to teach efficiently for the available job opportunities. Female education, however, also had to confront the home and the relationship of work to family life. More women, vocational educators argued, entered the job market each decade, with momentous consequences for their traditional roles. Employed in unskilled occupations, they frequently worked with men "who are of shiftless and irresponsible character'' in an environment deadening to the intellect, destructive of sensibility, and conducive to reckless moral behavior. Such conditions, Florence Marshall, founder of the Boston Trade School for Girls, claimed, threatened the American family: "What sort of homes can we expect girls to make when the years of preparation have been spent in this fashion?" 23

23

1211-1212, 1217-1218, 1241; Massachusetts Senate, Documents, 1909, No. 1, pp. 8-12, Nos. 16, 316; Massachusetts General Court, Acts and Resolves (Boston, 1908), chap. 572; ibid., 1909, chap. 457. Hearings on the merger legislation were held in March, 1909. Boston Transcript, Mar. 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 1909. See also the comments by Alvin Dodd and Charles Prosser on the role of Massachusetts businessmen in the merger activities in What Chambers of Commerce Can Do for Vocational Education (New York, National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, 1913), p. 22. Hanus later claimed that he supported the merger of the two educational agencies, but, if he did, it was undoubtedly after he recognized that the compromises would strengthen his hand at the expense of Martin. Adventuring, pp. 172-173. Florence Marshall, "The Industrial Training of Women," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Industrial Education, 23 (1909), 119-126. On the hopes that vocation and culture would not be seen as antagonists, see the remarks of Charles Warner, Principal of the Evening Trades School, Springfield, Massachusetts, in Manual Training Magazine, 8 (1907), 1 6 7 - 1 7 3 .

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To counter these conditions, Massachusetts' educators offered a number of alternatives. They suggested opposing any industrial employment of females, and they recommended training only skilled workers, thereby elevating occupational status, financial resources, and social surroundings. The former proposal, however, denied the necessity and advantages of working women. The latter was costly; few women were employed full time for more than five years, and expenditures to train them seemed wasteful. The alternative ultimately adopted by most educators recognized the legitimacy of female employment and sought training in skills, but did so only in conjunction with preparation for homemaking. The requirement that industrial training be linked to family life, however, blurred vocationalism's commitment to economic relevance. What made a better wife and mother did not necessarily lead to economic success. By so circumscribing its options, vocational education thus undermined its validity and raised questions about the economic advantages of industrial training courses.24 Dressmaking provides an excellent example. A skilled occupation, requiring some training, it offered a moderate income in an acceptable work environment and would aid the future homemaker in economizing for her family. Additionally, the trade seemed ready for the establishment of school training courses. The small shops that had offered modified apprenticeships were being replaced by larger, more factorylike establishments which seemed to be hiring only knowledgeable workers. Massachusetts' vocational educators quickly jumped at this apparent opportunity to 24

Marshall, "Industrial Training"; Arthur D. Dean, The Worker and the State (New York, 1910}, pp. 61-109; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Report, 1909, pp. 22-26; [Abbie Stoddard,] "The Study of the Vocational Trend in the Schools of Massachusetts [1915-1919]," pp. 24-32, MS in Women's Educational and Industrial Union Papers, Schlesinger Library, RadcIifFe College; National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Trade Education for Girls, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 13, pt. 1 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911).

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synthesize home and vocation. By 1914, of the 2,000 girls who had attended the state's three female trade schools, 62 percent enrolled in the dressmaking course, and the proportion was increasing. Yet this commitment had little to do with actual conditions in the dressmaking industry. Believing they could only support vocational training that contributed to home life, the advocates of dressmaking consistently overlooked changing industrial demands. Noting the unemployment and irregularity of work in this highly seasonal occupation, for example, May Allinson obtusely suggested that both could be remedied by a larger supply of more and better trained female workers. In fact, however, the female garment industry was undergoing rapid mechanization and division of labor. Expert sewers able to complete whole garments—the thrust of the trade school programs—were being replaced by machine workers, usually immigrant males, employed in clothing factories rather than dressmakers' shops. In most cities in Massachusetts the supply of dressmakers exceeded demand, and the situtation was worsening. Graduates of Worcester's Girls' Trade School found their skill almost worthless. In Boston demand for skilled workers would drop by 50 percent within ten years, one study reported, while a Boston merchant simply contended in 1915 that dressmaking had already become "a dead industry." But despite the evidence, dressmaking continued as the most prominent industrial instruction for females. 25 Dressmaking hardly encompassed the vocational edu25

May Allinson, Dressmaking as a Trade for Women in Massachusetts (New York, Columbia University, 1916), pp. 5-6, 52, 64-65, 68-69, 111, and Industrial Experience of Trade School Girls in Massachusetts (Boston, Women's Educational and Industrial Union, 1917), pp. 20-21, 195-199, 209-210; Cleo Murtland, "Report on the Factory Needle Industries of Boston," in "Prevocational" folder, North Bennet Street Industrial School Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; [Stoddard,] "Vocational Trend in Massachusetts," pp. 25-27; Women's Educational and Industrial Union, A Trade School for Girls: A Preliminary Investigation in a Typical Manufacturing City, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 17 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1913), pp. 38-44, 53-54.

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cation movement in Massachusetts. Its development, however, revealed the peculiar problems associated with work training for females and offered insights into the difficulties of vocational instruction in a rapidly changing economy. Accepting female employment as legitimate, schoolmen tried to perfect a curriculum that integrated vocational opportunity and familial responsibilities, hoping thereby to avoid the necessity for factory labor. Commitment to the home, however, prevented any true assessment of the industry. Clearest in the education of females, this search for vocations that retained ties to traditional cultural institutions—the shop and home—touched every phase of the vocational movement. Although educators talked of future industrial demands, they fostered training programs that overlooked the vast changes occurring in American industry. Building upon notions of limited vocational mobility, they neglected the new supervisory positions and service occupations that enhanced mobility. Electrical training, for example, received its greatest boost in Massachusetts from the General Electric Company's instructional program in West Lynn rather than from the schools. Expecting to make their schools economically relevant, the state's vocational educators were often tied to values outside the marketplace. Torn between these values, they developed programs accepted by many but satisfactory to few. While all agreed on the necessity for vocational schooling, its implementation remained a source of bitter controversy.26 Between 1909 and 1915 the trend toward schooling for job placement dominated Massachusetts' educational system. The reorganized State Board of Education contained a majority in favor of industrial training. A deputy commissioner of education responsible for vocational schooling was appointed, and David Snedden, one of the nation's 26

Magnus W. Alexander, "The Apprenticeship System of the General Electric Company at West Lynn, Mass.," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Industrial Education, pp. 141-150.

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leading advocates of separate industrial training classes and highly differentiated school programs, was selected as Commissioner of Education. The five day and ten evening industrial schools with enrollments of 4,700 pupils in 1909 grew, six years later, to twenty-four day and thirty-five evening programs, not including agricultural instruction, with more than 8,000 students. 27 Manual training high schools, such as those in Springfield and Boston, stopped preparing students for advanced technical schooling and turned to direct vocational training. Educators undertook extensive studies to show that trade training increased earnings, while the greater availability of state funds led some cities to establish vocational schools. Boston appointed a new superintendent of schools in 1912 whose reputation largely derived from the industrial education program he had instituted in Cincinnati. In Beverly and Fitchburg cooperative education classes, financed by the cities' businessmen, allowed children to alternate between factory work and the classroom, a scheme one writer called the "best example of what a small city can do for industrial education." Boston established, also in cooperation with local businessmen, compulsory continuation classes for working children under sixteen. Often conducted in business establishments, the continuation classes required four hours attendance weekly, with employers granting full pay for the time in school. "It is generally recognized that industrial education of the cooperative kind should be encouraged," Superintendent Franklin Dyer wrote in 1915. "It is the most economical type of industrial education, as manufacturing plants provide the equipment. It gives the boy his industrial training under actual shop conditions." 28 27

28

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport, 1907-1908, pp. 12-14, 257-265, 297-316; ibid., 1908-1909, pp. 137-153; ibid., 19091910, pp. 143-163; ibid., 1910-1911, pp. 48-65, 137-188; ibid., 19131914, pp. 105-134; ibid., 1914-1915, pp. 290-293, 300-321; Boston Transcript, May 25, June 29, 1909. [Stoddard,] "Vocational Trend," pp. 8-21, 34-36; George A. Stephens, "Influence of Trade Education upon Wages," Journal of Political Economy, 19 (1911), 17-35; Lowell, School Report, 1911, pp. 38-45.

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Although cooperative schooling never fulfilled its exponents' expectations, training for particular occupations as a responsibility of public education remained a heritage of the Douglas Commission and its successors. In calling for separate facilities for different kinds of children and for highly differentiated school programs, Massachusetts' Commissioner of Education Snedden undoubtedly shocked many who viewed the common school as an agency for the commingling of social classes and social values. Yet Snedden accurately summarized the trend in the state's educational system when he wrote in his 1914-1915 Annual Report: "That the American system of public education must so expand and diversify its organizations as to make extensive and real provision for vocational education is now a foregone conclusion among most students of this subject, whether educators, social economists or business men," 2 9 The reorientation of Massachusetts' public schools toward trade classes and shop practices was accompanied by a The Fitchburg and Beverly experiments were widely discussed. See Matthew R. McCann, "The Fitchburg Plan of Cooperative Industrial Education," U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 50 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1913); National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Part Time and Evening Schools, Bulletin No. 13, pt. 3, 1911, pp. 93-122; Dean, Worker and the State, pp. 232-246; Frank Leavitt, Examples of Industrial Education (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1912), pp. 201-222. On developments in Boston, see Boston, School Documents, 1914, No. 11, pp. 48-55, 65; ibid., 1915, No. 17, pp. 53, 7 9 - 8 2 ; Finance Commission of the City of Boston, Report on the Boston School System (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1911), pp. 55-57; Finance Commission of the City of Boston, Report of a Study of Certain Phases of the Public School System of Boston (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1916), pp. 72-126; Charles A. Prosser, A Study of the Boston Mechanics Arts High School (New York, Teachers College, 1915). See also Fall River, School Report, 1913, pp. 51-55; and Worcester, School Report, 1913, pp. 476-477. 29

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1914-1915, pp. 41-42. On Snedden, see Walter Drost, David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), passim, but especially pp. 101-143; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Reports, 1909-1915, especially 1909-1910, pp. 4 7 - 5 5 ; David Snedden, The Problem of Vocational Education (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910).

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dramatic revision in educational ideology. The advocates of manual training had been confused and ambivalent about industrial change. Believing in technological progress, they were uncertain about its social effects. Most concerned about life in the city, especially the failure of socializing institutions, they looked to curricular and pedagogical reforms to reconstitute and revivify social values. Not what skills men possessed, but how they used them and less their direct relationship to the industrial economy than their importance to moral decision making and moral behavior, these were the driving themes of manual education. Trying to balance industrial progress and social stability, manual training opted for the more adequate inculcation of social and moral values. Vocation education, however, moved away from these questions. Possessing an abiding faith in industrialization, it saw little if any conflict between technological progress and social stability. Indeed, rather than searching the past for traditional values, it glorified those most closely associated with the industrial present. But even more crucial, industrial education rejected commonality as the basis of common schooling. Whereas all children had once been expected to undergo similar learning experiences, now each child was directed toward a different function, his learning part of the specialization necessary for efficient industrial production. The school became analogous to the factory with children standing at particular points along the assembly line performing particular functions. Under the impact of vocational education, differentiated learning and separate school programs became the ideological basis of a democratic educational system. That ideology would soon force a redefinition of equality of educational opportunity. 30

30

The factory metaphor is suggested in Michael Katz, "The Emergence of Bureaucracy in Urban Education: The Boston Case, 1850-1884," History of Education Quarterly, 8 (1968), 320-321.

VII Vocationalism and Equality of Educational Opportunity The institutionalization of vocational education had momentous consequences for Massachusetts' public schools. The argument that a majority of the system's children were being neglected and the belief that academic courses and even the newer manual activities were "brain" studies and thus undemocratic became a kind of gospel among the state's educators. Calls for the categorization of students and more differentiation within the curriculum coincided with demands for the immediate applicability of knowledge. Schools were now pressed into "relevance," increasingly defined as job preparation. At the forefront of Massachusetts' educational debates emerged a sharp dichotomy between culture and vocation, between how one lived and how one worked, the boundaries of which would rarely be bridged. Convinced that urban-industrial America needed specialized workers, vocational educators demanded that learning be specialized and that different kinds of instruction be based upon different kinds of student characteristics: social and economic backgrounds and perceived desires, needs, and abilities. These broad implications were not apparent in the years immediately following the Douglas Commission. The difficulties of instituting and financing vocational programs, the weight of tradition, and the political conflict between the State Board of Education and the Commission on Industrial Education confused vocational education's most important trends. The initial stress upon secondary trade training by both the Douglas and Industrial Education Commissions implied, moreover, that, once established, vocational education would be self-generating. Once its benefits were understood, groups would accept implementation. Cities would establish industrial schools that would appeal to potential school dropouts. Employers would hire the vocationally trained at higher wages than their untrained counterparts, and would offer greater possibilities for advancement. These assumptions had severe limitations

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in practice. Cities, employers, and students were slow to respond, and educators took a second look at their initial activities. In the process, they changed Massachusetts' elementary schools, advanced the vocational guidance movement, and forged a redefinition of equality of educational opportunity. They left the public schools significantly different institutions. The dropout problem provided the major impetus to this réévaluation. Although Susan Kingsbury's investigation for the Douglas Commission found that five-sixths of Massachusetts' school dropouts never completed the elementary grades, the Commission's major proposals centered on secondary school trade programs. Assuming that thirteenand fourteen-year-olds were close to graduating and believing that children under fourteen could neither learn industrial skills nor be hired if they had, the Commission proposed vocational training for youth between fourteen and sixteen. Almost immediately, however, these proposals proved inadequate. Having established records of failure, many youths refused to continue school. Teachers and parents were given little information as a basis for choosing vocational programs. Secondary trade schooling assumed, moreover, that dropouts could afford to delay income. But even Kingsbury admitted that 25 percent left school out of economic necessity, and her survey included few poor immigrant families. At one point, indeed, she asserted, without explanation, that in one sample of 5,459 youths, 45 percent left school for financial reasons. Most educators in Massachusetts underplayed the issue of delayed income and economic need, but their reassessment of high school training programs reflected an awareness that a problem existed. 1 The most important aspect of the reanalysis in vocational education, however, lay in the recognition that many elementary school dropouts never came close to graduating. 1

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report (Boston, 1906), pp. 18-24, 30, 86, 92; "Records of a Boston School Vocational Counselor," in Meyer Bloomfield (ed.), Pleadings in Vocational Guidance (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1915), pp. 207-216.

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Of the 9,072 fourteen-year-olds who left school in the Kingsbury survey 43 percent did so before the seventh grade. In Boston about 30 percent of the school system's thirteen-year-olds were at least two years away from graduation. In Worcester, Lowell, and Fall River 37, 45, and 60 percent, respectively, of the thirteen-year-olds had not entered the seventh grade, and in these cities, as in most cities in the state, an elementary school diploma required completion of the ninth grade. Slow progress was complicated by the large proportion of older immigrant children in the lower grades. In Boston and Worcester the percentage of thirteen-year-olds in the eighth grade with foreignborn fathers was 61 and 57 percent, respectively. The percentages for the same group in the fifth grade were 71 and 63 percent. More dramatic were Lowell and Fall River where children of foreign-born fathers equaled 55 and 56 percent, respectively, in the eighth grade and 76 and 84 percent for the fifth grade. Immigrant children thus progressed through school more slowly than the children of native-born. Often they dropped out of elementary school at least three years before graduating. For these youth, trade training at the high school level was meaningless.2 Confronted by the inadequacies of their original assumptions, vocational educators turned to the elementary school. The various high school programs, wrote the editor of Manual Training Magazine, "all demand the completion of the traditional elementary school course as a pre-requisite for admission." They were thus irrelevant to the "mass of children from which the supply of skilled workers must be drafted." Vocational education had started so high up the educational ladder that it was "quite out of reach of the future industrial workers." To offset their false start, 2

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report, p. 1 0 3 ; "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911), X X X , 189, 245, 2 5 7 ; X X X I , 213, 251, 258, 267, 706, 7 1 3 ; XXXIII, 569, 618, 626. Of the eight cities in Massachusetts surveyed by the Immigration Commission, seven had nine-year elementary schools, exclusive of kindergartens.

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educators turned to prevocationalism and vocational guidance, further emphasizing differentiation and categorization as the raison d'etre of the schools.3 Whatever their dissatisfactions with the elementary schools, most nineteenth-century innovators had demanded continued recognition of common educational goals. Legislation concerning compulsory attendance defined the chronological limits of those demands; where state coercion was applied to school attendance, children should be taught a common syllabus under common conditions. The essentials of citizenship and morality, the creation of homogeneity where heterogeneity existed, and the fundamentals of communication and thought had been the goals of public schooling. The separation of educational aims and pupils as had occurred with the mill and factory schools of the 1870's had almost invariably been rejected. Manual training had tested but not overthrown these ideals of shared learning, and indeed most manual educators would have been horrified at the association of their program with separation in education. While trade schools had pushed segregated schooling and course differentiation further than ever before, they had addressed those outside the limits of compulsory education, providing in theory and practice an alternative to those who legally could leave school. Elementary schooling for children under the compulsory attendance laws had been modified by manual activities, and separate classes for physical defectives and non-English-speaking students had become an acknowledged feature of public education. But differentiation among pupils and their categorization by abilities and career goals had neither been significant nor altered the ideals of common school education. Prevocational schooling in Massachusetts during the decade before World War I, however, would provide an 3

Manual Training Magazine, 10 (1908), 1 6 5 ; Frank M. Leavitt and Edith Brown, Prevocational Education in the Public Schools (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), p. 20.

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alternative to those ideals and powerfully influence their revision. Rejecting specific trade training, prevocational educators hoped to revise the last two or three years of the elementary school to allow more flexibility and choice for children for whom the literary curriculum had ceased to be meaningful. Directed at the upper elementary grades, prevocational schooling hoped to "lay a better foundation for vocational courses than is commonly laid by the regular school work." It claimed that the value of book learning derived solely from industrial and vocational needs; mathematics and reading were valuable only as they helped the prospective plumber, carpenter, or factory worker practice his skill. These demands, however, were not the most dramatic alterations in elementary schooling required by prevocational education. Similar ones had previously modified the curriculum for manual training. The significance of prevocationalism lay in its call for the early categorization of pupils. There existed a "prevocational type" consisting of the "concrete-minded," "seriously retarded," "anti-book," "physically active," and "individualistic," for whom existing schools were meaningless. Having fallen behind their normal grade levels, these children reached the minimum age of compulsory attendance years before they had any prospects of graduating. Found "stranded or progressing but slowly in the upper elementary grades," they could no longer apply themselves and "resisted the attempts of others to drive them to the lifeless task of reading and memorizing a mass of literary material which some one else assures them will do them great ultimate good, but which, so far as they can see, is unrelated to anything in their own past, present, or to come." Nearing the age at which they could and would leave school to enter the job market, they needed prevocational instruction.4 4

Leavitt and Brown, Prevocational Education, pp. 2-5, 8-10, 21-23, 38-39, 73-78. The word "retardation" was commonly used after 1903 to denote children whose age was beyond their grade level. Thus

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By teaching the basics of industrial trades, prevocational educators hoped to provide working-class children with two options heretofore missing in the elementary schools. Children would be exposed to economically relevant learning before they could leave school. Once they were introduced, the advantages of continued schooling would become obvious, but if they did not, the students would have had at least some exposure to job skills. Unlike the vocational training recommendations of the Douglas Commission, these possibilities—the stimulation of continued schooling or basic skills for immediate job earnings—depended upon the coercive powers of the state to institute differentiated education: as long as society required these children to attend school, it was under an obligation to provide an education explicitly directed to their occupational futures. As had occurred so often in Massachusetts, Boston took the initial steps. In May, 1907, the School Committee authorized the Superintendent of Schools "to designate one or more boys' elementary schools in which the course of study may be experimentally modified for the purpose of determining in what way these schools may become more effective in training pupils for industrial pursuits, while at the same time maintaining their efficiency for preparation for high schools." Fifty boys from the incoming sixth grade of the Agassiz School in Jamaica Plain—the highest proportion of dropouts occurred between the sixth and seventh grades—subsequently enrolled in the prevocational class in September, in a program especially suited "for boys who thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in the third and fourth grades were considered "retarded," without any reference to their mental abilities. Children w h o had been sick, those w h o were delayed in entering school, the non-English-speaking who needed elementary schoolwork, and numerous other such categories could be so classified. The word received national publicity in 1909 with the publication of Leonard Ayres's Laggards in Our Schools (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1909), and again in 1911 w h e n the U. S. Immigration Commission used it to equate slowness in completing school with the number of immigrant children in school. U.S. Immigration Commission, "Children of Immigrants in the Schools."

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have aptitude for industrial pursuits." The prevocational class was, in many respects, only mildly innovative. The industrial work involved cardboard box making, an extension of the manual training activities in cardboard construction of the fourth and fifth grades, taught for an hour daily and only after parental permission was granted. But the prevocational class was significant for the principles that underlay it. "Everything must conform as closely as possible to actual industrial work in real life. The product must be not only useful, but must be needed, and must be put to actual use." Products and production methods, moreover, "must be subjected to the same commercial tests, as far as possible, as apply to actual industry." To assure conformity to industrial production, the boxes replaced those formerly bought by the School Department from commercial sources. To prove the validity of specialization and "the greater economy of employing 'industrial methods,' " each student made one entire box and then participated in construction as a specialized worker: cutter, paster, gluer, assemblyman, inspector, counter.5 A second prevocational center soon opened in the North End at the North Bennet Street Industrial School. As it had with manual training, the Boston School Committee agreed to release students to the School for special instruction at no cost to the public. The experiment began in September, 1907, in cooperation with the nearby Hancock Grammar, a school for girls almost exclusively composed of immigrant children, few of whom graduated. Fifty girls between age thirteen and fourteen from the sixth and seventh grades were divided into two classes with each alternating their academic and industrial work between the Hancock School and North Bennet Street in the ratio of two hours to one hour, respectively. Trying to mediate between vocational 6

Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1908, No. 7, pp. 48-53. This experiment, as well as those in other American cities, is discussed in Frank M. Leavitt, Examples of Industrial Education (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1912), pp. 95-128.

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needs and preparation for home management, the prevocational classes—sewing, cooking, laundry, housekeeping, and personal hygiene—resembled existing manual training activities, though they were offered more frequently (two hours daily) and at more advanced levels and were more explicitly concerned with occupational preparation. The classes, North Bennet Street's director believed, were a major success. The girls had "gained an insight into and a liking for real work, and acquired some specific and useful knowledge of the subjects taught and formed ambition for a higher grade of work and of living after school." They had achieved proficiency in their academic subjects equal to or greater than expected, had attained a "greater sense of obligation, of responsibility, of justice, and of honest work, together with habits of industry and thrift," and had developed "better poise, and more tidy habits." 6 More revealing of the pressures prevocationalism was placing on the elementary schools, however, was the decision by North Bennet Street in 1910 to request the transfer of academic work to the Industrial School so that all instruction would revolve around the industrial demands of the course. The "special industrial class for girls," the director wrote, makes "better provision for the vocational needs of children who will probably leave school early to enter upon industrial and domestic pursuits." To this end, the pupils were given industrial instruction, but their academic program, "taught in the regular public school by a teacher not directly associated with the industrial work," was not being integrated with the girls' vocational needs. "Industrial training as a subject alone is not right. It leaves the academic work unrelated and uninterpreted. The saving of time which might be effected by close correlation is not 6

Boston, School Documents, 1908, No. 7, pp. 53-54; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report of the Director, 1909, pp. 17-21, 3 8 - 3 9 ; North Bennet Street Industrial School, "Report of the Director on the Industrial Work of the Special Class from the Hancock School," pp. 1-9, MS in North Bennet Street Industrial School Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

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secured for the child." Only by transferring the academic instruction could "a system of close correlation of all academic subjects with the industrial" be secured "so that one will interpret the other, and the pupils . . . be stimulated to intense interest and effort by the evidence thus offered them that all the work has a real value for later life." Finding the economic arrangement to its satisfaction, and intent upon restructuring its elementary schools to offer industrially efficient education, the Boston School Committee readily accepted the North Bennet Street proposal.7 The complete integration of academic and industrial instruction for prevocational girls at the North Bennet Street School paralleled a similar move a year earlier, when boys from the Eliot School, also almost entirely immigrant children who failed to graduate, started attending North Bennet Street on a full-time basis. Like the transfer of females, the Eliot program was justified financially— allowing industrial schooling in the immigrant North End without expense to the public—and as part of the Boston School Board's commitment to reshape academic instruction to the vocational needs of elementary school children. In this sense, the fact that the integration of academic and industrial in the North End occurred at the North Bennet Street School rather than in a public-school building was considerably less significant than the decision by Boston school officials to establish industrially oriented courses for some elementary school children.8 By 1910 prevocational centers affecting seven Boston elementary schools had been established, with the industrial work—now expanded to include furniture making, sheet metal production, machine work, and printing—increasing as a proportion of academic instruction. Whereas the Agassiz 7 8

North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1910, pp. 21-24. Letters from Director, North Bennet Street Industrial School, to Stratton D. Brooks, Superintendent of Schools, and other Boston school officials, Apr. 22, 1909, May 29, 1911, in "Prevocational" folder. North Bennet Street Industrial School Papers; North Bennet Street Industrial School, Annual Report, 1910, pp. 19-21; ibid., 1911, pp. 22-31; ibid., 1912, pp. 21-26.

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experiment began with five hours a week devoted to industrial practices, children attending a pre vocational center that opened in 1909 spent between twelve and thirteen hours in shop and mechanical drawing, half the available class time and five times the amount spent on those subjects by the regular elementary pupils in the same school. Five years later prevocational education for girls existed in nineteen elementary schools, for boys in eight prevocational centers, some drawing students from several school districts. Intensive shop courses for selected elementary school students had also either appeared or were in the process of implementation in other Massachusetts communities: Cambridge, Beverly, Springfield, and Worcester.9 More important than specific programs, by 1915 the ideology underlying prevocationalism had begun to pervade the state's system of public education. Elementary school children who were "retarded academically," "practical-minded," or came from socioeconomic backgrounds that made continued schooling unlikely now had a separate category. These children, Boston's Superintendent of Schools Franklin Dyer defensively wrote, "are neither defective nor less capable than ordinary children." "They are simply different . . . They are the children who learn best by doing things." Yet it was also clear that the distinctions between motor skills, academic retardation, and social class background were becoming confused. In some schools prevocational courses were regarded as "adapted only to the mentally inferior"; in others they conveyed the "idea of direct prep9

Boston, School Documents, 1910, No. 10, pp. 56-78; ibid., 1914, No. 11, pp. 42-45, 147-154, 178-184; ibid., 1915, No. 17, pp. 1 0 - 1 1 ; Cambridge, Annual fleport of the School Committee and Superintendent of Schools [hereafter reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School Report], 1913, pp. 1 8 - 2 0 ; Beverly, School Report, 1915, pp. 1 4 - 1 6 ; Springfield, School fleport, 1913, p. 41; ibid., 1914, p. 23; Worcester, School Report, 1912, p. 29; ibid., 1913, pp. 72-73; [Abbie Stoddard,] "The Study of the Vocational Trend in the Schools of Massachusetts [1915-1916]," pp. 37-42, MS in Women's Educational and Industrial Union Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. For a dissenting view about the trend toward prevocationalism, see New Bedford, School fleport, 1914, pp. 36-37.

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aration for life." The economic condition of a student's home became an acceptable basis for course differentiation. Indeed, by the mid-1920's, t w o leading advocates of vocational education, both former educators in Massachusetts, criticized prevocational education for depending too extensively on poverty as a criterion for placement. Prevocational schooling had become a euphemism for social class differentiation in the elementary schools. 10 Differentiated schooling and segregated classes were not created by the prevocational movement; nor were they limited to the "motor-minded" and "practical-oriented." By the second decade of the twentieth century Massachusetts' cities had already established separate elementary classes for the physically and mentally handicapped, the non-English-speaking, and the particularly bright student. Prevocationalism, however, gave powerful impetus to the categorization movement within the common schools by helping rework the definition of a democratic education. "It is hoped, that the [prevocational] experiment," Boston's Stratton D. Brooks declared, "may demonstrate that the place to begin industrial training is the public schools, and that in this way only can our schools be made truly democratic." "Until very recently," Brooks continued, "they have offered equal opportunity for all to receive one kind of education, but what will make them democratic is to provide opportunity for all to receive such education as will fit them equally well for their particular life work." Democracy worked by separating school failures from the other schoolchildren and providing them with a special kind of instruction suitable for their limited futures. 10

Leavitt and Brown, Prevocational Education, p. 45; Boston, School Documents, 1913, No. 10, pp. 49, 75-76; [Stoddard,] "Vocational Trend in Massachusetts," pp. 37-38; Women's Educational and Industrial Union, A Trade School for Girls: A Preliminary Investigation in a Typical Manufacturing City, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 17 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1913), p. 22; Worcester, School Report, 1911, p. 83; Charles A. Prosser and Charles R. Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy (New York, Century Company, 1925), p. 144.

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By World War I these themes were becoming embedded in the structure of Massachusetts' educational system as schoolmen became committed to the ideology of categorization and separation.11 The commitments Massachusetts' educators were making to job training and prevocational instruction raised questions about educational decision making and vocational congruence. How could the manually motivated and the potential school dropout be placed in industrial training programs? What vocational training was most suitable? Who would make such decisions? What alternatives existed? Most Massachusetts vocational schoolmen tried to answer these questions. They stressed the importance of fitting school activities to occupational opportunities, noted that educational choices had consequences for mobility and social efficiency, and recognized that formalizing these choices would significantly alter public schooling. Yet most educators initially overlooked the necessity to structure educational decisions and were slow to support the vocational guidance movement. But guidance did emerge before 1915, and its development in Boston as an aid to categorization suggested its future role in Massachusetts' educational system. "The most important immediate effort of the movement for industrial education," Boston's Superintendent of Schools Brooks declared in 1910, "has been to move forward suddenly the time of choice, and it is this necessity to choose early a definite career that renders desirable a consideration of vocational direction." With schools preparing pupils for particular occupations, and occupations themselves becoming more specialized, a faulty educational decision could severely handicap an individual. Advising a boy to take an industrial training course, Brooks contended, restricted him more than a nonvocational program and was thus "a matter requiring much graver considera11

Boston, School Documents, 1908, No. 7, p. 5 3 ; ibid., 1912, No. 10, pp. 1 0 7 - 1 0 9 ; ibid., 1914, No. 11, pp. 4 2 - 4 3 .

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tion" than heretofore acknowledged. People needed more reliable information "showing what vocations are open to children, what conditions prevail in each, and what the rewards of success may be." Through guidance, schools would be brought "closer to the people and what the people need," while youth would be stimulated to what Harvard University's President Charles W. Eliot called "a life-career motive."12 By 1910 Boston had already committed itself to vocational guidance in the public schools, one of the first major American cities to do so. The initiative came from philanthropy: Civic Service House, a social settlement for immigrants in the city's North End. Founded in 1901 by Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw, the settlement pioneered in adult citizenship and Americanization activities under the direction of Meyer Bloomfield, an immigrant who had grown up on New York's Lower East Side before attending Harvard University. In 1908, under the prodding of Bloomfield and Frank Parsons, a leading Boston social reformer and cofounder of the Breadwinner's College for workingmen, Mrs. Shaw agreed to finance a vocational information bureau as a department of Civic Service House. Opened in April, 1908, under Parsons' direction, the Vocation Bureau offered advice to a varied clientele: college students and graduates, young businessmen, and especially high school pupils and working children of high school age. Branches at the Young Men's Christian Association and the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, both of which offered vocational training courses, extended the Bureau's early influence in its attempts to establish a basis for more fruitful career choices.13 12

13

Stratton D. Brooks, "Vocational Guidance in Boston Schools," in Bloomfield (ed.), Readings, pp. 83-86; Boston, School Documents, 1911, No. 14, p. 34; Charles W. Eliot, "Life Career Motive in Education," in Bloomfield (ed.), Readings, pp. 1-12. Brooks, "Vocational Guidance," pp. 86-91; Pauline Agassiz Shaw, Tributes Paid to Her Memory (Boston, McGrath-Sherrill Press, 1917), pp. 78-80; Meyer Bloomfield, The Vocational Guidance of Youth (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), pp. 29-30; Frank Parsons,

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Parsons took as his guiding motto "Light, Information, Inspiration, Cooperation," but his primary concern lay in erecting a scientific methodology for vocational decision making. Choosing a vocation, he argued, should be done "in a careful scientific way, with due regard to . . . aptitudes, abilities, ambitions, resources, and limitations, and the relations of these elements to the conditions of success in different industries." While the Bureau offered information on specific jobs, counseled clients on improving manners, appearance, intellectual ability, and citizenship, and tried to persuade employers of the benefits in hiring those it screened, its most important innovation, Parsons believed, was its elaborate program for collecting data: job rating schemes, measures of efficiency and success, statistical analyses of job earnings, and charts showing the geographic distribution of vocational opportunities. The Bureau, Parsons wrote, was dedicated to the "business of perfecting the human machinery," and he hoped to provide it "with every facility that science can devise for the testing of the senses and capacities, and the whole physical, intellectual, and emotional make-up of the child, and with experts trained as carefully for the work as men are trained today for medicine and the law." 14 Parsons never saw his expectations implemented. Within a year of the Bureau's establishment, he died, penniless and overworked. But even then the Bureau was becoming a significant force in Boston's educational system and a major

14

Choosing a Vocation (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), pp. 91-92. On the Vocation Bureau within the perspective of the vocational guidance movement, see John M. Brewer, The Vocational Guidance Movement (New York, Macmillan Company, 1919), pp. 2 2 32. The Bureau's relationship to Boston's social settlements is discussed in Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 52-54. Parsons, Choosing a Vocation, pp. 3-4, 92, 96-100, 160, 165. On Parsons as a social reformer, see Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 126-144. See also Howard V. Davis, Frank Parsons (Carbondale, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1969).

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influence in the vocational guidance movement throughout the country. Using its close ties with Boston's philanthropic and educational establishment, the Bureau instituted a working agreement with the Boston School Committee in 1909-1910 to provide a full-time vocational counselor for the city's public schools. In cooperation with a newly appointed Committee on Vocational Direction, its workers offered training courses for select teachers and headmasters, held open meetings with parents and teachers, and gave vocational guidance lectures in most elementary schools, "including all the schools in the more congested parts of the city." High school and elementary school counselors were appointed, vocational libraries begun, and vocational aptitude ratings substituted for random selection or selection by academic achievement as the basis for entry into Boston's high schools of Commerce and Practical Arts. Finding that most teachers "generally have little acquaintance with industrial conditions," and therefore could rarely "tell a boy how to get into a trade, or what the opportunities therein are," the Bureau and the Committee on Vocational Direction also centered much of their attention on the city's teaching staff, seeking to convince them of the importance of guidance. 15 The Vocation Bureau owed much of this success to its second director, Meyer Bloomfield. Under Bloomfield the Bureau became a national center for information on vocational education and job opportunities. It undertook research on business conditions and advised Massachusetts' industrial and educational leaders. In 1910, with the joint participation of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, it held a national conference on vocational guidance. 16 Yet for all 15

16

Bloomfield, Vocational Guidance, pp. 31-41; Boston, School Documents, 1910, No. 10, pp. 111-116, 147-151. Meyer Bloomfield, Youth, School, and Vocation (Boston, 1915), pp. 39-49, 65-83, 217-220; Bloomfield (ed.), Headings, pp. 515-541. On the Vocation Bureau's national influence, see Beverly Wolf and Ruth B. Barry, "History of the Guidance-Personnel Movement in Education," unpub. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1955, pp. 38-50.

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the Bureau's activities, a peculiar discrepancy developed between the practice of vocational guidance and the ideology of guidance expounded by its director. Vocational guidance stressed vocational information and placement. Its major question was how the child could best be fitted to the job. Bloomfield, however, emphasized social reform: how can vocational information be used to change industrial behavior and assure equality of opportunity? Bloomfield constantly tried to balance efficient counseling—bringing together individual and job—with recommendations aimed at larger reforms. But his attempts failed ; counseling did not become a wedge for social reform. His failures revealed, however, much about the emerging shape of public education in Massachusetts. Having come to vocational guidance from a background of social work with Boston's immigrant population and closely associated with many of the city's social reformers, Bloomfield believed in social change through enhanced educational opportunities. Arguing that industrialization made choice more difficult and that specialization made each choice more important, he hoped to offer individuals more information, while using that knowledge as a lever to change institutions, especially those dealing with the urban slum dweller. "It is in our centres of population, in the apartment and tenement house districts, that the masses of children are to be found." "Here," Bloomfield wrote, "is the most need for unfolding the panorama of occupations to the quick intelligence of the young people." Forced to carry heavy work loads and often ignorant of conditions in America, slum parents could not establish effective and guiding familial relationships. They sent their children to excessively crowded schools. They lived among "the unskilled, the poorly paid, the unemployed, and the misemployed." A place of "high lights and deep shadows," where "life opens unpromisingly," the slum allowed thousands of children to "drift aimlessly through school, through work, and through life." These children, Bloomfield argued, were demoralized by their lack of opportunity and by the social

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chaos around them. "Pleas for interest in work, loyalty, esprit de corps, training, and efficiency fall on barren ground." Products of this "vocational anarchy," the children became society's "unemployables." "We have no plan for conserving the talents of the poor; no plan for conserving the resources of the immigrant." To reverse that condition, Bloomfield called for programs that would improve each child's "start in life." 17 Initially committed to private philanthropy—as a youth, he received aid from the University Settlement in New York City—Bloomfield had become increasingly dissatisfied with the public's use of philanthropy to avoid its social problems. By pressing for a commitment by the public schools to relate "life and livelihood," he hoped to awaken the community to its responsibilities. Too many, Bloomfield wrote, still see employment as "a private concern of the individual, and the employment bargain and all that follows it as nothing more than the personal affair of the bargaining parties." But the public was coming to recognize the need to protect its young; child labor laws, work certificates, health and factory inspection, vocational education, and licensing requirements for employment agencies attested to that. Now, he argued, it should enlarge the school's role in social improvement. "Work and school," he wrote, "cannot be safely kept apart in a democracy. Each has a vital meaning to the other, and they must share in common the burden of conserving the coming generation for its best achievements." As an "educational institution with social aims," the school could undertake investigations of industries and expose those conditions harmful to the young. Educators could demand that employers "cooperate in what might be called the health guidance of the workers" and press for shorter workdays. Although those involved in guidance had to understand the world as it existed, Bloomfield argued, their work had to be illuminated by an ideal 17

Bloomfield, Vocational Guidance, pp. 1-3, 7-8, 12-20; Bloomfield (ed.), Readings, p. vi; "Meyer Bloomfield," Dictionary of American Biography, XXIII, 45-46.

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of what conditions ought to be. 18 Yet, though Bloomfield called upon schools to expand their social responsibilities, he never developed a consistent philosophy of reform through guidance. While he believed counseling included supervision of the work process and the exposure of inadequate conditions, he seemed to place as much hope in a simple rationalization of job choices. "There is much to be said in favor of a labor exchange . . . It is certain social waste to leave the labor market unorganized." Bloomfield recognized, moreover, that broad reform had to await educators' acceptance of the more limited possibilities of advice on curriculum and job choices. But while he accepted the pragmatics of educational change, Bloomfield continued to articulate larger social goals. Believing that critical career choices should not be made too early, he recommended an increase in compulsory education to age fifteen or sixteen and proposed that economic assistance be given to those needing it. Determined to eliminate chance and false expectations from educational and vocational decision making, he still warned against an excessively ready categorization of individuals, "of forcing vocational decisions upon children; of naively adjusting human 'pegs' to 'holes'; or of narrowing the range of service open to the fit." Arguing that society would continue to need unskilled and partially skilled labor and rejecting the "uncritical individualism of an age that is gone," Bloomfield believed nonetheless that early guidance would enhance social mobility by opening up the full options of continued schooling. The slum child did not have to be wasted, his particular abilities could be discovered and fostered. Believing this, Bloomfield demanded that schools accept their responsibility to assure each child an adequate "start in life." 19 18

19

Bloomfield, "School and the Start in Life," in Bloomfield (ed.}, Headings, pp. 324, 711-719; Bloomfield, Vocational Guidance, pp. 22-24, 47-64, 72, 100, 114-116; Bloomfield, Youth, School, and Vocation, pp. 24-26, 151. Bloomfield, Youth, School, and Vocation, pp. 49, 57-59, 149-151, 1 5 8 170; Bloomfield (ed.), Readings, p. v; Bloomfield, Vocational Guidance, pp. 102-103, 109-110.

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Although Bloomfield played an important role in establishing vocational guidance in Boston, his broad vision never received more than passing mention. As guidance moved from the philanthropically based Civic Service House into the public schools, its primary concern became placement in particular educational tracks. "The problem of vocational guidance in the elementary schools," wrote Franklin Dyer, Superintendent of Schools in Boston in 1915, "is gradually resolving itself into the choice of the proper high schools for the student to attend." The school system's new Department of Vocational Guidance helped parents choose among the differentiated course offerings of the seventh and eighth grades and between the prevocational and academic curriculum as the basis for job placement or advancement into the more specialized high schools. Guidance in the high schools became a way of convincing children to remain in school or of advising them on the best subjects to prepare for work. Although Bloomfield had cautioned against placing too much faith in psychological testing as a means of determining aptitudes and interests, Boston established a Department of Educational Investigation and Measurement in 1913 to test the "establishment of standards of achievement on the part of children and teachers that would form definite ideals of accomplishment in different subjects and grades." Educational testing—the categorization of students and teachers, the establishment of standards, varied to meet the economic and social backgrounds of youth, and the objective measurement of results —was in the process of being substituted for the social reform of industrial life that Bloomfield had sought to make the ideal of vocational guidance.20 20

Boston, School Documents, 1915, No. 17, pp. 14-15, 28-29, 37-42; ibid., 1911, No. 14, pp. 32-50; ibid., 1913, No. 10, pp. 29-32; Frank W. Ballou, "Educational Standards and Educational Measurement," ibid., 1914, No. 10; Bloomfield, Vocational Guidance, p. 94. An excellent example of the trend emerging in vocational guidance toward the categorization of students through educational measurement and testing, usually to distinguish prevocational or manual students from academic students, can be found in a joint arrangement worked out

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By 1915 the prevocational and vocational guidance movements were spreading to other parts of Massachusetts. The former had established the concept of differentiated schooling for children under the compulsory education laws. Vocational guidance, which had initially sought to rationalize educational and career choices, was rapidly losing its commitment to the broader goals of social and industrial reform and was merging with psychological testing and intelligence measurement to categorize students as its predominant concern. Counseling was becoming a means of determining aptitudes and capabilities, a way of objectively identifying children who were "manually motivated," and thus belonged in courses preparatory to industrial labor. Although the institutionalization of these trends remained incomplete before World War I, even in Boston the tendencies had become clear. In addition, there emerged an ideology associated with vocationalism that sought to redefine the goals of schooling in terms of equality of educational opportunity and efficient social service.21 Defined in terms of providing service to society, vocational education meant the school training of efficient industrial workers. By teaching precision in manual work, knowledge of industrial processes, and particular job skills, all summarized as "job intelligence," vocational schooling seemed a peculiarly well-suited adaptation of the school to the needs of a modern industrial society. Educational differentiation and vocational guidance were means of increasing the productivity of future industrial workers by ascertaining who they were and by separating and placing them in school programs and job possibilities in which they appeared most likely to succeed. Vocationalism called for

21

between the North Bennet Street Industrial School and the Somerville, Massachusetts, public-school system. Expanding upon work started before World War I, the former conducted a series of psychological and aptitude tests in the Somerville schools between 1919 and 1922 in order to differentiate "mind workers" from "hand workers." See the "Vocational Guidance" and "Psychological Testing" folders in the North Bennet Street Industrial School's Papers. Boston, School Documents, 1915, No. 17, pp. 28-29, 37-38, 84-118.

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specialization in a society seeming to demand particular skills. For the school as an institution, the categorization of students, the separation of educational programs outside of and within individual schools, and the measurement of input through aptitude tests and output by job and higher educational placement made the processes of organization and structure—how administration could most effectively occur—the dominant concern of school officials. A smoothly functioning educational plant meant more clearly defined goals, increased productivity, and a more efficient institution. Vocational education, by seeking to integrate its products with the apparent demands of the economy, helped make immediate service a primary goal of public education.22 The industrial education movement also sought to democratize the schools by bringing into them the poor, the immigrant, the "manually" motivated, and the dropout who had hitherto been outsiders. By making vocational preparation—now defined to include manual occupations—and the economic welfare of the individual primary goals of public schooling, industrial education helped revise traditional notions of intelligence and educational aptitude and called upon the school to respond to individual needs. "It is this fair dealing with all kinds of work and talent that the new democratic spirit in education invokes," wrote Henry Suzzalo of Columbia Teachers College. The recognition of differences among children, Boston's Superintendent of Schools declared in 1910, had greatly modified American education. To promote "the welfare of each individual pupil," educators had to "determine what differences exist and in what way the educational machinery needs to be modified . . ." Flexible systems of promotion had to be instituted and standards of discipline revised. "Because children differ in vocational aim," Superintendent Brooks continued, "the schools are now being reorganized for the purpose of pro22

On industrial efficiency as an aspect of vocational education, see Prosser and Allen, Vocational Education, pp. 19-45, 368-381. See also Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 273-283.

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viding an education for each child that will best fit him for his future position in life." Industrial education and vocational guidance were both part of that movement. 23 Vocationalism thus articulated a new definition of democracy in education. Differentiated schooling and the categorization of students replaced the common learning environment. Equality of educational opportunity meant that individuals starting at different levels would end their school careers at different levels, the quality of their education determined by the effectiveness with which beginning and end were fitted together. "It is popularly held that 'all men are created free and equal,' " declared one supporter of Boston's Vocation Bureau. "They are free in this country, and equal in the sight of God, but so far as likes and dislikes, aptitudes and limitations, powers and weaknesses are concerned, there are not two individuals alike." American education had too frequently overlooked this. "Our entire educational system has . . . been established and built up on the basis that these unlike persons could be dealt with in large numbers throughout the greater part of their school career, and only be segregated into small sections, when well advanced in their educational life." Vocationalism rejected that notion; instead, it assumed that "persons are not alike, and that each has his own peculiarities which should be studied and an effort made to discover that line of human endeavor in which each may most reasonably hope to succeed." 24 While the ideology of equality of educational opportunity demanded responsiveness to individual needs, in practice it stressed categorization and limited educational achievement. Arguing for a democratic educational system two years before he became Massachusetts' Commissioner of Education, David Snedden declared that the state would provide equal opportunities to all "within their personal and social capacity" and that "equality of opportunity can only be secured by recognition of differences which theo23

24

Suzzalo's introduction to Bloomfield, Youth, School, and Vocation, pp. vii-xi; Boston, School Documents, 1910, No. 10, pp. 5-6. "Choosing a Career," Boston Common, July 16, 1910, p. 19.

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retically individual, may nevertheless, for practical purposes, be regarded as characterizing distinguishable groups of children." These groups, Snedden continued, should be based upon "(a) native capacity, including strong interests and tastes; (b) economic conditions of the family and its capacity to support the child during the period of its higher education; and (c) probable educational [vocational] destination." Although Snedden was an extreme advocate of differentiated schooling, his ready association of industrial education with children who failed in school and who had little alternative to leaving school for industrial employment soon came to pervade educational thought. Critiques of fantasy in education, the lack of realism among the poor and working class—a keynote in the origins of the Vocation Bureau—the chastisement of manual laborers for looking wistfully to the professions as a possibility for their children, these became the terms upon which discussions of equality of educational opportunity were built. A note of predetermination increasingly entered the rhetoric and practices of Massachusetts' schoolmen. Those destined for industrial employment came from backgrounds of such employment. Differentiated education, wrote Joseph Lee of the Boston School Committee in 1910, assured the taking of "different roads that different temperaments must follow to reach their social destiny." The feeling that particular kinds of children belonged in particular school programs and the association of those categories with social background and probable future destinations became, above all else, the legacy of vocational education. 25 25

David Snedden, "Differences among Varying Groups of Children Should Be Recognized and the Period at Which This Recognition Takes Place May Rationally Constitute the Beginnings of Secondary Education," Manual Training Magazine, 10 (1908), 1 - 2 ; Joseph Lee, "The School Situation," Boston Common, May 14, 1910, p. 17; Boston, School Documents, 1912, No. 10, p. 83; Brewer, Vocational Guidance Movement, p. 105. On Snedden's commitment to separate schooling for different categories of children, see Walter Drost, David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 158, 165-166, 168, 182-190, 196-198; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board, 1914-1915, pp. 36-38, 42-44.

VIII The Quest for Citizenship "It is evident that there is a revival of an earnest spirit of patriotic Americanism throughout the land," reported the National Education Association in 1892. "It is the result of various causes. Foremost among these is the work so wisely carried out by patriotic schoolmasters. Nowhere is the new spirit of Americanism more active than in our public schools." In a time of patriotic fervor, Francis Bellamy, editor of Youth's Companion, reiterated the same theme, that the teacher "holds the future of American politics." The sentiments were hardly novel. Thomas Jefferson had earlier called upon the common school to solidify the American experiment in representative government. In mid-nineteenthcentury Massachusetts, Horace Mann had articulated an elaborate rationale for public support, arguing that schools created a sense of community among the citizenry and between the generations. By the end of the century the tie between democracy and a common education had become an article of faith, marred, but paradoxically also strengthened, only by the specter of parochialism and privatism among the alien and affluent. Boston's Superintendent of Schools Edwin Seaver told a National Education Association audience in 1898 that every child's right to an education was based upon community needs. "The child is soon to become a free citizen of a free state. He is to be a sovereign; and much will depend on his being intelligent and honest." His educational rights, Seaver argued, have therefore "been embodied in the fundamental laws of our states as part of that security for free men and free institutions which those laws are designed to give." The public schools were "the most American of all American institutions," the "salvation of the American republic."1 1

National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses (Washington, D.C., 1892), p. 23; Francis Bellamy, "Americanism in the Public Schools," ibid., pp. 61-67; Edwin P. Seaver, "Democracy and Education," ibid., 1898, p. 250; H. M. James, ibid., 1886, pp. 529531; E. O. Vaille, "Teaching Current Events in School," ibid., 1892, p. 142. On the ideological relationship between public education and democracy, see Rush Welter, Public Education and democratic Thought in America (New York, Columbia University Press, 1962).

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Although the rhetoric of late nineteenth-century American education drew upon pre-Civil War commitments, it did so from a dramatically altered perspective. The legitimacy of public schooling was now an accepted fact. Sanctified by compulsory attendance legislation and a growing faith in the power of formal educational institutions to shape morality, the public school—criticized for its archaic methods and irrelevant curriculum, bending under its expanding responsibilities, inadequately financed, and threatened by political conflict—stood, nonetheless, as a central agency through which the community expressed its will. Whereas parents and children had once chosen attendance or nonattendance, now they decided upon what kind of a school to attend and for how long. By the end of the nineteenth century, all educational conflict—curriculum reform versus traditionalism, parochial versus public, vocational versus academic—took for granted the legitimacy and the permanence of public education. 2 Early reformers had called upon the schools to resolve social problems through the inculcation of common moral values and basic intellectual skills. Ambivalent about the relationship between the school and the social environment, they remained optimistic that the school would build upon the values initiated in the family and community outside. Hostile environments, in the city and among immigrant newcomers, were regarded as temporary and subject to alteration. The mixing of children together in a classroom, providing them with the fundamentals of literacy and morality, would assure the homogeneity and cohesion necessary for the functioning of a democratic society.3 2

3

For suggestive comments on the relationship between the commitment to formal and compulsory education institutions and alternatives to the public schools, see Robert D. Cross, "Origins of Catholic Parochial Schools in America," American Benedictine Review, 16 (1965), 194-209. Lawrence Cremin, The American Common School: An Historic Conception (New York, Teachers College Press, 1951); but see also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968).

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In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, fears about the social environment dominated American educational debates. Schools seemed to exist in a society continually threatened by social sin. Public infidelity, labor agitation, conspicuous consumption, slum living, and Roman Catholic separatism were products of heightened technological and social change. In most cities ethnic communities seemed to threaten the homogeneity of values and behavior patterns that was the raison d'être of public education. No longer able to depend on the external environment for the inculcation of morality and committed to the state as the basis of civilization, American schoolmen began to rework their definitions of citizenship, moving from a faith in literacy and broad moral values to an explicit teaching of behavior and patriotism. In a desperate search for symbols of unity, they made national holidays and the flag fundamental to the educational process. In Massachusetts these themes were most strikingly manifested in the development of the public evening schools, in the school as a community center movement, and in the teaching of history and civics.4 Antebellum Massachusetts had been a center of adult education. On the lyceum circuit Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, Catharine Ward Beecher, and numerous others offered cultural sustenance, exposure to scholarship and politics, and communal entertainment. 4

Oscar Handlin, John Dewey's Challenge to Education ( N e w York, Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 19, 23-27. Any gathering of educators or collection of essays brought forth arguments similar to those mentioned above. See, e.g., A . D. Mayo, "Object Lessons in Moral Instruction in the Common Schools," National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 1880, pp. 6-17; N. A . Calkins, ibid., 1886, p. 75 ; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Re port of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board [hereafter cited as Annual Report], 1883-1884, pp. 125130; A. E. Winship, "The School-House in American Development," Education, 6 (1886), 387-393; "Symposium on Temperance Instruction in the Public Schools," Journal of Education, 24 (1886), 207-216. On the flag mania, see ibid., 30 (1889), 408; ibid., 42 (1895), 243; ibid., 45 (1897), 354-355.

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Artisans and mechanics organized libraries, discussion groups, and lectures to introduce themselves to advanced scientific techniques, political organization, and group recreation. Philanthropists and clergymen produced programs designed to stimulate moral behavior and social success. John Lowell, Jr., established the Lowell Institute, the nation's most prominent lecture center, to assure a permanent place for self-improvement in the Boston community, while others founded the city's Public Library in 1852 to expand knowledge among the adult population. Incorporating highly diversified goals—knowledge for pleasure and material gain, morality, social recreation, and community harmony —through a multiplicity of means, adult education before the Civil War attracted a broad range of participants in activities that defied simple categorization.5 Among these activities, formal schooling (classroom learning) held a limited place. The evening classes that had emerged during the colonial period as substitutes for the master's nonvocational obligations under the apprenticeship contract had gradually expanded their curriculum from basic instruction in literacy and arithmetic to more practical and vocational subject matter. With the withering of the apprenticeship system during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, and the extension of day schooling to increasing numbers of children, evening classes turned to older youth and adults, offering a modicum of vocational instruction, lessons in the common morality, and some introduction to culture. Simultaneously, philanthropic and church agencies saw evening programs as a means to uplift the poor and immigrant. In Lawrence a committee of the religious denominations, other than the Catholics, opened a free evening school in 1861 conducted by the City Mission, where the rudiments of literacy, arithmetic, 5

Sidney Jackson, "Some Ancestors of the 'extension course,' " New England Quarterly, 14 (1941), 505-518; Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York, Oxford University Press, 1956), chaps. 4, 11; C. Hartley Grattan (ed.), American Ideas about Adult Education, 1710-1951 (New York, Teachers College, 1959), pp. 20-47.

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and some vocational training were introduced in an environment deemed morally safe. Believing that even the lowest could improve himself and could learn at any age, assuming that knowledge had economic and social utility, and hoping to provide a secure atmosphere within which learning could occur, the architects of the evening school adopted the heterogeneous goals of the antebellum adult education movement, along with its voluntaristic traditions.6 Even before the war, however, Massachusetts had begun to differentiate formal schooling for adults and youth who had left school from the philanthropic and self-supporting activities of the lyceum, mechanics' institutes, and charity classes. In 1847 the state legislature allowed the use of public funds for evening classes, thereby fostering some independence from private sources. A decade later the legislature legitimized evening instruction as a responsibility of public education by making the regular school fund and local school committees the sources of financing. Boston, Cambridge, Lowell, and Lawrence soon responded by adding evening classes to their school systems.7 The evening school movement was further intensified in 1869 when the admittance age to night classes was lowered from fifteen to twelve, allowing "a considerable number of young children extremely poor, whose daily earnings are absolutely necessary to keep the family from starvation or the almshouse," to continue with some schooling. Making explicit the state's concern with improving literacy, pro6

7

Katz, Irony, pp. 1 1 0 - 1 1 1 ; Boston, Annual fleport of the School Committee and Superintendent of Schools [hereafter all annual reports of school committees and superintendents of schools will be cited as School fleport], 1888, p. 6 1 ; Robert Seybolt, Evening Schools in Colonial America (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1925), pp. 9 - 1 2 , 2 1 - 3 2 ; Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York, Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 3 2 - 3 3 . Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves of the General Court (Boston, 1847), chap. 1 3 7 ; ibid., 1857, chap. 189; Boston, School Report, 1869, pp. 1 7 7 - 1 7 8 ; Lowell, School Report, 1869, pp. 4 6 - 4 7 ; ibid., 1899, pp. 5 7 - 5 8 ; Lawrence, School Report, 1870, pp. 1 5 - 1 6 ; ibid., pp. 3 0 - 3 3 ; Cambridge, School Report, 1890, p. 3 7 ; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1 8 6 9 - 1 8 7 0 , p. lxi.

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viding the tools through which communication and social responsibility could occur, and seeing evening classes as supplements to inadequate earlier education, the evening programs quickly adopted the elementary day school curriculum as the basis of their teaching. "The advantages to be derived from free evening schools are peculiarly marked in a city like ours," concluded Lowell's Committee on Evening Schools in 1876, "where so large a proportion of the young are engaged during the day in manual labor, and who are consequently deprived of the privileges afforded by our day schools." The boot and shoe industry, Lynn's School Committee similarly remarked, attracted children from the day schools "at an early age," thus making "the maintenance of first class evening schools . . . of the utmost importance." The consensus that evening schools should be patterned after day classes for those unable to attend the latter was aptly summarized by the Evening Schools Committee of the Boston School Board in 1881: "There must always be in a city like ours a large number of persons, who while they most need an education, are least able to avail themselves of the privilege of attending school. Poverty and the necessity for their daily labor compel many to leave school without even the rudiments of a good education, and prevent others who have never enjoyed any school advantages from doing so. The only time available for self improvement is in the evening. Hence the necessity for evening schools, and the reason for their maintenance and support."8 The Industrial Drawing Act of 1870 reinforced a different aspect of the evening school movement, for it involved the state in the financing of vocational training. Largely through the efforts of a coalition of businessmen and manufacturers, 8

Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves of the General Court, 1869, chap. 305; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport, 1868-1869, p. 110; Lowell, School Report, 1873, pp. 13-14; ibid., 1876, p. 45; Lynn, School fleport, 1883, pp. 11-13; Boston, Documents of the School Committee [hereafter cited as Boston, School Documents], 1881, No. 20, pp. 3-4.

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the state legislature required every city and town of more than 10,000 inhabitants to offer evening instruction in mechanical drawing, hoping thereby to advance the state's economic progress and the individual worker's success. "The free evening drawing schools," wrote a committee of the Boston School Board, "were established for mechanics and artisans wishing to make up deficiencies in their education, which . . . seriously interfere with their success in life. Skilled labor commands high wages and skilled labor is what these schools should produce." Within a few years most of the state's large cities had opened drawing schools, attracting a solid base of semiskilled, clerical, and whitecollar workers. In some cases, as in Worcester, the commitment was extensive, developing out of previously functioning self-improvement and technical instruction courses. In other cities the mechanical drawing schools seem to have appeared for the first time as direct responses to the state legislation, theoretically offering practical instruction in industrial design.9 It is uncertain whether the evening drawing schools actually contributed either to social mobility or economic efficiency. To the end of the nineteenth century the schools attracted a small but steady supply of semiskilled laborers, clerks, carpenters, mechanics, and even teachers, suggesting a continuing faith in the opportunities being offered there. In Springfield the work of the schools received commendation throughout the 1870's and 1880's. After the initial flush of enthusiasm, however, the drawing classes in most cities failed to continue their early growth and showed a rather static record of attendance. The manufacturers and businessmen most responsible for the 1870 legislation withdrew their active support of industrial drawing after the early 1870's, probably recognizing that Massachusetts' economy did not depend upon such instruction. In addition, few 9

Committee on Music and Drawing of the Boston School Committee, quoted in Isaac E. Clarke, Art and Industry (46th Cong., 2d sess., U.S. Senate, Executive Documents, 1897), VII, No. 209, pt. 1, 257-258; Worcester, School fleport, 1870, pp. 3 1 - 3 6 ; ibid., 1871, pp. 2 1 - 2 5 ; ibid., 1884, pp. 3 3 - 3 4 ; Springfield, School fleport, 1870, p. 16.

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evening pupils appear to have become draftsmen, the original expectation of the 1870 drawing act. Thus whatever effect the evening classes had on mobility, it did not occur along the originally conceived lines.10 The legislation of 1869 and 1870 concentrated the two significant aspects of evening education—literacy and vocationalism—in publicly supported institutions. By the mid1870's thirty-two cities and towns in Massachusetts were expending between $65,000 and $70,000 annually on night classes, enrolling around 16,000 individuals, most of whom attended the drawing classes. Yet the evening schools remained the public-school system's stepsister. In the early 1880's, with interest in drawing declining, enrollment dropped to under 12,000 students, expenditures to less than $60,000 annually. "The Evening School," complained Lynn's Superintendent of Schools in 1881, "seems to have become a thing of the past with us. On inquiry, I found the impression prevailing that there was more in the name of keeping an Evening School than in any advantage secured to a sufficient number of attendants, to warrant the trouble and the expense." Attendance rarely averaged more than 50 percent of enrollment, while the registration itself was deceptive since many came a few times and never returned. The situation in Cambridge, one of the first cities to provide public-supported evening classes, became so bad in 1879 that the School Committee moved to close the schools, only relenting in one portion of the city when forty residents requested their continuation.11 The tenuous condition of evening classes had many man10

11

The best way of relating the evening drawing classes to a particular school system is to follow the annual school reports. See, e.g., Springfield, School Reports, 1873, pp. 29-30; ibid., 1875, pp. 9 - 1 0 ; ibid., 1877, p. 23; ibid., 1878, pp. 19-20; ibid., 1881, p. 31; ibid., 1887, pp. 49-50. An example of the occupational categories attending the drawing classes is Haverhill, School Report, 1885, p. 54. Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1902-1903, p. 92; ibid., 1890-1891, p. 75; Lynn, School Report, 1880-1881, p. 46; Cambridge, School fleport, 1879, pp. 7 - 8 ; Haverhill, School Report, 1886, p. 31.

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ifestations, but the most obvious were the inadequate facilities provided by local school systems. Describing a typical situation, Lowell's Committee on Evening Schools wrote in 1876: "A basement, heated by steam pipes passing overhead, with little or no ventilation, with a large number of gaslights rapidly consuming the oxygen of a room, filled with boys and girls none too clean, at the end of an hour presents an atmosphere that flavors strongly of a pest-house." The Secretary of the State Board of Education chastised communities for failing to provide suitable accommodations, proper supplies, or competent instructors. "With the illlighted and cheerless quarters afforded evening schools, which were taught by teachers, of whom many were rejected from day school service, and equipped with condemned supplies, what could be expected but the results of record?" 12 In an attempt to eliminate the most evident deficiencies in the system—low attendance, poor facilities, and inadequate teachers—school committees resorted to a variety of expedients. Worcester, Springfield, and Boston imposed a deposit of one to two dollars on all evening school enrollees, returnable on condition of good behavior and regular attendance. Springfield and Boston expelled students who absented themselves more than a limited number of times. But while the fee system might ensure regular attendance among those determined to attend, it risked losing others uncertain about their regularity and did nothing to attract students. More to the point was the decision to house evening sessions in the regular day schools, thus providing at least as much light, ventilation, and accommodations—within the limits of classrooms built for children—as was furnished the other parts of the publicschool system. A number of cities authorized day school instructors to teach at night, thereby upgrading the staff from the traditional teaching rejects and transients. The 12

Lowell, School fleport, 1876, p. 46; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport, 1883-1884, pp. 18-19.

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legislature took a major step in 1883 by requiring that all cities and towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants offer evening classes for twelve-year-olds and above in "orthography, reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, drawing, United States history and good behavior." 13 Although the 1883 legislation pronounced evening schools an integral and required feature of urban public education, it ignored vocational training—drawing was included as a means of disciplining accuracy and taste—and focused the state's commitment almost exclusively on evening elementary schools. The statute's immediate impact was difficult to determine. Expenditures for evening classes, which state-wide had hovered around $60,000 prior to its passage, jumped to $72,000 in 1883-1884, and to $90,000 a year later. Changes in individual cities, however, were inconsistent. In Springfield, where school officials had expressed satisfaction with the evening program for more than a decade, the 1883 legislation produced no significant increase in enrollment. In Lowell, on the other hand, registration rose from around 1,500 to more than 2,000 within two years. New Bedford's Superintendent of Schools reported in 1885 that his city's evening schools had been reorganized and provided with "the best of teachers, the best of schoolrooms, and the best of appliances, such as give life and progress to the day schools." Nevertheless, across the state, the 1883 statute failed to achieve its supporters' expectations. A year after passage, at least one-third of the thirty-one cities and towns falling under the requirements of the act had not complied, while appropriations in a number of cases allowed for only the most cursory programs. Unable to enforce compliance by municipalities or to demand attendance where schools were open, the Secretary of the State Board of Education concluded that, despite the 13

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1 8 8 2 - 1 8 8 3 , pp. 1 8 7 1 9 0 ; Springfield, School Report, 1883, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 ; ibid., 1884, p. 2 1 ; Boston, School Documents, 1889, No. 1 7 ; Cambridge, School Report, 1884, p. 1 6 ; Lowell, School Report, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 ; Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves of the General Court, 1883, chap. 174.

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legislation, the evening classes were being underutilized.14 To a large extent, the movement to increase the importance of evening classes centered on the problems of illiteracy and the foreign-born. "I am inclining to the opinion," Fall River's Superintendent wrote in 1887, "that the compulsory feature of the day schools should be incorporated into the evening schools. The amount of illiteracy that prevails in manufacturing centers, occasioned largely by the influx of this class from other countries, seems to demand legislation on this point if Massachusetts would maintain the position she has so long and proudly held for intelligence, and for the common school education of the children within her borders." State and national censuses in 1875, 1880, and 1885 found between 20 and 25 percent of the state's immigrant population illiterate in English, as compared to less than 2 percent of the nativeborn. While the illiteracy rates in Boston, Cambridge, Springfield, and Worcester equaled approximately 7 percent, the immigrant factory cities of Lawrence (9.4 percent), Lowell (10.1 percent), New Bedford (12.7 percent), Holyoke (16 percent), and Fall River (20.6 percent) were considerably higher. The situtaion demanded stringent measures. In the cities, "where indifferent provisions, or none whatever, are made for the education of untaught foreigners, remedial legislation is necessary," concluded State Board of Education Secretary John Dickinson.15 E. C. Carrigan solidified this association of evening 14

15

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1890-1891, p. 75. The Lowell and Springfield statistics were compiled from the School Reports of those cities between 1881 and 1886. New Bedford, School Re port, 1885, pp. 101-102; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1882-1883, pp. 13-14; ibid., 1883-1884, pp. 18-19. Not until the Industrial Education Commission began its work in 1907 did evening vocational classes become prominent. Fall River, School Report, 1886-1887, pp. 14-15; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1883-1884, p. 20; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, The Census of Massachusetts, 1875 (Boston, 1876), pp. 643-667; Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, The Census of Massachusetts, 1885 (Boston, 1887), pp. 987-1143; U.S. Department of the Interior, Statistics of the Population of the United States of the Tenth Census (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1883), pp. 919-920; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual

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school education with foreign-born illiteracy. An Englishborn Irishman, Carrigan had come to this country in 1857 at the age of five. After attending the Evening High School in Boston, he went to Dartmouth College, graduating in 1877. A part-time journalist with a forceful personality and an active interest in education, Carrigan was appointed principal of Boston's Evening High School in 1881, after a period of sharp controversy during which the school was first modified, then closed, and finally reopened. More important, Carrigan devoted much of his time to legislative lobbying, making himself a well-known and prominent figure at the Massachusetts State House. In 1883 he was appointed to the State Board of Education and in January, 1888, became a member of the Boston School Committee, holding these positions until his untimely death in November, 1888.16 Before his death Carrigan enunciated a confused but nonetheless forceful rationale for state responsibility to eliminate foreign-born illiteracy through evening schools. "We are at the mercy of the manufacturer," he wrote, "who encourages the cheap, foreign illiterate laborer, and never asks whether he can sign the pay-roll in person, by mark, or by special power of attorney." With foreign-born parents from Europe and Canada "comes a swarm of illiterate children, many of whom, though far from their teens,

16

Report, 1882-1883, pp. 141-151. In all cases, illiteracy referred to those persons over ten years, of age w h o were unable to read or write in the English language. Most evening school advocates overlooked questions raised by the census that complicated their arguments. For example, though they focused on the large cities, the census found some of the highest rates of illiteracy in the small towns of Cape Cod and the Berkshires. Additionally, although evening school supporters emphasized non-English-speaking illiteracy, more than 60 percent of the state's illiterates were born in Ireland. Agitation for compulsory evening school attendance for those under twenty-one, which emerged in the 1880's, moreover, overlooked the fact that around 80 percent of the foreign-born illiterates were over thirty. "Obituary on E. C. Carrigan," Journal of Education, 28 (1888), 320. On the controversy over the Boston Evening High School in the early 1880's, see Carrigan's remarks in American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses (Boston, 1885), pp. 280-283.

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swear that they are beyond the school age of fourteen, and hence not within the control of our school officials." Finding it almost impossible to ascertain the child's true age, educators accepted the "lying statement of the parent." While Massachusetts could not solve the broad problems caused by immigration, Carrigan claimed, it could improve the condition of "its illiterate minors"; he thus urged legislation to require evening school attendance for the nonEnglish-speaking between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. 17 Carrigan's proposal ignored the significant number of foreign-born over twenty-one who could neither read nor write English, but he seems to have been reaching for a compromise that would satisfy the need for industrial labor, while forcing the assimilation of youth through evening instruction. Submitted to the state legislature in 1884, Carrigan's bill was designed, the Journal of Education declared, to "throw an effective safeguard around the foreign illiterate youth, who in increasing numbers continue to flock into the State." By the beginning of 1887 he had marshaled enough support throughout the state to achieve his objective, and, in the single most important piece of evening school legislation before World War I, compulsory attendance of non-English reading and writing minors was combined with restrictions upon the employer's right to hire. No child under fourteen who could not read and write simple English sentences could be employed in any mercantile or mechanical establishment. All illiterates between fourteen and twenty-one years of age were required to attend either day or evening classes during the period the schools were open, and no employer could grant work to such individuals without receipt of school attendance certificates, at the risk of being fined fifty to one hundred dollars.18 17

18

Carrigan in American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses, 1885, pp. 276-280, 283-286. Journal of Education, 19 (1884), 328, 345; ibid., 20 (1884), 360-361; ibid., 25 (1887), 184-185, 188; Massachusetts, Acts and flesolves of

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The 1887 legislation reshaped Massachusetts' system of evening schools, legitimizing and providing them with a sharply defined social function: the teaching of literacy to the non-English-speaking. Changing evening schools from voluntaristic to compulsory institutions for the majority of those who attended, the legislation increased the size and heterogeneity of the student body. Its impact forced a reconceptualization of evening schools and changes in pedagogy and helped forge new definitions of citizenship education. Responding to the new statute, Lawrence's Superintendent of Schools articulated its rationale: "The cost of educating and thereby Americanizing the large number of illiterate foreigners who are gradually but surely increasing in our manufacturing centers is great, and the work is difficult. Our public schools alone can do it. Legislation has commenced none too soon."19 The immediate and obvious changes lay in the student body. In New Bedford evening school enrollments increased from slightly above 500 in 1886 to more than 900 a year later and to over 1,400 in 1888. Whereas at least 60 percent of the students in 1886 were either native-born or of English, Scotch, or Irish birth, around 75 percent two years later were non-English-speaking foreign-born. In neighboring Fall River evening registration doubled in a year, from 1,555 to 3,039, half of whom were illiterate in English. In Springfield, with a proportionally much smaller immigrant population, the change was dramatic. The Superintendent had noted in 1884 the great variety of backgrounds among the evening elementary pupils, only some of whom were foreigners. Within five years the enrollment at these schools had become predominantly foreign-born. By 1893 more than 50 percent of Worcester's evening

18

the General Court, 1887, chap. 433. School committees could waive these requirements in cases of individual need, for example, where a child was physically too weak to work and attend school. Literacy was defined by the reading and writing of simple sentences in English, a requirement loose enough to provide great leeway for local officials. Lawrence, School Report, 1887, pp. 32-34.

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students had little or no knowledge of English. Of the 13,758 pupils enrolled in Boston's evening elementary classes during the school year 1906-1907, 9,006 were foreignborn, with 90 percent of those from non-English-speaking countries. The increased numbers and more heterogeneous student bodies quickly led to higher expenditures. In the decade after the 1887 act, evening schools went from a nominal expense in most cities to a small but no longer insubstantial part of the regular school budget, and the rising tide of non-English-speaking immigrants made larger costs even more likely.20 Now dramatically confronted with the problems of schooling the immigrant, Massachusetts' educators moved to systematize their evening classes. Committees on evening schools and newly appointed supervisors analyzed the progress and deficiencies of their programs. Registration records were introduced with forms showing compliance with the attendance requirements forwarded to local employers. For the first time, courses of study were regularized, textbooks introduced, and explicit discussion of subject matter and goals undertaken. Some school systems categorized pupils by abilities, usually determined by degree of English literacy or previous schooling. Separate classes composed exclusively of a single nationality that had sometimes been organized previously became common after 1890; these groups conformed to the increasingly segregated residential patterns of the cities, seemed to facilitate teaching, and offered ready companionship to an uncertain and insecure student body. "Until within a few years the 20

New Bedford, School Report, 1886, pp. 3 0 - 3 3 ; ibid., 1887, pp. 4 5 - 4 6 ; ibid., 1888, pp. 55-56, 79; Fall River, School Report, 1887-1888, pp. 14-15, 63; Springfield, School Report, 1884, pp. 21-22; ibid., 1888, p. 13; Worcester, Suggestions to Teachers and Hours of Study in the Evening Schools, 1893; Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 13, pp. 90-91. Expenditures for evening schools as a proportion of total school costs in the state increased from just over 1 percent in the early 1880's to around 2 percent by 1890. The latter percentage, however, held firm to World War I. The percentages have been compiled from statistics in the Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Reports for those years. See, e.g., the report for 1901-1902, p. 109.

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classes for those who were unable to speak the English language were confined wholly to French speaking pupils but at the present time we have in operation classes for Swedes, Portuguese, Armenians, and Greeks," wrote Lowell's evening school committee in 1893, describing a process that differed from other cities only by nationality groups.21 Compulsory attendance for evening pupils intensified concern over motivation. "It should be borne in mind that the elementary evening schools work under certain peculiar disadvantages. They deal with pupils whose attendance is forced by the law, which says in effect that if the pupil does not attend school he shall not work," declared Fall River's Superintendent of Schools in 1903. "The pupils go to school when tired by a long day of exhaustive labor and so in poor condition to receive instruction." To offset these difficulties, experienced teachers were brought into the schools and instructed to provide a congenial atmosphere for their students. "Try to make them feel that they are coming to school not because they are obliged to, but because they wish to, because they know America means Opportunity for them as well as for us, and that Opportunity now knocks at their door in the shape of the instruction offered by the Evening School," Lawrence's evening school supervisor told his staff. Readers specifically written 21

Lowell, School Report, 1893, p. 17. Sample registration forms can be found in Haverhill, School Report, 1896, pp. 40-41. On evening school courses of study, see Boston, School Documents, 1888, No. 6; ibid., 1903, No. 12; ibid., 1911, No. 10; Lawrence, A Syllabus for the Instruction of Non-English Speaking Pupils in the Evening Schools, 1908. For the categorization of students by national origins, see Lowell, School Report, 1886, p. 28; ibid., 1895, pp. 2 1 - 2 2 ; Lynn, School Report, 1891, p. 59; ibid., 1905, p. 27; Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 13, pp. 90-91. Separation by nationality though predominant was not universal. See Haverhill, School Report, 1895, p. 19. Robert Woods reported that Jews and Italians in Boston's North End had to be separated in the evening classes because of conflict between them. Robert A. Woods, Americans in Process (Boston, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1903), pp. 311-312. For a national view of these issues, see Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), pp. 31-32, 79-114.

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for non-English-speaking men and women replaced the elementary textbooks. Since evening pupils were generally mature young men and women, Springfield's former Superintendent of Schools Thomas Balliet informed the readers of Sara O'Brien's widely used English for Foreigners, "their interests are those of adults, and the content of the lessons of a children's Reader does not appeal to them." "In this little book," he wrote, "the lessons treat of topics of intrinsic interest to mature minds, while the language is simple and easy." Students do not read about dolls and cats, or learn a child's vocabulary, but "acquire useful knowledge, and with it a vocabulary which will enable them to speak, read, and write about it after the manner of adults." 22 Under pressure to secure rapid and effective instruction of the foreign-born, school systems distributed special instructional material. Boston's "The Teaching of English to Adult Foreigners" informed teachers that they would have to overcome the "jaded" mental faculties of students physically exhausted at the end of a day's work. "Something that will quicken their wits and set their machinery in action is e s s e n t i a l . . . A joke, an anecdote, a humorous remark here and there will act like a powerful mental tonic, and put the class in a right condition for study. It is true some time will be consumed by the laughter that is sure to follow, but this never fails to arouse their slumbering faculties and thus compensates for it tenfold." The instructional essay cautioned that "the intricacies of the English language are so enormous to an adult foreigner as to overwhelm him in his first attempt to familiarize himself with it; and it is the invariable experience of teachers of English to adult foreigners to hear from them despondent remarks to that 22

Fall River, School Report, 1903, pp. 22-23; Lawrence, Syllabus for the Instruction of Non-English Speaking Pupils, p. 2; Thomas Balliet, in Sara R. O'Brien, English for Foreigners (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), p. ii; Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 17, p. 49; ibid., 1895, No. 4, p. 105; Lawrence, School Report, 1895, pp. 28-29.

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effect." This lack of confidence was fatal to learning. "Therefore the first aim of a teacher ought to be to overcome that pessimism in his pupils in the very beginning, and there nip the evil in its bud." Sara O'Brien's two textbooks for the foreign-born reproduced the exact questions in the proper order for classroom presentation. A Syllabus for the Instruction

of Non-English

Speaking

Pupils in the

Evening

Schools, distributed by the Lawrence School Committee in 1908, explained how to organize students by sex, nationality, and general intelligence, before directing how the lessons should be taught. Facility in the English language, wrote John J. Mahony, Supervisor of Lawrence's evening schools, whose work received national attention, developed out of exposure to objects and actions. Lessons should thus revolve around a material theme, such as opening the door or closing a window, broken down into steps leading to the completion of the act. To any teachers uncertain of how to teach the foreign-born, these handbooks and readers provided clear counsel.23 This mixture of congeniality and systematic instruction, the pedagogical concerns, and the emphasis upon the right environment for learning were all part of a broad phenomenon of professionalization in education.24 The significance of these trends when applied to the evening schools, however, lay in their explicit application to the foreignborn. After 1890 the formalization of night schools became intimately tied to teaching the immigrant how to act; textbooks for the non-English-speaking became handbooks for life in America. Massachusetts' evening schools began to establish themselves as the agency through which individuals earned the right to become and learned how to be citizens. Prior to the 1880's evening classes provided an option 23

24

Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 13, pp. 67-68; O'Brien, English for Foreigners, and English for Foreigners, Book 2 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912); Lawrence, Syllabus for the Instruction of Non-English Speaking Pupils. See, e.g., Boston, School Documents, 1885, No. 4, pp. 83-90.

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for those who had failed to complete their schooling. The curriculum and teaching techniques imitated those of the day schools. To a great extent, the systematization of night school programs, the special committees and supervisors of evening schools, the courses of study and pedagogical recommendations, and the transfer to day school classrooms represented part of the legitimization process designed to make evening schools comparable to the day classes. The decision to require the attendance of the immigrant young at night schools in 1887 reflected a significant change in attitude. With compulsion now replacing voluntarism, the education of the foreign-born, once open to a multiplicity of agencies, became synonymous with school attendance. The immigrant's satisfactory socialization depended upon formal instruction. Evening schools no longer saw their function simply in terms of literacy and broad moral values as a basis for citizenship, but increasingly assumed the tasks of explaining the environment to the newcomers, offering them specific instructions on how to behave, and instilling an emotional commitment to improving their environment. Evening school readers added special sections on personal hygiene and health care, teaching the foreign-born the way to recognize and avoid tuberculosis and the importance of brushing one's teeth and acquiring proper grooming habits. An array of job opportunities was presented, with brief sketches explaining the requirements of the work, the benefits derived, and the steps to take in applying for a job, though the occupations tended to be those of rural and small-town America—blacksmith, cobbler, tailor—rather than those of the city. Textbooks explained the workings of government and the interrelationship of various governmental agencies; they warned their readers to avoid the corrupting politics of the "machine" and ward "boss" and presented the exact procedures necessary to qualify for one's naturalization papers. In Boston a special committee was established in 1907 to devise a civic primer for evening school use "which shall deal concretely with those phases of municipal government with which the foreigner first

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comes into contact." Lawrence's evening instructional staff was similarly told to offer weekly talks on hygiene, city government, national holidays and songs, current events, and conduct in public places. 25 Seeking to improve the immigrant's environment and his way of life, evening schools presented rural America as the ideal. In her instructions for a lesson on the United States, Sara O'Brien suggested that teachers "point out the great centers of population . . . and contrast the opportunities offered in the less thickly settled parts of the country with the disadvantages of segregation in the big cities." All evening school textbooks contained sections on farm life, while many of the activities described could only occur in small-town America. For those unable to move westward, however, the city might approximate a rural village. Clean homes, community cooperation, and the support of municipal agencies—police and fire departments, health services, schools—could make the city a center of opportunity. Instruction in behavior was invariably reinforced by inspirational readings and discussions. "This country is the United States of America," began one lesson. "It is the land of freedom and liberty, because the people govern themselves. All citizens love their country, because they know that this freedom was earned by men who gave their lives for it." Lessons on Abraham Lincoln ("By hard work and close study, he became a man of strong and noble character, and did a great work for his country"), George Washington (a leader chosen by his people to lead his country in peace and war), and Thomas Edison (the genius of the new 25

ibid., 1907, No. 13, pp. 36-37; Lawrence, Syllabus for the Instruction of Non-English Speaking Pupils; O'Brien, English for Foreigners, pp. 16, 23-26, 34-49, 71-72, 81-86, 90-91, 123-150; O'Brien, English for Foreigners, Book 2, pp. 39-40, 60-61, 67-68, 86-89, 98-109, 167-191; William E. Chancellor, Standard Short Course for Evening Schools (New York, American Book Company, 1911), pp. 42-47, 68-69, 218-259; Mabel Hill and Philip Davis, Civics for New Americans (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), passim. T w o legislative attempts to strengthen the evening schools were Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves of the General Court, 1902, chap. 183, and 1911, chap. 241.

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technology) were presented to show America's most admired values, while immigrant success stories—Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schurz, Jacob Riis—revealed the opportunities available to all. "Thus, while he is acquiring our language," one textbook declared, "the foreigner is gaining the necessary acquaintance with our institutions" and "the ideals that will tend to make him a happier individual and a better citizen."26 While English-language instruction for the foreign-born crystallized the evening school movement, by the early twentieth century the language itself had become only a first step in teaching proper behavior and American ideals. A code of conduct replaced literacy and the inculcation of moral values as the defining element of citizenship education. "As the public day school is the most effective means of Americanizing the children who come from foreign lands to our shores in such large numbers every year," Springfield's Balliet told a National Education Association audience in 1904, "so the public evening school should be made the institution which shall Americanize their parents by teaching them our language, our history, and the principles of our government." "Upon us devolves the expensive and never ending task of teaching them [the foreign-born] that which they most need if they are ever to become American citizens in fact as well as in name," wrote Lowell's Superintendent of Schools two years later in a discussion of his city's evening classes, "—a task never ending because a new crop comes on as fast as the old one is cleared off."27 Before World War I evening schools never achieved the central place for which their supporters hoped. Despite compulsory legislation, many immigrants refused to attend or acquired just enough English to pass the minimal statu26

27

O'Brien, English for Foreigners, pp. vi, 120-122, 123, 138, 145, 1 9 1 197; Chancellor, Standard Short Course, pp. 24, 28-31, 33, 35, 53, 106-108, 111-113. Thomas Balliet, "Evening Schools," National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 1904, p. 281; Lowell, School Report, 1906, p. 51.

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tory demands. "The education of immigrants who have passed the age of elementary school attendance, especially those from sixteen to twenty-four years of age, remains a greatly neglected problem," State Commissioner of Education David Snedden noted in his Annual Report for 19141915. The peculiar needs of teaching the foreign-born were being given too little attention. "The proper training of adult foreign-born Americans in the use of English, and their instruction in those phases of civics, American history, sanitation and other related subjects which they can best assimilate, can be done only by specially qualified teachers. These must be prepared to select, organize and employ a wide range of teaching materials, and to use processes quite different from those which have become accepted in ordinary school and college instruction." Yet few evening school teachers received such training. Despite existing legislation, local communities offered inadequate provision "partly because of the expense, partly because of inadequate means of administration, and partly because of local indifference." "The development of a sound and effective program of education for adult foreigners is dependent on additional legislation, generous State support (to which might well be added support from the national government) and comprehensive State supervision." All of that would await America's entry into World War I and the resulting frenzy of Americanization, but the themes of evening school responsibility, the definition of citizenship as behavior, and the teaching of citizenship as the inculcation of explicit ways to act had already been established.28 The evening social center movement was another approach to educating citizens. This idea of the center drew upon the concept of community as a way of bringing individuals into civic harmony. It assumed that life in densely populated heterogeneous urban neighborhoods hindered the 28

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fteport, 1914-1915, pp. 5 8 - 5 9 ; Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, The Problem of Immigration in Massachusetts (Boston, 1914), pp. 117-146, 217-223.

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development of group identity, cooperation, and communal understanding. People in the city were "not well organized for local social life." Families living on the same street, Boston's Superintendent Seaver declared, were isolated, autonomous units in a fragmented society. In this situation the school only partially fulfilled its obligations. Adults rarely went to it; youth who had left school ignored it. "The principal and teachers of the school often reside elsewhere in the district, and can hardly be expected to do otherwise in most cases. In these respects the city school district is at a disadvantage in comparison with a village school district." With their model the "little red schoolhouse"—the unifying center of the rural village—the advocates of "open schools" appealed for publicly financed evening recreation and lecture programs, parent-teacher associations, civic clubs, and summer vacation activities centered in neighborhood school buildings. Through the wider use of existing facilities, especially in programs for youth and adults who were not attending school, that institution would be brought into closer contact with the community, mutual understanding would increase, and citizenship would take on new meaning. The social centers, one of their advocates asserted, would develop "the community interest, the neighborly spirit, the democracy that we knew before we came to the city." The expectations were for unity, friendliness, and civic participation.29 Although some discussion of the schoolhouse as a community center occurred before 1900,30 the first definite proposal in Massachusetts appeared in the Boston School 29

30

Boston, School Documents, 1902, No. 3, p. 53; Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, pp. 272-273, passim. The analysis of the social center movement presented here draws heavily upon Judith E. Smith, "Efficiency vs. Community: The Social Center Movement, 1900-1920," unpub. honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1970, in Radcliffe College Archives. See also Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1 8 9 0 1914 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 76-83. Horace E. Scudder, "The Schoolhouse as a Centre," Atlantic Monthly, 77 (1896), 103-109.

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Committee's Annual Report for 1899. In a section entitled "The School and the Community," the Committee claimed that the local public school, as the only institution common to all, should exercise greater influence on community life than at present. Interest in the schools "should be encouraged and stimulated by the formation of school societies, which should meet in school buildings; . . . parents and teachers should come into closer touch, . . . parents should understand and appreciate the earnest, conscientious, dayby-day work of the teacher, and . . . the teacher should come into full sympathy with the view and ambitions of the parents concerning the welfare of the child." Since most schools were not fully utilized, expanded community involvement would not significantly alter expenses: building maintenance and land costs remained relatively constant. The Committee thus authorized use of schoolhouses for free lectures and concerts and reported the opening of one school in the immigrant North End for evening study.31 The movement for open schools gained further impetus between 1900 and 1902 when the Boston School Committee agreed to support summer vacation programs and evening lectures, both patterned after developments in other eastern cities. The summer activities included playgrounds, country excursions, and manual training for poor and working-class children. Justifying the arrangement, Supervisor of Vacation Schools Sarah Arnold wrote that the "inevitable conditions of city life" tend to undermine "the results of school training." Especially "in the thickly settled portions of the city the children may always be found upon the streets in the midst of the heat, the dirt, and the din," their anarchic existence deleterious to healthy growth. The lecture series, mostly illustrated travel talks and directed at a different clientele, drew upon similar assumptions: the time spent out of school by youth and adults offset the accomplishments of public education, and each group would benefit 31

Boston, School Documents, 1899, No. 14, pp. 26-28. The social center movement in Boston is discussed in Smith, "Efficiency vs. Community," pp. 41-56.

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by exposure to the school environment. Both the summer and lecture programs required involvement with individuals and at time periods not previously considered public education's responsibility. Both were noncompulsory and thus were predicated on their attractiveness to the surrounding community. 32 The vacation schools and evening lectures increased pressure to make the schools community centers, and, under the prodding of James J. Storrow, the School Committee opened three experimental Educational Centres in immigrant and working-class neighborhoods during the 1902-1903 school year. A prestigious Boston lawyer who was committed to expertise and efficiency, Storrow was elected to the School Board as part of a city-wide good government campaign in 1901. His call for extended use of school buildings "grew out of the idea that the modern fireproof school building, perfectly equipped and costing from $100,000 to $300,000, and often standing on land costing several dollars a square foot, constituted an educational plant, paid for out of the public moneys and existing only for the public good, from which the citizens of Boston were not receiving the benefit they ought to expect." Storrow found most schoolhouses empty at least 75 percent of the time. The situation was especially wasteful in poorer areas where youth who left school at fourteen rarely took advantage of the formal evening classes and went instead to cheap and corrupting recreational facilities. "If it is worth while for the city to give a Latin or high school education to every boy who can afford to take it," Storrow argued, "it is certainly still more worth while for the city to try to promote the moral and intellectual welfare of the boy of fourteen who cannot aiford it." 33 By late 1902 Storrow had convinced the School Committee 32

33

Boston, School Documents, 1901, No. 13; ibid., 1902, No. 15, pp. 32-35; ibid., 1903, No. 13. Ibid., 1903, No. 9; ibid., 1902, No. 15, pp. 17-25; Henry G. Pearson, Son of New England: James Jackson Storrow (Boston, Thomas Todd Company, Printers, 1932), pp. 43-69.

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to open three Educational Centres offering manual instruction and recreation (sewing, dressmaking, cooking, dancing, singing), general entertainment, athletics, and courses in civil government, stenography, and mechanical drawing. In immigrant areas, informal English-language classes were conducted. "The Centres are composed almost wholly of people who up to the time the Centre was opened had ceased their schooling and who . . . unless kept at home by household duties, are working during the day." Unlike the regular evening schools which stressed formal learning, the Centres strived for informality and congeniality. By making those who left school or had never attended school feel at home, the School Committee hoped to instill community identity, extend the uplifting influences of the public schools, and promote allegiance to the school system. The Centres, School Superintendent George H. Conley wrote in 1905, would "encourage helpful association, enlarge acquaintance, and promote good-will among the people in the different neighborhoods in which they are located. The lectures attract large numbers of adults who appreciate the value of education, and gladly seek opportunities for culture and refinement."34 Yet even as Conley praised them, the Educational Centres were losing support. Although wider use of existing facilities seemed economical, costs had risen from $3,700 during 1902-1903 to almost $24,000 two years later. As important, the Centres occupied a kind of no-man's land between the formal educational system and philanthropy, satisfying neither side. Largely autonomous at a time of growing school centralization, they seemed administratively inefficient. They conflicted, moreover, with the professionalization of the schools. In 1904 Superintendent Seaver justified using inexperienced college graduates to teach English to immigrant adults by suggesting that the Centres stood outside normal school regulations. "They could not," Seaver wrote, "be examined and certificated as teachers, nor employed as 34

Boston, School Documents, 1903, No. 14, pp. 24-27; ibid., 1905, No. 7, pp. 49-52; ibid., 1904, No. 13, pp. 45-62.

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teachers, in the ordinary sense of the term," and had thus been employed as "interpreters." A similar approach was adopted to allow guest lecturers and noncertified individuals with industrial experience to teach at the Centres.35 With Seaver's death in 1904, after twenty-four years as Boston's Superintendent of Schools, challenge to the Evening Centres' costs and unprofessional nature substantially increased. Late in 1904 a uniform set of rules and regulations was promulgated, with the Centres now forbidden to impinge on the offerings of the regular evening schools. Financial pressures, new Superintendent Conley reported, forced a choice among alternatives. Funds for the new activities meant cutbacks in regular evening classes, and unless "a more liberal allowance" was made to the School Department "from the general tax levy, . . . these new and highly valuable educational features must be very materially restricted, if not entirely abandoned." Conley's fears proved accurate. In 1906, with the election of a new School Committee dedicated to economy, expertise, and centralized administration, the Educational Centres were closed.36 Although the "open schoolhouse" ideal was infrequently discussed between 1906 and 1910, concern over greater community participation continued. In December, 1907, a group of "good school" reformers organized the Boston Home and School Association and elected philanthropist Mrs. Quincy Adams Shaw its president. Committed to making parents more knowledgeable about the schools, and therefore more supportive, the Association published a monthly newsletter, recommended children's and parent's books, investigated child attendance at Boston theaters, distributed seeds for home and school gardens, arranged school art exhibitions, and propagandized for improved building sanitation. By 1909 it had established branches in eighteen school districts, each parents' group meeting ap35

36

Ibid., 1904, No. 3, pp. 35-38; ibid., 1903, No. 2, pp. 12-13; ibid., 1904, No. 13, pp. 61-62. Ibid., 1905, No. 7, pp. 51-52; Smith, "Efficiency vs. Community," pp. 46-49.

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proximately once a month for discussion and entertainment. One branch even held a neighborhood improvement contest with prizes for the best-kept home and flower, vegetable, and window box gardens.37 The Association's activities, implicitly and explicitly, called for the opening of school facilities to community groups and an expanded role for the school in the neighborhood. The notion of extended responsibility was reinforced in 1908-1909 when the School Committee allowed the North American Civic League for Immigrants to sponsor a series of illustrated public lectures directed at non-Englishspeaking adults. The League had been organized in 1907 by New England businessmen to expose conditions among the immigrant masses and to gain support for intensive Americanization programs. By 1910 it had assumed the leadership of Boston's immigrant aid organizations and was sponsoring citizenship lectures in seven cities in Massachusetts. The League viewed the extended school movement almost solely in terms of the foreign-born and claimed that the resolution of social problems caused by adult immigrants could not be postponed until their children were Americanized. Formal evening classes had proven inadequate. Rooms for the young did not attract adults; nor had the teaching been effective. The League thus requested school buildings for more informal programs: foreignlanguage talks on American customs and institutions.38 By 1910 requests to use school facilities during free hours had enormously increased, and the School Committee moved toward reinstituting community social centers. In 1911 the Committee allowed the Women's Municipal League to open an evening center in the immigrant-working-class East Boston area. Held in the local high school, with a director 37

38

Boston, School Documents, 1909, No. 13, pp. 122-128; Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant, pp. 341-343. Edward Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York, Columbia University Press, 1948), pp. 3 8 - 4 9 ; William J. Mann, "Extending the Use of School Houses," Boston Common, Sept. 10, 1910, pp. 8-9, Sept. 17, 1910, pp. 12-13.

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who had established a reputation for taking charge of "unmanageable boys," the Municipal League's center focused primarily on teen-agers who did not attend school. The inculcation of group values ("cooperative helpfulness") was stressed and contrasted to the normal conditions of urban life. As had occurred earlier, the center was conceived in terms of community uplift and identification, a place where ethnic and social class lines were erased. "We have no Irish clubs, or German clubs, or Hebrew clubs—they are all American clubs," the director told one reporter.39 The success of the East Boston center increased pressure for more formal and extensive commitment to school community centers. Following a legislative act in 1912 authorizing the School Committee to appropriate two cents on every $1,000 of the city's net valuation—about $30,000 annually—for extended use of the schools, three new centers in addition to that in East Boston were placed under the authority of a newly created school department. "There is no movement before the American people," the department's director wrote,". . . from which more is hoped than the social center . . . From its underlying motive, that of catching up the resources that lie in the expenditure of leisure time and spontaneously focusing those resources on contemporary social progress, many a thinker goes so far as to assert that the movement will play a very decided part in the future social, political, industrial and moral development of this country." The center movement, built upon the public-school system—"the exponent of an absolutely democratic institution which typifies the American ideal"—was awakening that sense of community analogous to the "rub-shoulder camaraderie of the village of a generation ago when . . . neighbors . . . were bound together by all that there is in group cooperation." Drawn together by wholesome recreation and informal educational opportuni39

"East Boston's Social Center," Boston Common, Feb. 24, 1912, pp. 4 - 5 ; Women's Municipal League of Boston, Bulletin (Nov., 1910), pp. 2 3 - 2 5 ; ibid., (Mar., 1911), pp. 1 8 - 2 0 ; ibid., (Nov., 1911), pp. 1 8 - 1 9 ; ibid. (May, 1912), pp. 6 - 2 4 .

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ties, members of the community would discuss their common interests and "the improvement of civic life." 40 The social center movement in Boston and to a lesser extent in other cities in the state made manifest many of the themes altering urban public education. The expectations that school and community be integrated, that the school's responsibilities extend beyond the classroom, and that the Americanization of the foreign-born be formalized shaped the concept of the wider use of the school. Yet the movement to make schools community centers never really flourished. It culminated in little more than the nominal opening of school buildings for recreational and educational purposes. Many in a neighborhood, especially in immigrant areas, did not identify with the public school, and, indeed, their notion of community involved the maintenance of group and parochial loyalties. The controlled and uplifting school center activities never successfully competed with commercial and street attractions. Interest groups often had dissimilar objectives. The New Bedford School Committee balanced requests for school facilities from the American Civic Alliance, the Y.M.C.A., the Athletic Field Fund, and the Socialist party. Despite the assertions of social center advocates that civic issues were nonpartisan, in practice this rarely proved true. "If you get into politics," one Boston center director reported, "one side is sure to have the better of things, and the rest of the people won't pay to support a school for their political opponents." Moreover, the rhetoric of responsiveness to community desires stood against the a priori definition of standards by school officials. As one club leader in a South Boston center put it, "the part of the work that fascinates me most is the opportunity I have of instilling culture. It is really shocking 40

Boston, School Documents, 1915, No. 17, pp. 42-43, 128-149; ibid., 1913, No. 10, pp. 116-121; Frank Dazey, "The School Centre Experiment in South Boston," unpub. paper written for Social Ethics I, Dec. 17, 1912, in Harvard College Library; Mary P. Follett, Evening Centers: A i m s and Duties of Managers and Leaders

City of Boston Printing Office, 1913).

Therein (Boston,

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how little the people here know of good literature. Their customary dramatic fare is the moving picture house, and their dramatic ideal the vaudeville theatre . . . I am trying to give my class a real appreciation of good literature, but it's a rather discouraging task at times." Standards, an increasing number of schoolmen believed, could be assured only through centralizing authority and professional certification, both antagonistic to the flexible, informal, community-oriented expectations of the early social center movement. Finally, the public-school centers increasingly emphasized self-support, the financing of club and group activities through dues and profit-making functions, thereby eliminating certain members of the community. That selection mechanism seriously hindered the full establishment of common school centers for all.41 In the elementary and secondary schools, children received instruction in the processes of becoming Americans and in what being an American involved. The teaching of behavior and its corollary, the belief that only in the school setting could the ideals of American life be communicated to the urban dweller, were becoming pervasive features of Massachusetts' public education. In the day schools these themes became manifest in the growing importance of American history and in the emergence of civics courses. The study of American history had always been valued for its mental discipline and civic inspiration, a way of instilling national pride and solidifying group loyalties. Its first and main object, reported a committee of the Boston School Board in 1907, "is that the pupils may know the conditions of their country in the past, . . . may realize the struggles and heroism of the previous generations which 41

Dazey, "School Centre Experiment," pp. 7, 16; Boston Finance Commission, Report of a Study of Certain Phases of the Public School System of Boston (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1916), pp. 66-68; N e w Bedford, "Minutes of the School Committee," Sept. 23, Oct. 7, 1912, Feb. 14, Mar. 14, Apr. 25, May 9, 1913, in Offices of the School Committee, N e w Bedford; Cambridge, School Report, 1916, pp. 46-49; Smith, "Efficiency vs. Community," pp. 50-56.

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produced the present glorious heritage, and, finally, that they may grow to feel that sacredness of the hard-won peace, and prosperity and comfort of to-day, and their own responsibility toward the continuation of it." History was recommended by John Fiske for its ability "to arouse [the student's] interest and stimulate his faculties to healthful exercise," revealing, Brown University's President declared, the anachronisms of the present and offsetting contemporary materialism. Reading about the nation's past, one of the country's most prolific textbook authors claimed, proved that "America Means Opportunity." "Here every advantage is open. Education is absolutely free; millions of acres of Western land are free . . . Here every law springs directly from the will of the majority."42 During periods of social tension the American past seemed especially relevant. It revealed the country's common value system, its progress, and its spiritual unity. Concerned over immigration into the state, the Massachusetts legislature added American history to the public school's required course of study in 1857. In the late nineteenth century, with immigration increasing and social divisions becoming more apparent, the state again turned to the study of history to assure allegiance. "If one of the functions of the public schools is to make loyal American citizens of the children of foreigners," Springfield's Superintendent of Schools wrote in 1892, "certainly the teaching of our country's history would seem to be the most effective means of accomplishing this purpose." In Boston at the end of the 1880's conflict between Catholics and Protestants over the teaching of medieval history increased American history's importance in the curriculum; all sides could agree on its 42

Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 5, p. 78; John Fiske, A History of the United States for Schools (Boston, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1901), pp. iii-iv; E. Benjamin Andrews, "The Indispensableness of Historical Studies for Teachers," American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses, 1889, p. 2; D. H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of American History (Boston, 1891), p. 359; Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 3-4.

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utility. 43 School history books now added to the chronicle of wars and presidential administrations discussions of social life. Footnotes, supplementary reading lists, and suggested research topics were introduced into the leading textbooks. Technological advancement became as important as politico-spiritual contributions to America's development. 44 The changing pedagogy of biography was one measure of the importance attached to American history. Biography had always been inspirational, an object lesson in "courage, selfdenial, fidelity to trust, perseverance, patriotism, humanity." A way of securing the reader's attention—schoolchildren had an "unfailing interest in biography," one textbook author declared—it had a long tradition of giving "vitality" to historical writing and was a means of personalizing national unity. But if biography was heroic, it now noted the human and "real life" qualities of its subjects. Too much can be made of this. William Penn, "an excellent scholar" who "spoke five or six languages," "was fond of out-of-door sports, rode well, danced well, was a good sportsman, and a favorite wherever he went," could hardly be identified with. But educators were also determined to provide some means whereby schoolchildren could imitate as well as idolize. They hoped to encourage "a feeling of friendly familiarity with the heroes of our nation," making the past real and "peopled by live human beings like ourselves." 43

44

Massachusetts, Acts and Resolves of the General Court, 1857, chap. 206; Thomas Balliet, in Journal of Education, 35 (1892), 275; Boston, School Documents, 1902, No. 15, pp. 11-12. On the Travis-Swinton affair in Boston over the teaching of medieval history, see Isabella MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal: Boston Public Schools, 1888-1891," unpub. honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1967, in Radcliffe College Archives, pp. 69-70; Lois B. Merk, "Boston's Historic Public School Crisis," New England Quarterly, 31 (1958), 172-199; Boston, School Documents, 1889, No. 11; ibid., 1890, Nos. 8, 13; Solomon Schindler, "The Study of History in the Public Schools," Arena, 1 (1889), 41-54. Contrast John J. Anderson, A Grammar School History of the United States (New York, 1869), a widely used textbook in Massachusetts just after the Civil War, with Montgomery, Leading Facts of American History, or Edward Channing, A Students' History of the United States (New York, Macmillan Company, 1901), two popular texts at the turn of the century.

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Biography brought the individual into both the noble and the everyday activities of the great, synthesizing the inspirational and the practical. Although a certain ambiguity existed over the place of the individual at a time when professional historical scholarship emphasized institutional development and the role of underlying forces, in the school textbooks biography seemed a clear statement to the child that he was responsible for his own behavior, that his chances for success lay in his actions, and that society had a stake in those decisions.45 Biography was not the sole means whereby history and civics merged, the past becoming a guide to action in the present. Even more important were the loss of chronology, the disappearance of time, and the appearance of ahistorical history in the classroom. History was seen as a mirror or, more accurately, as a reflection of what one wished to see in the present. Alternatively, the past became a way of tracing the origin and growth of a contemporary phenomenon. In its most extreme form, the study of history became a selective process of the recognizable. Noting for example, that some material on ancient and medieval history was included in a course of study in United States history, the Cambridge School Department declared "those features of ancient and medieval life have been illustrated which explain either important elements of our civilization or which show how the movement for discovery and colonization originated." "When we come to the jury system in the reign of King Henry II," one writer in the History Teacher's Magazine declared in 1909, "it is pertinent and profitable to digress into a clear discussion of the jury of 45

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1889-1890, p. 1 4 9 ; Eva March Tappan, Our Country's Story: An Elementary History of the United States (Boston, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1902), pp. iii, 9 9 ; Horace E. Scudder, A History of the United States of America (New York, American Book Company, 1907), p. v ; Boston, School Documents, 1907, No. 5, p. 79. The textbooks and authors cited above and those referred to below were widely used in Massachusetts' public schools between 1880 and 1915. On biography as inspiration and individual responsibility, see Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912), pp. 2 2 2 - 2 2 5 .

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today . . . " The marathon runner of ancient Greece and the telegraph, another wrote, should be treated analogously: "Why do we begin west of the Indian peninsula, and ignore the Hindoos, the Chinese, the Japanese? Because these people are out of the great stream of development. The progressive life of today's world owes little to them, if anything." History courses should cover only those nations which have had "a direct connection with us."46 In part, this concern with evolution and analogy reflected the impact of Darwinism on historical scholarship. History became a seamless web of institutional development, its traditions and events immediately influential on the present. "The history of a nation is the development of that nation. It is a process. It is one thing—an unfolding from a germ," its lesson the elaboration of a nation's unity, George Martin told a gathering of educators in 1884. Narratives of past events that simply showed the relationship of a particular historical situation, Martin wrote six years later, were no longer adequate. History had to be presented as evolution, "conceived as a process by which one thing (viz., the colonial germ, simple and rudimentary) became another wellknown thing (viz., our country as it is to-day), . . . [providing thereby] a singleness of thought which is conducive to clearness and to interest." To aid students in seeing the immediacy of the past, "the historian fixes upon those [facts] only which he thinks will help him show the grander features of a people's origin, rise, progress, and vicissitudes," Frank A. Hill, one of Massachusetts' most prominent educators, explained to teachers about to use John Fiske's History of the United States.47 The commitment to finding the present in the past led 46

47

Cambridge, Provisional Course of Study in United States Hi story, 1922, p. 8; C. B. Newton, "English History in the Secondary School," History Teachers Magazine, 1 (1909), 34-35; William Fairley, "Ancient History in the Secondary School," ibid., 8, 61. George Martin, "Special Preparation for Citizenship," American Institute of Instruction, Proceedings and Addresses, 1884, p. 76; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1889-1890, p. 150; Frank A. Hill, in Fiske, History, p. xix; John Higham et ai., History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 94-95.

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some educators to question whether history should even begin by studying previous generations. Former United States Commissioner of Education John Eaton told the readers of the Journal of Education in 1892 that the best way to teach history was to begin with the "near in place and time," an argument that received even greater prominence after 1900. Undoubtedly the most extreme form of this approach came from David Snedden, Massachusetts' Commissioner of Education from 1910 to 1916. For Snedden history was simply the searching of the past for what society wanted to establish in the present. History teachers should thus know the values they wished to inculcate and direct their lessons toward those ends. "Having once conceived of the citizen as we should like to have him," Snedden told a gathering of the New England History Teachers Association in 1914, "we can work back and by analysis find the numberless specific forms of training by which we can produce this type." "We do not need chronological order. My idea is that instead of taking history in your secondary schools and teaching it as history in chronological order, at first you draw up a definite purpose, and then you take whatever you are working on and draw upon history for material."48 Snedden's blunt and crass indictment of historical scholarship and his call to compress all history into educational sociology and current events was challenged. A generation of professional historians continued to argue for the sacredness of the past, and most teaching remained chronological and factual. But Snedden did reflect an increasing concern with the present and the explicit teaching of behavior among Massachusetts' educators. Nowhere was this more evident than in the introduction of civics into the publicschool curriculum. 48

John Eaton, "Teaching Patriotism and Current Events," Journal of Education, 35 (1892), 199-201; David Snedden, "The Purpose in History Teaching," History Teacher's Magazine, 5 (1914), 186; David Snedden, "The Teaching of History in Secondary Schools," ibid., 277-282. For a critique of Snedden's approach, see George L. Burr, "What History Shall We Teach?" ibid., 283-287.

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Before the Civil War the term "civics" was not used. Until the end of the nineteenth century courses on civil government discussed formal institutions and, to a lesser extent, political theory, particularly as found in the Constitution. George Martin's textbook, Civil Government, published in 1875, devoted itself to such broad concepts as the source of authority in the state, the forms, functions, and obligations of government, and the nature and duties of citizenship. Combining an emphasis on governmental structures with political theory, Martin's text traced the origins of American government in England and the colonies, the workings of its various departments, and the role of the Constitution. Confident of American unity and the soundness of political institutions—the Civil War had only strengthened his optimism—Martin raised philosophical questions about the "duty of revolution" when government "fails to meet its obligations to people." The rebel, he maintained, was not easily classified; George Washington was both a criminal and a patriot depending upon one's viewpoint. When he turned to government itself, as in his chapter on elections and nominations, Martin elaborated its structure and how it functioned. The legal qualifications to vote, methods of registering and voting, the certification of votes, and the convention as a nominating institution, Martin suggested, were the bases of American politics. Though "at different times the United States has been called upon . . . to protect the State governments from domestic violence," he expressed little concern with such issues. As a textbook for citizenship, Civil Government was a study in self-satisfaction, a portrayal of a self-regulating system with only limited problems. Conflict, the threat of division, even after a civil war, seemed distant and abstract.49 Less than a decade later, however, Martin was less sanguine about American society. Special preparation for citizenship was no longer a luxury, but a necessity, he told 49

George H. Martin, A Text Book on Civil Government in the United States (New York, 1875), pp. 50, 219-224, 300; Alexander J. Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts (New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1911), pp. 142-143.

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the American Institute of Instruction in 1884. Elementary school children had to be introduced as early as possible to the importance of the "public good," "the subordination of the individual to the public," and respect for and obedience to the law. Before they left school, children should know the rights and duties of citizenship and the need to protect their liberty from threats by neighbor, government, and foreign nations. "The people of this country," Martin declared, "need political education more than they do industrial education . . . every large city in the country is ruled by its slums." It was, he argued, poor public policy to educate youth for vocational opportunities "and then leave them to be, first the tools and then the victims of any blatant demagogue who chose to trumpet himself as the champion of labor." The situation was critical. "City life is unfavorable to it [patriotism], so is business life; the love of money excludes it. An alien population cherishing a worthy love for a mother-country across the sea, experiences but slowly . . . 'the explosive power of a new affection.' All these considerations point toward danger unless the schools do something." Three years later Martin wrote in the Journal of Education that civics instruction had to show the threats to stability that anarchy and anarchists posed. "The community is so honeycombed by a maudlin sentiment of sympathy for those men, that the teachers cannot be too earnest in impressing the truth." Through the 1890's Martin continued this now-frantic tone on the perils facing the country. At a National Education Association meeting in 1895 he called for a new wave of patriotic citizenship in which teachers taught their students how to meet and conquer the dangers of social disharmony, modeling their lessons after such men as William the Silent, Cromwell, Lafayette, Bolivar, Washington, "all men with swords in their hands."50 60

Martin, "Special Preparation for Citizenship," pp. 71-75, 80-82, "Occasional Lessons in Civics: Anarchy and Anarchists," Journal of Education, 26 (1887), 210-211, and "New Standards of Patriotic Citizenship," National Education Association, Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 1895, pp. 134r-139.

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This impending sense of anarchy, doubts that without proper educational programs the American experiment might not last, was hardly novel. New, however, were the explicit concern with technique and the idea that individuals could learn citizenship only in the schools. Handbooks instructing teachers on the mechanics of shaping citizenship appeared. Educators could no longer count on inculcating principles of behavior; they had to teach conduct. Politics as abstract moral behavior gave way to discussions of the corrupt ward boss. Knowledge of what voting involved as a function of government was supplemented by instruction on whom one should vote for. It was no use, John Fiske wrote in his school text, Civil Government in the United States, to limit citizenship to the broad themes of national policy and federal institutions. "Questions of civil government are practical business questions, the principles of which are as often and as forcibly illustrated in a city council or a county board of supervisors, as in the House of Representatives in Washington." Offering their students exposure to the workings of the national government, the new civics* educators placed local issues, indeed, local corruptions, at the forefront of their lessons, seeking to instill behavior patterns to overcome the deleterious effects of the immediate social environment. "It behooves the teachers of the United States," A Course in Citizenship concluded, "to begin the foundations of such a crusade [for better, more responsible citizens] with the children." On the eve of World War I, Massachusetts' educators, enlarging their conception of childhood to include adult immigrants, had already begun their crusade. The schools, Commissioner Snedden declared, were ready to undertake a more extensive and more defined teaching of community civics. America's entry into war built upon that preparedness. 51 el

John Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins (Boston, 1890), pp. viii-ix; Ella Lyman Cabot et ai„ A Course in Citizenship (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), p. 129; Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report, 1915-1916, p. 58; U.S. Bureau of Education, The Teaching of Community Civics, Bulletin No. 23 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1915).

IX The Shape of Urban Education: A Retrospect Between 1870 and 1915 the progress of Massachusetts' schools was obvious. The total number of students and teachers had more than doubled. Less than 70 percent of the state's five- to fifteen-year-old population was enrolled in 1870; more than 90 percent attended forty-five years later. High school attendance had increased from 11,500 to 81,800, expenditures per public-school pupil from around twenty dollars to almost fifty dollars. The Commonwealth had also assumed national leadership, its schoolmen participating on every major education committee since the Civil War. Individuals who were prominent in education schools and departments at leading universities had started their careers in Massachusetts. Horace Mann's claim that common schools were essential to social unity and economic prosperity had become a national ideology, while compulsory attendance and secondary schools, both supported first in Massachusetts, were now nationally accepted. The state's philanthropists stimulated innovation and experimentation where public resources lagged. Elizabeth Peabody had been an influential force in the kindergarten movement. John D. Runkle was second only to Calvin Woodward of St. Louis in propagandizing for manual education. The Douglas Commission of 1906 offered the first major pronouncement on vocational education; its arguments, categories, and documentation were apparent in the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act a decade later. Boston's Vocation Bureau influenced the vocational guidance movement. Finally, Massachusetts could be particularly proud of its work in Americanizing the foreign-born. The 1887 act requiring that alien minors attend evening schools and subsequent legislation formalized the growing association between citizenship training and the classroom. By World War I schoolmen around the country doubted that immigrants could become Americans without spending time in school. Yet all was not progress. Local control continued to hinder effective administration and the development of pro-

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fessional standards. Tax support was inequitably distributed across the state. The education of immigrants remained confused and unsatisfactory. While urban growth had enlarged the tax base and allowed schoolmen to grade their schools and introduce specialized curricula and teaching techniques, it overextended facilities and accentuated financial problems. Between 1870 and 1915 no city in Massachusetts could accommodate all its school-age population. Classrooms of over sixty pupils were common, and the financial drain was enormous. In 1910-1911 almost 25 percent of Massachusetts' tax resources went into supporting schools. Since educational funds were tied to property valuation, educators looked to expanding property values. They fought for a higher share of the taxes and pleaded with philanthropists for contributions, but the pressure on financial resources remained high. Other sources of tension existed. The schools were pressed to aid in the solution of social problems, but Massachusetts' schoolmen expressed uncertainty over the correct approaches. They often adopted policies fostered outside the schools by social reformers and philanthropists whose concerns were frequently hostile to the educators' professional independence. Optimism in the school's ability to reshape the urban environment was, moreover, difficult to sustain. School systems rarely supported innovations to the extent that reformers desired. Even where educational reforms were implemented, the problems of the city and immigrant life remained, and the schoolmen had to search for new responses. The massive expansion of Massachusetts' educational system brought children into the schools who had rarely appeared before. It raised questions about the kind of knowledge required, traditional standards and goals, and teaching methods. Immigration meant illiteracy, high birth rates, alien mores, language difficulties, and poverty. The difficulties had appeared before, but never so insistently or with so much at stake. Interest groups, good government reformers, and those who bore the moral conscience of the community demanded special instruction in temperance,

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religion, civics, and health. Through compulsory attendance they gained a captive audience that could be shaped to the community's standards. Through programs like the kindergarten they expected to shape childhood behavior and educate the home to its responsibilities. Invariably the call went out to broaden school responsibilities. Education had become a mass institution ; its survival, critics and supporters agreed, depended upon its ability to secure social progress and social stabililty. Nowhere was this more evident than in the contrasts Massachusetts' educators drew between the rural past and the urban-industrial present. America, they claimed, had once been homogeneous and harmonious. Its institutions —family, church, workshop, town meeting, school— shared in the education of its people. That balanced interdependence had been rudely shattered by industrial and urban growth. While industrialism brought material benefits, it disrupted social relationships. The factory divorced individuals from one another, isolated them from the products of their work, and undermined traditional notions of labor. Satisfaction and pride in work disappeared when a man was tied to a machine he could not control and when he rarely observed or understood the work process. The city was artificial and unhealthy, its environment a hothouse for immorality and waste. Whereas few discrepancies of wealth or ethnic conflict existed in the rural setting, the city was disharmony itself. In an earlier period, moral and vocational learning were integral to daily activities. Now work and life were segregated, learning and school distinct. The street offered anarchy; the school stood as its ultimate opponent. These views received their fullest expression when educators discussed family life among the urban poor. The family, the schoolmen argued, was the basic unit of civilization. Properly functioning, it assured social stability, transmitting cultural values across generational lines. At home, youth learned of authority, understood its meaning, and incorporated its lessons for future use. Through the family's

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relationships with the external world, children were introduced to other, less parochial institutions. They became socialized, their thoughts and behavior shaped by more than self-centered needs. Under parental guidance, children learned their vocational obligations, were taught work skills, and understood that satisfactory adult relationships depended upon fulfilling vocational responsibilities. All this, the educators assumed, was essential to social harmony. Yet when they looked at urban family life in an industrializing society, they found little that was recognizable. The family had lost its economic functions: production occurred outside the home, and few parents had skills that could be transmitted or were worth transmitting. The factory laborer learned his job in a matter of hours. Ignorant of American society, the foreign-born could not act as agents of cultural continuity. Even where American needs were understood, tenements made sanitation difficult, insufficient income led to malnutrition, and work demands kept parents out of the home for long hours. The existing family could no longer be counted on for healthy socialization. This view of society explains much about the thrust of educational reform during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Reformers treated the factory, city, immigrants, and poverty synonymously. They failed to distinguish between social class and ethnicity and sought programs that would subsume all social conflict. They found the schools playing curious and confusing roles. While education furthered industrial growth, technological progress intensified the social changes that most disheartened the reformers. Machines isolated man from his work. Industrialism increased immigration and accentuated the problems of poverty and population density. Isolated institutions broke down, no longer socializing the young. While schools expanded individual opportunity, their success undermined the rural community that Americans cherished. Massachusetts' educators tried to overcome this paradox by reinvigorating the teaching of traditional values and by providing what was no longer available outside the classroom.

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They continued to believe in an organic society, assumed that industrialization was progress, and saw the school as a corrector of social dislocations.1 The notion of the school as a restorer of threatened social values continued to be an important theme well into the twentieth century. But after 1900 there was an increasing emphasis upon the identity of industrial progress and social stability. Training individuals for industrial needs became the surest way of preserving order in a hierarchical, bureaucratic society. The disruptions of industrialism were deemphasized; stability as a concomitant of continuing technological change was stressed. Vocational education replaced manual training with the claim that the school should not be in the business of restoring a sense of shared values to the family or curing the social effects of industrialization. America's problem was productivity, and the role of the school was to prepare each child for more efficient production. Within the school, children and teachers became categorized members of the plant; learning became preparation for each succeeding grade level. Educators talked about vocational training, guidance, and measurement more than social amelioration. They spoke less about social disruption and more about economic efficiency, and they sought to integrate the schools into the industrial society. The responses varied. Great emphasis was placed on educational administration, the adoption of uniform curricula and teaching standards, certification procedures, and more efficient plant use. School boards were changed from ward representation to small centrally elected agencies which now theoretically made decisions based upon system-wide needs. Before 1870 the superintendency of schools hardly existed. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had become 1

Michael B. Katz, The irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 27-50, offers a similar assessment of pre-Civil War educational reformers.

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the most important office in the urban educational hierarchy, and under it stood a growing bureaucracy of administrative assistants. The new professionals took as their goals efficiency, regularity, and standardization. "The surest single test of the soundness of the underlying educational ideals and of the school practices which determine the quality of the education being offered in any State or community," declared Commissioner of Education Snedden, "is to be found in the character of the aims, means and methods of administration." 2 Although conflict periodically erupted between lay boards dedicated to economy and management and the educators who demanded certified competence and increased power, the exigencies of organizing unwieldy urban school systems and of protecting the schools from outside critics produced remarkably similar outlooks on educational policy. Laymen versus professionals rarely became a major concern. There were also pedagogical responses to the urbanindustrial environment. How to teach the child became an important question. Handbooks of pedagogical techniques and curricula guides appeared. Emphasis was laid on naturalness and warmth in the classroom, and there evolved alternatives to the parrotlike repetition of material. The classroom was projected as a home or a republic where more could be taught by building upon the child's needs, cooperation, and guidance than by autocracy. Disciplining the mind became secondary to teaching behavior, and work activities designed to integrate idea and act were introduced. These themes, however, never entirely dominated urban teaching. Classrooms remained formal, harsh, and cold. Teachers incorporated pedagogical innovations into their restricted views of the educational process. But the emphasis on methodology reflected the growing concern that the traditional classroom was not reaching the urban child, 2

Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual fleport of the Board of Education Together with the Annual fleport of the Secretary of the Board, 1914-1915, p. 22.

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that its autocratic discipline, excessive order, and enforced passivity risked alienating the child before the school could be effective. Teachers were told that the street was their primary enemy and that by failing to take account of its attractiveness to youth they risked failure in their most minimal efforts. The pedagogues thus tried to introduce a more natural and freer learning environment without, however, undermining the benefits derived from the traditional classroom. Their solution lay in stressing "internal" moral controls. The best environment inculcated self-discipline, order, and determination without obvious external imposition. Pedagogy became a means of channeling the child's natural interests into traditional ends. Nowhere was this more evident than in the emergence of the kindergarten and manual training. Since the child learned best what excited and interested him, pedagogical methods had to be flexible. The kindergarten sought this through "play," the child's spontaneous and active participation in what attracted him. While playing he learned about himself and the world around him. Symbolic material became actual objects ; the child imitated and worked at what he thought was real. He experimented with and tested his senses and physical prowess. Among his peers and under the guidance of a trained teacher-mother surrogate, he learned games that emphasized sharing, participation, and self-denial. The kindergartners advocated movement, happiness, and self-awareness. They introduced participation, discovery, and creativity to American pedagogical thought and made "warmth" a desirable characteristic of primary schooling. Yet these were most often justified as means to improve the teaching of order and obedience. Harmony in the classroom meant that the child would accept school as an alternative to the chaotic street. Attracting the child early meant reshaping his values and behavior patterns before they were perverted by urban life. Children who worked at their play would be better workers when they grew up ; they would have developed the initiative to complete their tasks. Primary teachers were

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assured that play was not detrimental to future schooling, that it was in fact highly disciplinary, and that kindergarten children would do better at their regular schoolwork than nonkindergartners. "The ordinary child remembers to be good," one kindergartner asserted, but "the kindergarten child forgets to be naughty." 3 With that assurance, play could be accepted—provided it was contained within structured limits. The pedagogical justifications for manual training revealed similar concerns. In a society that offered undisciplined activity on the street, the schools risked obsolescence if they ignored physical needs. Children had once been active in the morally healthful surroundings of the home, workshop, and fields. Now, however, homes were cramped and often unsanitary. Workshops had been replaced by factories, and the child was playing his life out on the streets—undisciplined and frequently at odds with the law. These conditions prevented the child from fulfilling his natural impulse to create and build, perverting it into destructiveness. Manual training would meet some of these needs. Fashioning objects out of wood, cardboard, or cloth provided an outlet for constructive exercise. Social worker Robert A. Woods wrote that manual training "is the enemy of indifference and willfulness, because every step requires self-control, thoughtfulness, care. A thing created means for the boy added self-respect." 4 To accomplish their manual tasks, children had to follow highly structured processes, graded to produce discipline and order. An appreciation of economy and a sense of productivity would emerge. For the urban poor, hand learning developed skills useful in the mechanical occupations they could expect to hold in the future. Finally, manual training used the hand to discipline the mind. It added tools to books as agents of classroom learning. As a pedagogic innovation, manual education thus synthesized responsiveness to the new environment—a 3

4

Alice W. Rollins, in The Kindergarten, ed. Kate Douglas Wiggin (New York, 1893), p. 2. Robert A. Woods, The City Wilderness (Boston, 1898), pp. 237-238.

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softening of formal teaching methods—and a reaffirmation of traditional moral values. Although the kindergarten and manual training sought traditional ends, their implementation introduced new themes to American education. The ideology of activity devalued the worth of books. Learning through play and hand tools might be as valid as learning through books, but schoolmen soon learned that the same knowledge was not transmitted. Nor were the same measures of learning applicable. While the kindergarten and manual training suggested only moderate changes in the existing evaluatory system—both would better accomplish what was normally expected—they ultimately provided support for differing standards of achievement. The new pedagogy legitimized interest and activity as essentials of learning. Curriculum had to reflect student needs, if only to attract and hold youth, and educators thus had to understand children as well as classroom subject matter. Happiness became a pedagogic value. Extracurricular activities, an attractive format, assumed major importance. Behavior—the translation of thought into immediate action—became a curricular goal. Pedagogy should incorporate "doing." Individuals should be able to see and touch what they learned, thus opening the way for a host of pedagogical innovations from play and manual training to school laboratories and educational trips. Pedagogical reform reflected a broader search for relevance. Criticized by outsiders, educators soon expressed concern that the school had become isolated from society, that its teaching methods and goals were not answering the needs of an urban-industrial environment. They responded with administrative and pedagogical changes, restructuring their institution and enlivening its teaching process. But more important, the concern for relevance sent educators into two areas infrequently entered before: social reformation and economic efficiency. The former revealed a combination of despair and optimism. Challenged to be relevant, educators adopted programs that claimed more

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than they could accomplish, that were soon found wanting, and that, once institutionalized, affected the schools far more than society's ills. The demand for economic efficiency similarly came from outside the school. Receiving its fullest expression in the vocational education movement, it pressed the educators into running their institutions as an extension of the industrial economy. Although few educators ever fully believed that schools would resolve social problems or that economic growth depended solely on their work, they soon found themselves enmeshed in a rhetoric of oversell: they claimed more than they could achieve, demanded increased responsibilities to strengthen their own stature, and, ironically, reinforced an ideology that threatened to overwhelm them with its obligations. The burden of social reform was strikingly revealed by the fate of the kindergarten movement. The advocates of preschooling for the urban poor raised a number of important questions about the relationship of education to social change: Could parents be taught through children? How could the school supplement the better aspects of family life and replace the latter's negative characteristics? How early should outside institutions intervene in the family, and what were the limits of such intervention? Kindergartens were seen, initially, as extensions of healthy family life. The teacher functioned as a complement to the mother, and her classroom was an enlarged family. As part of the philanthropic social settlement movement, however, the kindergarten turned from a supplementary to a surrogate role aimed primarily at replacing corrupt home values with ones more socially acceptable. The child brought his new knowledge and behavior attributes of his family and educated his parents to the mores of middle-class America. More directly, mothers' meetings, home visits, and lectures taught adults how to be parents. Philanthropically dominated before 1900, the kindergarten was committed to resuscitating the urban family, with the expectation that harmonious and healthy neighborhoods would emerge. Between 1890 and 1910 a number of public-school systems

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incorporated the kindergarten into their regular programs. Although the ideology of parental education and community reform initially remained, the schools soon found their institutional demands drawing them away from philanthropic goals. Unwilling to finance community participation by kindergarten teachers, iinding primary school faculty hostile to the kindergarten's special status, and becoming more concerned with articulating grade levels than bringing parents into the classroom, Massachusetts' educators made the kindergarten simply the first step of the grade school ladder. The change varied by city. Some school systems continued to affirm broad social goals; others retreated from the ideology of reform. All, however, terminated most of the practices that had involved the kindergarten in the community. An irony remained, nevertheless. Early childhood education had won its audience because it claimed it would reshape urban family life. Though the schools had given up that goal, such claims remained part of the legacy of the preschooling movement. The commitment to economic efficiency had equally important implications. Numerous studies at the turn of the century reinforced the long-accepted notion that schooling added to the individual's productivity and income. Education in this context usually referred to general schooling; higher levels of literacy, greater self-discipline, and more complete understanding of moral imperatives followed from the traditional classroom, and all made for better workers. Schools trained citizens in society's values and provided general skills sufficient for economic productivity. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the idea of a general relationship between work and learning came under attack. Increasingly, work meant understanding particular processes, having a skill specifically related to the market economy. Manual training raised, without resolving, this issue. Although hand learning was a confusing and all-encompassing movement that attracted pedagogical reformers, cultural Brahmins, and social philanthropists, its most influential

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early advocates were manufacturers who sought instruction in industrial drawing. A source of major controversy during the 1870's, drawing soon waned in importance once businessmen found the subject as taught in the schools insignificant for economic growth. But the debates over it and the other manual activities—woodworking, sewing, cooking—greatly confused the notion of economic relevance. Some educators argued that manual instruction was immediately marketable. New Bedford's School Committee, for example, commended sewing as a source of income. Nonetheless, before 1900, the teaching of job skills usually centered in the evening schools, and even there was subordinate to the Americanization of the foreign-born. As manual training spread, its advocates justified it less for economic reasons than as a means of social restoration— the reinvigoration of values being lost in the urban-industrial society. Those who understood the principles upon which objects were produced and could use their mind and hands in that process would be more responsible workers, and their work efficiency increased. While all individuals thus profited from exposure to hand learning, students whose future lay in mechanical employments, especially as unskilled workers, would gain the most since their classroom activities would be more closely related to their later work. Yet while Massachusetts' schoolmen acknowledged that manual training had economic returns, they emphatically rejected the notion that schools should teach particular job skills or act as extensions of the workplace. What seemed clear at the end of the nineteenth century, however, was soon revised. Economic relevance became defined by job competence and job placement, as Massachusetts' educators tried to adapt their schools to the industrial economy and prepare their students for particular economic roles. The older ideals of literacy and instruction in moral values as most productive of economic growth were overshadowed by demands for specific job training. Manual education's concern with the "principles of work" was attacked as a "cultural appetizer" with only limited rele-

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vance to the marketplace. "It seems," Robert Woods declared, "as if the old academic idea that there was something unacademic in studying anything that would later on be a means of earning bread and butter has been exaggerated in the development of the manual training system." The most important expression of these new concerns was the Douglas Commission report of 1906 which shaped educational developments in the state for more than a decade. Although moderate in many of its proposals, the report claimed that "the present public school system is aimed primarily to secure cultural and not industrial or vocational effects," and it urged the establishment of separate industrial education programs to teach individuals jobs. 5 The proposal to segregate vocational from academic schooling and the creation of a Commission on Industrial Education led to political struggles over who would control the state's educational system. But the conflicts were tied together by then commonly accepted assumptions: schools had to teach for the marketplace, and economic utility defined the validity of educational programs. In many ways the most profound examples of these trends were prevocational education and vocational guidance. The former made more explicit than ever before the role of the school as a selecting agency for the economy. Unlike trade schools and secondary level industrial programs, prevocationalism focused on those forced by compulsory attendance statutes to remain in school. Children not successful at the regular school course, those whose socioeconomic background suggested limited economic mobility, and those who were "manually-motivated"—the three groups were usually considered synonymous—should receive special training in line with their likely vocational opportunities. Before World War I the movement had not spread far beyond Boston. Most educators in Massachusetts doubted the 5

Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, "Hearings," Sept. 22, 1905, MS in Massachusetts State Library; Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report (Boston, 1906).

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efficiency of teaching actual job skills to twelve- to fourteenyear-olds. Many still adhered to earlier values of a common learning experience for the young. Some smarted under organized labor's criticisms that vocational education threatened to produce a vast pool of cheap, ill-trained labor. But an increasing number of schoolmen had begun to accept the idea that children should be segregated and given special educational programs on the basis of their probable economic destinations. Vocational guidance reinforced these tendencies for it sought the integration of schooling and the marketplace. In Boston the Vocation Bureau and other organizations studied local occupations and enumerated the personality characteristics and educational levels necessary for each. Children were counseled to fit their aspirations to these assessments and to ask themselves whether they could afford further schooling and what kind of schooling would be most useful. Schoolmen looked for similar information, hoping to find the vocational programs that promised the highest market returns. To assure high correlations between course work and occupational success, the educators turned to predictive criteria, tests that measured intelligence, personality, and skills, and helped counselors guide students into educational programs suited to their probable occupational ends. The full manifestation of these developments awaited the postwar years, but by 1915 the trends were clear. The philanthropic activities of the Vocation Bureau had been incorporated into Boston's public schools, and a Department of Educational Measurement was established. Other cities were moving in similar directions. The idea that schooling should foster easy transferral into the work economy and that vocational guidance assured an effective and efficient transfer had become an important theme in Massachusetts' public schools. The new shape of Massachusetts' public schools forced a redefinition of commonality and equality of educational opportunity. Before 1870 educators assumed that children attending the common school needed to learn the same

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things: the essentials of citizenship, morality, communication, and thought. The primary distinction lay in whether one attended or not rather than in what subjects or course of study one followed, and those concerned with schooling thus focused on more effective compulsory attendance laws. Except where social deviance was involved—uncontrollable children who might contaminate those around them—most educators supported the school as a common learning environment, and, as the rapid demise of the mill and factory schools in the 1870's suggested, explicit segregation by social class was unacceptable to the public. The development of a mass educational system, however, forced a reconsideration of these views. By 1900 Massachusetts' schools enrolled more than 90 percent of the sevento fourteen-year-old population; in the larger cities, the proportion was above 95 percent. Yet while universal schooling seemed almost complete, educators found serious deficiencies in the way schools functioned. Most children failed to complete the common school grades; many never even came close. For the children of immigrant parents the chances of achieving in the traditional school setting ran from unlikely to nearly impossible. In every city in Massachusetts large numbers of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds had completed less than five of the nine elementary grades; they would invariably drop out as they turned fourteen. The tensions produced by the expectations of universal schooling and the failure of most children to achieve led to changes in methodology and goals. Stress was placed upon responding to individual differences. Greater commitments were made to preparing youth for the job market. Pressure for curriculum differentiation intensified, especially on the basis of future occupational destinations. A new ideology emerged that emphasized achievement, measurement, differentiation, and efficiency. Seeking to synthesize individual development and social efficiency, educators categorized students on the basis of vocational potential and test measures and provided them with separate school programs. Commitment to a common curriculum and to the sharing of school opportunities among all children re-

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ceded before a definition of equality of educational opportunity that claimed separate places for separate kinds of children, necessary in a bureaucratic and specialized society. As part of this process of categorization and differentiation, the "manually-motivated," their futures often predicated upon their parents' backgrounds, received particular attention. Whatever the validity of vocational training—there was little testing of whether industrial education actually enhanced social mobility more than other kinds of schooling—the equation of "motor-mindedness" with children who had failed at the regular school course doomed vocational education to second-class status, a condition from which it never satisfactorily recovered. These developments remained incomplete before World War I. The integration of education and the economy, for example, never won total acceptance. Even the most committed vocational educators accepted gross occupational categories—industrial, commercial, academic-professional —rather than forcing detailed job preparation on the schools. Tradition and the expense of first-class shops limited commitment to vocational training. Industriousness, thrift, and competitiveness made for better workers, but many educators argued that these behavior characteristics were achievable through a nonvocational curriculum. Frequently such arguments became tied to professional prerogatives among the schoolmen. Programs that explicitly integrated school and industry—the cooperative plans in Beverly and Fitchburg and Boston's continuation schools—threatened institutional independence. Although they desired economic relevance, educators were unwilling to share decisionmaking powers any more than they had to. Finally, the full implications of economic efficiency were unacceptable to those who tried to blend mandatory schooling and common value training. Teaching for jobs meant dividing the school population by probable economic destination. The earlier this occurred, the more clearly traditional notions of commonality were rejected and the more segregation by future social class was accepted. Although a growing num-

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ber of their practices moved in this direction, many Massachusetts' schoolmen avoided such an explicit break with their common school heritage. By 1915 urban education in Massachusetts had adopted two seemingly contradictory views of American society. On the one hand, it gloried in the progress and techniques of industrial America. Schoolmen likened their institution to the efficiently run industrial factory. They saw themselves as the shapers of the raw material which, when emerging as finished products, fulfilled the needs of a hierarchical and specialized society. Their primary concern, therefore, became the earliest possible differentiation of children: how to determine the categories into which students would fall and what kinds of schooling to provide for those categories. On the other hand, these educators rejected the urban environment in which they worked as implacably hostile to socially valuable schooling, and they sought to withdraw the child and the school from this environment. Frustrated by their attempts at urban reform through educational change, and, indeed, by the attempts at community building, they ceased to believe in the possibilities of reform, and they turned to isolating the city school from urban life. They thereby hoped to synthesize service and institutional independence and offered the urban school as a glorification and an opponent of social trends. In the decades after World War I greater calls for service would be combined with increasing demands for professional independence, and educators would accept ever larger responsibilities. Often they overstated what they could do and defended failure by blaming their consumers, the urban poor. Because they believed that democracy and economic efficiency demanded public education, they rarely questioned their roles. Who benefited? How did achievement take place? What alternative forms of schooling were viable? These were the unasked questions. They would become the burden of urban education in the twentieth century.

Bibliographie Note and Index

Bibliographie Note

The literature of American education is overwhelming. The decades surrounding 1900 saw the appearance of numerous educational commission reports, school periodicals, and a vast increase in lay concern about the schools. By 1915 formal education touched almost every American family. Most of the published material, however, is repetitious. Questions quickly took a standard format; those for and against marshaled the same arguments ad infinitum. Only the most useful sources consulted for this study are therefore listed below. My original dissertation at Harvard University, entitled "The Burden of Urban Education: Public Schools in Massachusetts, 1870-1915," contains a more comprehensive bibliography, although the notes to the present publication provide almost as full coverage. The most important documents were the writings of educators and school committees. The Proceedings and Addresses of the American Institute of Instruction, a bastion of New England traditionalism, and the Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Education Association provided insight into the general issues of American education. While they do not make clear the relationship between expectations and practices, they reveal the professionals' priorities. This is also true of the Journal of Education (between 1875 and 1880, The New England Journal of Education), which covered New England intensively and spoke for moderate reform from within the educational establishment. The single most useful source was the Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board. While the Board and its Secretary (after 1910, replaced by a Commissioner of Education) had few coercive powers, their reports served as a forum for analyzing major educational concerns. The complete summaries of the annual school census published in the reports furnish a wealth of data on enrollment, expenditures, and a variety of other issues. The Board's agents surveyed conditions in the schools throughout the state and argued for centralized school districts, improved teaching, new curriculum, the extension of mass public education through high school, more adequate funding, and most other developments to improve the status of public education. The annual reports of local school committees and superintendents of schools allowed for a comparison of educational ideology and actual school changes. They reveal the enormous difficulties confronting school administrators and illuminate the flow of educational ideas through the state. Though there were occasional conflicts, the reports of the lay boards and professional educators reflected common positions on most issues and were

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thus used interchangeably. The school reports of Massachusetts' largest cities were studied and included: Boston, Cambridge, Fall River, Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, Springfield, and Worcester. Boston also published a comprehensive collection of Documents of the School Committee which included auditors' reports, teacher and book lists, and special reports on such problems as corporal punishment, manual training, kindergartens, sanitation, high schools, and almost every other aspect of administering a large urban school system. The Boston Finance Commission's Report on the Boston School System (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1911) and Report of a Study of Certain Phases of the Public School System of Boston (Boston, City of Boston Printing Office, 1916) added further to an understanding of that city's schools. Although the North Bennet Street Industrial School was not a public institution, its Annual Reports available at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contained material on philanthropic aid to education, educational reform for social amelioration, and the kindergarten, manual training, and vocational education movements. The published works of Massachusetts' educators proved especially helpful in establishing the schoolmen's ideology and often provided an overview of major developments. Among the most important were those by State Board of Education Secretary George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1904), Essentials of Education (Boston, Gorham Press, 1932), and Industrial Education and the Public Schools: Address Before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association (Boston, State Printers, 1908); Brookline Superintendent of Schools Samuel T. Dutton, Social Phases of Education in the School and the Home (New York, 1899); Harvard University educator Paul H. Hanus, Adventuring in Education (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1937), Beginnings in Industrial Education and Other Educational Discussion (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908), and Educational Aims and Educational Values (New York, Macmillan Company, 1908); William A. Mowry, Recollections of a New England Educator, 1838-1908 (New York, Silver, Burdett and Company, 1908); and Colin Scott, Social Education (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1908). Marian A. Dogherty, 'Scusa Me Teacher (Francestown, N.H., Marshall Jones Co., 1943), is a delightful reminiscence by a teacher in Boston's immigrant North End. The valuable works by Albert P. Marble, Worcester's Superintendent of Schools, and Meyer Bloomfield of Boston's Vocation Bureau are cited below in the sections on manual training and vocational guidance. Warren Burton, The District School as It Was, ed. Clifton Johnson (Bos-

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ton, 1897), portrays the antebellum rural school. Two individuals who did not consider themselves educators, but were nonetheless closely involved in Massachusetts' school affairs, offered an excellent perspective on the roots and goals of the educational reform movement: Boston school committeeman Joseph Lee, Constructive and Preventive Philanthropy (New York, Macmillan Company, 1902), Play as an Antidote to Civilization (1911), and "Kindergarten Principles in Social Work," Charities, 11 (Dec. 5, 1903), 532-537; and social worker Robert A. Woods, The City Wilderness (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1898), and Americans in Progress (Boston, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903). Pauline Agassiz Shaw, Tributes Paid Her Memory (Boston, McGrath-Sherrill Press, 1917), and Mary Hemenway, A Memorial of the Life and Benefactions of Mary Hemenway, 1820-1894 (Boston, privately printed, 1927), deal with the lives of two philanthropists who played major roles in sponsoring educational innovations that blurred the line between public and private throughout the period. Walter Drost, David Snedden and the Cult of Efficiency (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), places Snedden's role as Massachusetts' Commissioner of Education in the context of his other work. Two hagiographic biographies of Boston School Committee members are Henry G. Pearson, Son of New England: James Jackson Storrow (Boston Thomas Todd Company, Printers, 1932), and Chauncy J. Hawkins, Samuel Billings Capen (Boston, Pilgrim Press, 1914). The quality of manuscript collections greatly varied. Most excursions proved fruitless, but a number were of inestimable value. Outstanding were the papers of the North Bennet Street Industrial School, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Women's Education Association on deposit at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Also useful were the manuscript records of the New Bedford School Committee on file at the Committee's headquarters in New Bedford and the Lucy Wheelock Papers at Wheelock College in Boston. Local newspapers turned out to be disappointing. Although most papers printed summaries of school committee meetings, educational issues did not receive much attention. Unless a specific issue became controversial and could be followed on a daily basis, newspaper searches were time consuming and produced negligible returns. Among the papers that provided some material were the Boston Transcript, Cambridge Chronicle, Lynn Item, New Bedford Morning Mercury, and New Bedford Standard-Times. Assorted government documents yielded information not readily available elsewhere. The U. S. Bureau of the Census surveys and special reports between 1870 and 1925 and the Massa-

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chusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor's Census of Massachusetts between 1875 and 1915 provided statistical data. The most important government report was "The Children of Immigrants in the Schools," U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports, Vols. XIX-XXXIII (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911). Because the Commission's summaries are so badly biased, historians have neglected the excellent data included in the reports. Anyone interested in the relationship between ethnicity and schooling in public and private education, however, overlooks these volumes at considerable risk. The Documents and Journals of the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives contain information on legislative proposals and decisions. Since the Commonwealth prided itself on its educational code, a number of important issues were fought out in the legislature. The U.S. Bureau of Education regularly published surveys on educational subjects; some of the most useful for this study are cited below. Any particular issue produced its own literature, and the volume was enormous and repetitious. Once an idea got into the marketplace, it quickly became orthodoxy, and few educators ventured to depart radically from it. For purposes of convenience, many of the sources not yet cited are listed by topics relevant to this study. They include primary and secondary works, since the latter usually summarized what working educators believed to have been the dominant trends in the field or provided specific insights into the issues under discussion. Where sources apply to more than one topic, they are placed under the heading in which they proved most helpful. Kindergarten Nina C. Vandewalker, The Kindergarten in American Education (New York, Macmillan Company, 1908), remains the best historical survey of the movement by a leading participant, but see also Evelyn Weber, The Kindergarten: Its Encounter with Educational Thought in America (New York, Teachers College Press, 1969). Other general material can be found in Kate Douglas Wiggin (ed.), The Kindergarten (New York, 1893); Laura Fisher, "The Kindergarten," in the Report of the Commissioner, U.S. Bureau of Education, (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1904), pp. 689-719; U.S. Bureau of Education, Kindergartens in the United States, Bulletin No. 6 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1914); and International Kindergarten Union, Committee of Nineteen, The Kindergarten (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913). The works of Elizabeth Peabody are invaluable for understanding the kindergarten's early phases,

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especially Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergartners (Boston, 1893), a compilation of more than two decades in the movement, and Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Mann, Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide (Boston, 1863), an early statement on the importance of "warmth" and play in the lives of young children. A disappointing but nonetheless useful biography is Ruth M. Baylor, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: Kindergarten Pioneer (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965). A number of periodicals were devoted exclusively to fostering support for early childhood education and introducing teachers to the latest techniques: The Kindergarten, Kindergarten Magazine, and Kindergarten Review (Kindergarten News between 1891 and 1897). Manual Training Charles A. Bennett's History of Manual and Industrial Education up to 1870 (Peoria, Manual Arts Press, 1926) and History of Manual and Industrial Education, 1870 to 1917 (Peoria, Manual Arts Press, 1937) cover most phases of the manual training movement, including a number of non-American developments, and remain the most inclusive sources. A comprehensive discussion of "practical" education containing much primary material is Isaac E. Clarke, Art and Industry (46th Cong., 2d sess., U.S. Senate, Executive Documents, 1897), VII, No. 209, pts. 1-4. The ambivalence most educators felt about balancing the hand and mind can be seen in the National Council of Education, The Educational Value of Manual Training: Report of the Committee on Pedagogics (1889). John D. Runkle, "The Manual Element in Education," Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education Together with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board, 1876-1877, and a revised version, ibid., 1880-1881, played a major role in stimulating developments in Massachusetts. See also the earlier statement by Lizzie S. Batchelder, A Memorial on Industrial Schools, Delivered Before the Committee on Education of the Massachusetts Legislature (Boston, 1872); L. H. Marvel, Manual Education in the Public Schools (Boston, 1882); and Industrial Education Association, Manual Training at Springfield, Massachusetts, Educational Leaflet No. 4 (New York, 1888). The most important official document summarizing the arguments and condition of manual education and proposing its expansion is Massachusetts Board of Education, Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Existing Systems of Manual Training and Industrial Education (Boston, 1893). Gustaf Larsson, Sloyd for American Schools (1894), and Sloyd

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(Boston, 1902), discuss pedagogical goals and lesson plans for one form of hand learning. The papers and annual reports of the North Bennet Street Industrial School in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are an excellent guide to the relationship among manual training, philanthropy, and the public schools. The most articulate criticism of manual education's philanthropic and antiintellectual character came from Worcester Superintendent of Schools Albert P. Marble, Industrial Education as Part of the Common School Course: Address to the New England School Superintendents' Association (Boston, 1885), The Presumption o/ Brains ([1887?]), and Discussions on Manual Training and on the Blair Bill: Addresses to the National Education Association (Boston, 1888). Manual Training Magazine, which began publishing in 1899, has much material about the national movement, but by 1905 it had become committed to more explicitly vocational training. Vocational

Education

No subject elicited more controversy in the first decades of the twentieth century than vocational training. Both its critics and advocates correctly understood that integrating the schools with the industrial economy and making educational programs directly applicable to the job market would transform public education, and they responded accordingly. Excellent introductions to the subject are Berenice Fisher, Industrial Education: American Ideals and Institutions (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), and Sol Cohen, "The Industrial Education Movement, 1906-17," American Quarterly, 20 (Spring, 1968), 95-110. The National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, organized in 1906, poured forth a torrent of propaganda in support of all aspects of vocational training. See, for example, the Society's Bulletin No. 13, 1911, which contains material on trade education for girls, corporation, part-time, and evening schools, and a general discussion of the "social significance of industrial education." Professional educators expressed their approval of certain aspects of vocationalism in the National Education Association, Report of the Committee on the Place of Industries in Public Education (Washington, D.C., 1910). Arthur D. Dean, The Worker and the State (New York, Century Company, 1910), and Frank M. Leavitt, Examples of Industrial Education (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1912), summarize the ideology and give examples of the movement, while the work of Charles A. Prosser and Charles R. Allen, Vocational Education in a Democracy (New York, Century Company, 1925), is the fullest expression of voca-

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tionalism by two men who had previously worked in Massachusetts. Leonard Ayres's study of school retardation, Laggards in Our Schools (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1909), profoundly influenced the movement toward efficient and economically oriented learning. The best source for female trade training is the Women's Educational and Industrial Union papers and publications, especially the union-sponsored series "Studies in Economic Relations of Women." See May Allinson, Dressmaking as a Trade for Women in Massachusetts (New York, Columbia University, 1916), and Industrial Experience of Trade-School Girls in Massachusetts (Boston, Women's Educational and Industrial Union, 1917); Susan M. Kingsbury (ed.), Labor Laws and Their Enforcement (New York, Longmans, Green and Company, 1911); and Lorinda Perry, Millinery as a Trade for Women (New York, 1916). The U.S. Bureau of Education, A Trade School for Girls: A Preliminary Investigation in a Typical Manufacturing City, Worcester, Massachusetts, Bulletin No. 17 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1913), was also done under the union's auspices. The most important documents on Massachusetts were those relating to the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education (the Douglas Commission) and the subsequent Commission on Industrial Education. The Douglas Commission "Hearings" are on file at the Massachusetts State Library in Boston and reveal the conflicting pressures and expectations for vocational training. The Commission's Report (Boston, 1906) was the major statement of the period. Developments in the schools between 1907 and 1910 can be traced in the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Annual Reports and Bulletins. For the educational politics of the movement, see the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, "Hearings on Technical Education, May 15, 1908, on Senate Bill #335," a typed manuscript at the State Library, and George H. Martin, Remarks of Secretary George H. Martin Before the Legislative Committee on Education in Opposition to the Proposed Plan to Abolish the State Board of Education (Boston, 1909). Paul H. Hanus' Beginnings in Industrial Education and Other Educational Discussions (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1908), and Adventuring in Education (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1937) are reflections by a leading vocational advocate and the chairman of the Industrial Education Commission. Following the consolidation of the Commission and the State Board of Education, the latter published a number of reports on trade training on file at the State Library. Specific material about one kind of trade education is available in the catalogues of the Lowell, Fall River, and New Bedford Textile Schools, which re-

267

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ceived state aid, while Charles A. Prosser, A Study of the Boston Mechanics Arts High School (New York, Teachers College, 1915), offers specific proposals for more relevant schooling. Prevocational Education and Vocational Guidance Many of the works cited under vocational education are applicable here. The only substantial source on prevocational training is Frank M. Leavitt and Edith Brown, Prevocational Education in the Public Schools (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915). John M. Brewer, in The Vocational Guidance Movement (New York, Macmillan Company, 1919), and History of Vocational Guidance (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1942), covers the development of vocational guidance. Frank Parsons, Choosing a Vocation (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), is the pathbreaking work. On Parsons, see Howard V. Davis, Frank Parsons (Carbondale, University of Southern Illinois Press, 1969), and Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954). The most important writings on vocational guidance were those by Meyer Bloomfield: The Vocational Guidance of Youth (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911), The School and the Start in Life: A Study of the Relation between School and Employment in England, Scotland, and Germany, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 4 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1914), You th School, and Vocation (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915), and Readings in Vocational Guidance (Boston, Ginn and Company, 1915). An example of the guidance material developed in Massachusetts was the Girls Trade Education League of Boston, Vocations for Girls (Boston, 1911-1912), fourteen pamphlets on opportunities and educational and personality job requirements. Evening Schools, Community

Centers, and Civics Education

The schools as Americanizing agencies are best studied through the annual school reports and immigrant autobiographies. As interest in assimilating the newcomer heightened, school committees established separate departments and instituted special programs to deal with the situation. The classic statement of immigrant assimilation through public education is Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912). On the melting pot ideal, see Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York, Oxford University Press, 1964). The Education of the Immigrant, U.S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 51 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1913), discusses activities prior to America's entry into World War I.

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The most voluminous collection of material on immigrants by a government agency is the previously cited U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports (41 vols., Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1911). The Massachusetts Commission on Immigration, The Problem of Immigration in Massachusetts (Boston, State Printers, 1914), focuses on the Commonwealth and contains a number of suggestions for educational reform. The impact of World War I on immigrant education can be traced in Edward Hartmann, The Americanization of the Immigrant (New York, Columbia University Press, 1948); U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Naturalization, The Work of the Public Schools with the Bureau of Naturalization (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1917-1920); and Frank V. Thompson, Schooling of the Immigrant (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1920), which concentrates on developments in Boston. No adequate studies of adult education exist, but a start can be made with Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York, Oxford University Press, 1956), on the pre-Civil War period; Malcolm S. Knowles, The Adult Education Movement in the United States (New York, Holt, 1962); and Gratton C. Hartley (ed.), American Ideas about Adult Education, 1710-1951 (New York, Teachers College Press, 1959). Little is known about the development of evening schools. Robert Seybolt, Evening Schools in Colonial America (Urbana, University of Illinois, 1925), is an early study, but should be supplemented by Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York, Vintage Books, 1960). Again, local sources are fundamental. For Massachusetts, see Lowell, Massachusetts, Evening Schools of Lowell, A Brief Sketch of Their Origin, Growth, and Present Conditions (Lowell, 1912?). Lawrence, Massachusetts, organized a nationally famous evening Americanization program which served as a model for other cities. See Lawrence, A Syllabus for the Instruction of Non-English Speaking Pupils in the Evening Schools (Lawrence, 1908); John J. Mahoney and H. H. Chamberlin, The Lawrence Plan for Education in Citizenship (New York, National Security League, 1918); and John J. Mahoney and C. M. Herlihy, First Steps in Americanization (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918). Four widely used textbooks for non-English-speaking and citizenship classes were Sara R. O'Brien, English for Foreigners (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), and English for Foreigners, Book 2 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912); William E. Chancellor, Standard Short Course in Citizenship for Evening Schools (New York, American Book Company, 1911); and Mabel Hill and Philip Davis, Civics for New Americans (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915).

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The idea of making the schools centers for community education elicited much enthusiasm during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant {New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1910), discusses the movement's context. An excellent recent study that explores the workings and implications of community involvement in public education is Judith E. Smith, "Efficiency vs. Community: The Social Center Movement, 1900-1920," unpublished honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1970, in Radcliffe College Archives. On the origins of the centers in Boston, see the Women's Municipal League of Boston, Bulletins, 1910-1912, while Mary P. Follett, Evening Centers: Aims and Duties of Managers and Leaders Therein (Boston, City of Boston Printing Department, 1913), is a handbook for workers. Frank Dazey, "The School Centre Experiment in South Boston," unpublished paper written for Social Ethics I, December 7, 1912, in the Harvard College Library, explores one center's ideology and practices. The teaching of history and civics as an instrument of assimilation increased noticeably at the turn of the century and can be traced in the courses of study produced by local school committees. Some of the broader concerns are discussed in Francis N. Thorpe, "American History in Schools, Colleges, and University," The Study of History in American Colleges, ed. Herbert Baxter Adams, U.S. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information No. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1887). Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), and John Higham et al., History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Engelwood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall, 1965), survey the development of historical scholarship. Solomon Schindler, "The Study of History in the Public Schools," Arena, 1 (Dec., 1889), 41-54, is a prominent Boston school committeeman's perspective on political controversy engendered by an anti-Catholic textbook. Widely used American history texts usually went through more than one edition and thus offer insight into changing pedagogical concerns; see, for example, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Young Folks' History of the United States (Boston, 1875, 1883, 1891), and Horace E. Scudder, A History of the United States of America (Boston, 1884; New York, William Woodward Company, 1907). Also contrast a popular work just after the Civil War, John J. Anderson, A Grammar School History of the United States (New York, 1869), with such later school books as D. H. Montgomery, The Leading Facts of American History (Boston, 1891); Wilber F. Gordy, A History of the United States for Schools (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900); and Eva March Tappan, Our Country's

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Study: An Elementary History of the United States (Boston, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1902). History Teacher's Magazine was directed at the classroom teacher. The emergence of civics courses presents a fascinating study of conceptions of citizenship among educators. George H. Martin, A Text Book on Civil Government in the United States (New York, 1875), stands in striking contrast to Ella Lyman Cabot et al., A Course in Citizenship (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), and U.S. Bureau of Education, The Teaching of Community Civics, Bulletin No. 23 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1915). John Fiske, Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins (Boston, 1890), is a scholar's attempt to teach citizenship to high school and college students. Secondary Sources A number of secondary sources provided an interpretive framework within which developments in Massachusetts could be placed. The most important of these was Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, Hill and Wang, 1967). Charles Glaab and Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (New York, Macmillan Company, 1967), and Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1963), trace the development of American cities. Both should be supplemented by Oscar Handlin, "The Modern City as a Field of Historical Study," in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963). Taken together, the works of Oscar Handlin present a formidable interpretive structure. Boston's Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1959 rev. ed.) and, with Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy; Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York, New York University Press, 1947), treat two separate aspects of the history of Massachusetts. Handlin's The Uprooted (New York, Grosset and Dunlop, 1951) and John Dewey's Challenge to American Education (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1959) offer insights into immigration and education in American life. The best source for anti-immigrant attitudes is John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York, Atheneum, 1963), but on Massachusetts it should be supplemented by Barbara M. Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956). Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the

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United States (New York, New York University Press, 1966), and Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1967), discuss social reform movements that affected the development of American education. Neil Harris, "The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement," American Quarterly, 14 (Winter, 1962), 545-566, and Daniel Horowitz, "Response to Industrialism," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1966, analyze different responses to urban-industrial change. The history of Massachusetts has been well treated. Every county and city has at least one memorial volume devoted to its past, which, if often antiquarian, provides chronological and institutional data. On the state as a whole, the best general survey remains Albert B. Hart (ed.), Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (5 vols., New York, State History Company, 1927-1930). Among the more useful studies of individual cities are Margaret T. Parker, Lowell: A Study of Industrial Development (New York, Macmillan Company, 1940); Seymour L. Wolfbein, The Decline of a Cotton Textile Town: A Study of New Bedford (New York, Columbia University Press, 1944); Frederick W. Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (New York, Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1920); E. Gordon Keith, "A Financial History of Two Textile Cities [Lowell and Fall River]," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1936; and Sylvia Chace Lintner, "A Social History of Fall River, 1859-79," unpublished doctoral dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1945. More recently, Donald Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1963), and Sam B. Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1962), have greatly expanded our knowledge of those cities, while Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964), raises questions about social mobility intimately related to the functions of schooling. Robert H. Lord et al., History of the Archdiocese of Boston, 1604-1943 (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1944), is the best study of Catholicism in the Commonwealth. Three books effectively cover political developments between 1870 and World War I: Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1966); Richard M. Abrams, Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics, 1900-1912 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964); and Henry Bedford, Socialism and the Workers in Massachusetts, 1886-1912 (Amherst, University of Massachusetts

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Press, 1966). Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1954); Barbara M. Solomon, Pioneers in Service (Boston, Associated Jewish Charities, 1956); and Nathan I. Hugins, "Private Charities in Boston 1870-1900: A Social History," doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1962, published as Protestants against Poverty (Westport, Conn., Greenwood Publishing Company, 1971), provide information on social reform in Massachusetts' major city. The history of American education is undergoing a minor renaissance. Since Lawrence A. Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), a number of important and informative studies have appeared. Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962); Rush Welter, Public Education and Democratic Thought in America (New York, Columbia University Press, 1962); Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, Harper and Row, 1964); Theodore R. Sizer, Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1964); Sol Cohen, Progressives and Urban School Reform: The Public Education Association of New York City, 1895-1914 (New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964); Robert D. Cross, "Origins of Catholic Parochial Schools in America," American Benedictine Review, 16 (June, 1965), 194-209; and Robert Wiebe, "The Social Functions of Public Education," American Quarterly, 21 (Summer, 1969), 147-164, treat subjects important to this study. Henry Perkinson's The Imperfect Panacea (New York, Random House, 1968) is an informative survey of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An older work recently republished and still of considerable value is Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Paterson, N. J., Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1963 ed.). Lewis C. Solmon, Estimates of the Costs of Schooling in 1880 and 1890, Krannert School of Industrial Administration Institute Paper No. 223 (Lafayette, Ind., Purdue University, 1968), attempts a cost-benefit analysis. Lawrence A. Cremin, The American Common School: An Historic Conception (New York, Teachers College Press, 1951), sets out the ideology of the founding of the common school, but this whole area needs reanalysis. On the development of education in Massachusetts itself, the pathbreaking methodological and interpretive study is Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1968). Katz's "The 'New Departure' in Quincy, 1873-1881: The Nature of Nineteenth-Century

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Educational Reform," New England Quarterly, 50 (Mar., 1967), 3-30, and "The Emergence of Bureaucracy in Urban Education: The Boston Case, 1850-1884," History of Education Quarterly, 8 (Summer-Fall, 1968), 155-188, 319-357, treat issues specifically germane to this study. Political conflict over educational questions is discussed in Lois B. Merk, "Boston's Historic Public School Crisis," New England Quarterly, 31 (June, 1958), 172-199. An outstanding analysis of educational politics and ideology is Isabella H. MacDougall, "Transformation of an Ideal: Boston Public Schools, 1888-91," unpublished honors thesis, Department of History, Radcliffe College, 1967, in Radcliffe College Archives. Three older studies provide information not available elsewhere. George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1904), reveals the perspectives of a turn-of-the-century educator; Alexander J. Inglis, The Rise of the High School in Massachusetts (New York, Teachers College, 1911), covers the period before the Civil War; and John W. Perrin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England (Meadville, Pa., 1896), interprets statutory developments.

Index Adult education, see Evening school movement American history, the teaching of, 232-237 Anti-Catholicism, 21, 22, 23 Attendance rates, 139-140 Attleborough, 166 Balliet, Thomas, 109, 218, 222 Bellamy, Francis, 202 Beverly, 166,176,188 Bloomheld, Meyer, 191, 193-195, 196-197 Bordon, Mrs. Spencer, 59 Boston: school committee reduced in size, 4; supervisory staff appointed, 4; immigrant school enrollment, 9; overcrowding, 11-12; school expenditures, 12-13,14; student turnover, 15; parochial school enrollment, 19; kindergarten movement, 45, 53-59, 61; manual training classes, 103, 104-106, 108-109; manual training and philanthropy, 115-124; high school enrollment, 139; dropout rate, 140; retardation, 140-142,181; evening trade program, 166; continuation classes, 176; prevocational education, 184-188; vocational guidance, 190-198. Evening classes: established, 206; favorable arguments, 207, 208; fees, 210; expulsions, 210; enrollment, 216; and immigrants, 216, 218, 220-221; illiteracy rate, 212; evening social center movement, 224-231 Boston Associated Charities, 116 Boston Home and School Association, 228-229 Brockton, 6,150 Brookline, 60 Bureaucratization, 3-4 Cambridge: school expenditures, 13; parochial school enrollment, 19; public-parochial

275

relations, 22; kindergarten movement, 48, 59, 61-62, 71-72 ; manual training and philanthropy, 111, 112115; dropout rate, 140; evening trade program, 166; prevocational courses, 188; evening classes, 206, 209; illiteracy rate, 212 Cambridge Industrial School Association, 112-113 Cambridge Manual Training High School, 112-115 Capen, Samuel, 32-33, 80 Carrigan, E. C„ 212-214 Carroll, Charles F„ 74,135 Categorization movement, 183, 188,189-190 Catholicism, see Anti-Catholicism Chelsea, 9 Citizenship education, 202-238 Civic Service House, 191 Civics, 238-240 Cogswell, Francis, 24 Conley, George H„ 227, 228 Corporal punishment, 32-33 Dedham, 103 Dickinson, John, 4-5,136, 212 Discipline, 32-33,122 Douglas Commission, see Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education Draper, Eben S., 171 Dropouts, 138-140, 180-181 Dutton, Samuel T., 31, 60, 93, 94 Dyer, Franklin B., 124,176,188, 197 Eaton, John, 237 Eliot, Samuel, 51 Evening school movement, 204-223 Evening social center movement, 223-232 Fall River: population growth, 6; immigrant population, 6; labor force, 7; immigrant school enrollment, 9; overcrowding, 11; school

Index expenditures, 13; parochial school enrollment, 20; kindergarten movement, 59, 61; mill classes, 87, 89-90; sewing classes, 106-107; manual training and philanthropy, 111; high school enrollment, 139; dropout rate, 140; working youth, 144; retardation, 181; illiteracy rate, 212; evening school enrollment, 215 Fields, Annie A., 49 Fish, Frederick, 170 Fisher, Laura, 49 Fitchburg, 6,176 Frothingham, The Reverend Paul R„ 69 Gladden, The Reverend Washington, 3 Guidance, see Vocational guidance Hale, Edward Everett, 82 Hall, G. Stanley, 41-45,115 Hand learning, see Manual training Hanus, Paul, 156,158-159 Hardon, H. C„ 105,108 Hatch, William, 67-68,109 Haverhill: immigrant school enrollment, 9; publicparochial relations, 23; kindergarten movement, 48; manual training classes, 103, 109 Hemenway, Mrs. Mary, 104,108 Hill, Frank A., 51, 77, 78 Holyoke, 6, 61, 212 Hopkins, Louisa Parsons, 80 Illiteracy, 8, 212 Immigration: statistics, 6-7; and industrial employment, 7-8; and illiteracy, 8, 212; and birth rate, 8; and school enrollment, 9,181; and evening school movement, 212-223; and evening social center movement, 229 Industrial education, 135-201, 252-254; in Europe,

276 160-165; and evening schools, 165-166; and prevocational education, 181-190; and vocational guidance, 190-200 Keith, Allen P., 167 Kindergarten movement, 35-73, 247-248, 250; and socialization, 39-40, 55-56, 58; and the child-study movement, 41-45; and the rural ideal, 43-44; and the upper class, 45; and slum reform, 45-56; and the public schools, 56-73; and preparation for grade school, 57, 58-59, 64-66; enrollment, 60-61; public finances, 61-62 Kingsbury, Susan, 142-147 Larsson, Gustaf, 102 Lawrence: population growth, 6; immigrant population, 6; parochial school enrollment, 19-20; public-parochial relations, 23; kindergarten movement, 47; evening trade program, 166; evening classes, 205, 206; illiteracy rate, 212; evening school and immigrants, 219 Leavitt, Frank M„ 133 Lee, Joseph, 34, 49, 201 Lowell: immigrant population, 6; labor force, 7; immigrant school enrollment, 9; overcrowding, 11; parochial school enrollment, 20; public-parochial relations, 22; kindergarten movement, 62; mill classes, 87; manual training and philanthropy, 111-112; working youth, 144; retardation, 181; evening classes, 206, 207, 210, 211; illiteracy rate, 212 Lowell, Francis C„ 82 Lynn: public-parochial relations, 23; kindergarten movement, 47-48, 65-66; cooking classes, 109-110; hearings on industrial education, 150; evening classes, 207, 209

277

Index Mann, Horace, 2, 4, 202 Mann, Mary, 47 Manual training, 74-131, 248, 251-252; and social values, 75-76, 77, 99, 100; and the urban poor, 76; and the kindergarten, 77-78; and pedagogical reform, 77-85; and object teaching, 78; and industrialization, 81-83; and blacks, 92-93; and delinquents, 93-96; and the factory system, 100-101; woodworking, 101-103; sewing, 104-107; cooking, 108-110; and philanthropy, 111-124 Marble, Albert, 125-131 Marshall, Florence, 172 Martin, George, 29, 93, 168, 236, 238-239 Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, 153154, 156-160, 161-175 Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education (Douglas Commission), 148-154, 160 Mayo, A. D„ 20, 21 Medford, 103 Mill schools, 85-92 Milton, 103 Morse, Charles, 157-158,159 New Bedford: population growth, 6; immigrant population, 6; labor force, 7; immigrant school enrollment, 9; overcrowding, 11; student turnover, 15; parochial school enrollment, 20; publicparochial relations, 22; kindergarten movement, 48, 66-70; mill classes, 87, 88-89, 90-91; manual training classes, 103,107, 109; working youth, 144; evening trade program, 166; industrial school, 167; evening school enrollment, 211, 215; illiteracy rate, 212 Nonpublic schools, 16-24; enrollment, 16; response of public-school educators,

17; and the upper class, 17-18. See also Parochial schools North Adams, 144,166 Northampton, 103 North Bennet Street Industrial School, 115-124; and the North End Industrial Home, 117-119; relationship with the public schools, 119-124; and prevocational education, 185-187 North End Industrial Home, see North Bennet Street Industrial School Object teaching, 78-79 Ordway, John, 102 Parker, Francis, 53-54 Parochial schools: enrollment, 19-20; response of publicschool educators, 21-24 Parsons, Frank, 191-192 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 36-37, 39 Peabody House, 51-52 Perkins, Charles C„ 83-84 Pingree, Laliah, 52, 55 Population growth, 6 Prevocational education, 181-190 Professionalism, 3, 219, 245-246 Retardation, 140-142 Richards, Charles R., 155 Richmond, Clinton Q„ 169,171 Riis, facob, 47 Rindge, Frederick, 111, 113 Runkle, John D., 96, 97,103 Russell, William E., 113 Salem, 87,103 School facilities: and crowding, 11-12

School finances, 12-13 Seaver, Edwin P., 24-25, 27, 29; and the kindergarten movement, 58; and manual training, 74, 96, 98, 115, 120; and citizenship education, 202, 224, 227 Shaw, Mrs. Quincy Adams: and the kindergarten movement, 42, 52-56, 57-58, 59; and manual training, 103,

278

Index 109,115,120; and industrial training, 191; and citizenship education, 228 Sloyd, 101-103. See also Manual training Smith, Nora, 50 Snedden, David: and the kindergarten movement, 62-63, 64; and industrial education, 175,177; and citizenship education, 200-201, 223, 237, 240; and school administration, 246 Springfield: population growth, 6; parochial school enrollment, 21; half-time schools, 87, 88; manual training classes, 103,109; high school enrollment, 139; prevocational courses, 188. Evening classes: fees, 210; expulsions, 210; enrollment, 211, 215; and immigrants, 215, 218; illiteracy rate, 212 Storrow, James, 226 Students: non-English-speaking, 15-16; mobility, 16 Suzzalo, Henry, 199 Taunton, 166 Thompson, Frank V., 124

Truancy, 16,137-138; and mill schools, 89 Urbanization, 5, 6; response of educators, 10; and the rural ideal, 24-30; and social values, 98, 243 Vocation Bureau, 191-194 Vocational education, see Industrial education Vocational guidance, 190-200 Walker, Francis, 99,115 Waltham, 103,166 Wheelock, Lucy, 52 White, Eva Whiting, 52 White, Joseph, 137 Winship, A. E„ 131 Woods, Robert A., 49, 99,171, 253 Worcester: population growth, 6; school expenditures, 13; parochial school enrollment, 20; kindergarten movement, 45, 61; sewing classes, 106; high school enrollment, 139; retardation, 181; prevocational courses, 188; evening classes, 208, 210, 215; illiteracy rate, 212 Wright, Carroll, 86

Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies The Joint Center for Urban Studies, a cooperative venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, was founded in 1959 to organize and encourage research on urban and regional problems. Participants have included scholars from the fields of anthropology, architecture, business, city planning, economics, education, engineering, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology. The findings and conclusions of this book are, as with all Joint Center publications, solely the responsibility of the author. Published by Harvard University Press The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright, by Morton and Lucia White, 1962. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1970-1900, by Sam B. Warner, Jr., 1962 City Politics, by Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, 1963 Law and Land: Anglo-American Planning Practice, edited by Charles M. Haar, 1964 Location and Land Use: Toward a General Theory of Land Rent, by William Alonso, 1964 Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City, by Stephan Thernstrom, 1964 Boston: The Job Ahead, by Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, 1966 The Myth and Reality of Our Urban Problems, by Raymond Vernon, 1966 Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages, by Ira Marvin Lapidus, 1967 The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930, by Robert M. Fogelson, 1967 Law and Equal Opportunity: A Study of the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination, by Leon H. Mayhew, 1968 Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities, by James Q. Wilson, 1968 The Metropolitan Enigma: Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's "Urban Crisis," edited by James Q. Wilson, revised edition, 1968 Traffic and the Police: Variations in Law- Enforcement Policy, by John A. Gardiner, 1969 The Influence of Federal Grants: Public Assistance in Massachusetts, by Martha Derthick, 1970 The Arts in Boston, by Bernard Taper, 1970 Families against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890, by Richard Sennett, 1970 The Political Economy of Urban Schools, by Martin T. Katzman, 1971 Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 18701915, by Marvin Lazerson, 1971

Published by The M.I.T. Press The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch, 1960 Housing and Economic Progress: A Study of the Housing Experiences of Boston's Middle-Income Families, by Lloyd Rodwin, 1971 The Historian and the City, edited by Oscar Handlin and John Burchard, 1963 The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962, by Martin Anderson, 1964 The Future of Old Neighborhoods: Rebuilding for a Changing Population, by Bernard J. Frieden, 1964 Man's Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, by Charles Abrams, 1964 The View from the Road, by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, 1964 The Public Library and the City, edited by Ralph W. Conant, 1965 Regional Development Policy: A Case Study of Venezuela, by John Friedmann, 1966 Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, edited by James Q. Wilson, 1966 Transport Technology for Developing Regions, by Richard M. Soberman, 1966 Computer Methods in the Analysis of Large-Scale Social Systems, edited by James M. Beshers, revised edition, 1968 Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Program of Venezuela, by Lloyd Rodwin and Associates, 1969 Build a Mill, Build a City, Build a School: Industrialization, Urbanization, and Education in Ciudad Guayana, by Noel F. McGinn and Russell G. Davis, 1969 Land-Use Controls in the United States, by John Delafons, second edition, 1969 Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, second edition, 1970 Bargaining: Monopoly Power versus Union Power, by George de Menil, 1971 The Joint Center also publishes monographs and reports.