Where and When Did Vocational Education Begin?
In the mid-19th century, school reformers made the distinction between the head and hand learning in children and youth–both had to be schooled. After the Civil War, reformers introduced “manual education” into schools. Working with tools to fashion wood, iron, and other metals into useful objects, balanced the nearly total focus on academic subjects (see here and here). While adding such courses to the high school curriculum was common in the closing decades of the 19th century, separate manual training high schools in cities were also built such as the duPont Manual High School in Louisville (KY), Manual High School in Denver (CO), and Armstrong Manual Training School in Washington, D.C.
But the economy that welcomed artisans in carpentry, brick masonry, and farriers was shifting to industrial workplaces where different skills and different gatekeepers to jobs were needed.
In the early decades of the 20th century, business and civic leaders called for a different kind of “hand” schooling to prepare youth for newly created industrial and manufacturing jobs as machinists, iron and steel workers, etc. Many of these leaders had visited Germany, a global competitor now outstripping the U.S. in selling its products. They saw how Germany had established vocational education and apprenticeships in secondary schools and how these schools provided a ready supply of workers fitted to a rapidly changing industrial economy. By World War I, U.S. high schools had added “vocational” subjects to the academic curriculum and districts opened newly established, separate vocational schools.
What Problems Did Vocational Education Intend To Solve?
incorporating vocational education into the high school curriculum sought to solve two problems. First, the wholly academic curriculum of the 19th and early 20th century high school drove most students to dropping out of school while in grammar school (grades 1-8) or immediately after graduating. Adding work-related courses that could equip students with workplace skills and lead to actual jobs enticed students to continue going to school. In a democracy, Progressive CONTINUE READING: Whatever Happened To Vocational Education? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice