By Sophia Wiener
What comes to mind when you hear the words “industrial education?” Children in a line, learning to work menial jobs, being taught to be automatons?
Connie Goddard, Ph.D., a Tinton Falls-based historian of education, said that opinion is ill-informed – at least, as it applies to industrial education as it was first designed. She has set out to redeem this much-maligned teaching style in her newest book, “Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity,” released Sept. 24 by University of Illinois Press.
Goddard’s interest in industrial education is homegrown. Raised on a farm, her mother faced final difficulties, but an inexpensive education at North Dakota Normal and Industrial School allowed her to find successful work as a bookkeeper and move to Chicago. “It changed her life,” Goddard said.
Her father later started a local boys’ and girls’ club, founded on similar principles, whose motto was “Learning to Do and Doing to Learn.” To Goddard, these have always been the true ideals of industrial education: Head and hand, working and learning in harmony.
Industrial education first became popular in America in the late 1800s, during the Progressive era. Over the past decades, America’s workforce had shifted from working for themselves locally, as craftspeople and farmers, to working for massive corporations. “We went from the age of the artisan to the age of the employee,” Goddard said.
The problems these newly minted employees and youths were facing weren’t so dissimilar to those we face today. Poor immigrants and the lower class, often deprived of opportunities for education or to learn skills, had difficulty finding sufficient employment. And just decades after the abolishment of slavery, Black communities faced these problems on a systematic scale. Industrial education, whose cost was often supplemented by students working at school farms and orchards, was an inexpensive way for Black students to gain education and skills and then return to their communities to propagate their knowledge.
There was another problem, too, that modern Americans can relate to – lack of student interest. “Kids who were 13, 14 were dropping out of school” because they simply weren’t interested in the material or how it was taught, Goddard said. “So, there was an effort by educators, business people, reformers, labor unions and a whole lot of people to introduce more manual work in schools.”
Schools did not abandon Latin or arithmetic but balanced them with hands-on work that was inherently more attractive to children. It wasn’t simply teaching people “to stand at a machine and punch buttons. It (industrial education) was counting. It was dressmaking. It was cooking and nutrition, it was carpentry, it was electronics, it was mechanics. It was a way to solve a big problem.”
Goddard’s book explores three industrial education schools: the short-lived but enormously influential Chicago Manual Training School, the New Jersey Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth and the North Dakota State Normal and Industrial School. It uses these schools as a gateway to the early history of industrial education. It’s the first history of industrial education published in over 25 years, and Goddard feels it’s long overdue.
Goddard started on the path that led her to “Learning for Work” as an adjunct at Mercer College when she took the opportunity to teach at Woodbridge’s Rahway Prison. Impressed by her new students’ dedication and gratitude, she couldn’t help but wonder why they were stuck behind bars while she could leave every day.
Many of her students, she found, simply had not had ample opportunity to learn legal ways to make a living. Meanwhile, less than 50 miles south were the remnants of a school once known as “The Tuskegee of the North,” The New Jersey Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, also known as Bordentown School. Founded in 1886 with the goal of training Black students so they could support themselves, it educated thousands, with most surveys showing a high level of job placement after graduation, according to the NJ Historical Commission. But Goddard’s students would have never had the opportunity to study there. Bordentown School shuttered in 1955, its closure ordered by the state after attempts to desegregate the school failed.
Bordentown’s closure coincided with the beginnings of the modern backlash against industrial education. Springing from the same wellspring that led to the No Child Left Behind Act or the College for All school of thought was an idea that labor and education were diametrically opposed. “There was an idea that developed in the ’60s,” Goddard said, “That the industrial education movement was a way for the elitist power structure to create a subservient class.”
She disagrees fervently, outlining in her book that industrial education was not an attempt to oppress the lower classes but to teach them marketable skills. She cites scholars of the times such as Booker T. Washington, who went so far as to say that industrial education had the potential to teach a Black man how to “make the forces of nature… work for him… lifting labor up out of toil and drudgery into the plane of the dignified and the beautiful.”
Goddard also pointed out how industrial education influenced modern teaching practices and schools of thought, drawing connections between it and active learning as opposed to rote memorization, the idea that students should be taught material that interests them and the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the leading educators and thinkers that pushed these policies forward.
Whatever it is today, early industrial education was a marriage of head and hand and designed to help, and Goddard thinks we can still take instruction from its ideals.
“I remember tutoring a kid at a Trenton school who didn’t know what a lathe was, didn’t know what a level was. I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is a 14-year-old boy. This is tragic.’ ”
Goddard will present her research journey for “Learning for Work – Learning for Writing” at Monmouth County Library, Eastern Branch, at 7 p.m. Nov. 21. Her book is available at press.uillinois.edu.
The article originally appeared in the November 7 – 13, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
