Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity

Founded in 1883, the Chicago Manual Training School (CMTS) was a short-lived but influential institution dedicated to teaching a balanced combination of practical and academic skills. Connie Goddard uses the CMTS as a door into Americas early era of industrial education and the transformative idea of learning to do.

Rooting her account in John Deweys ideas, Goddard moves from early nineteenth century supporters of the union of learning and labor to the interconnected histories of CMTS, New Jerseys Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, North Dakotas Normal and Industrial School, and related programs elsewhere. Goddard analyzes the work of movement figures like abolitionist Theodore Weld, educators Calvin Woodward and Booker T. Washington, social critic W.E.B. Du Bois, Dewey himself, and his influential Chicago colleague Ella Flagg Young. The book contrasts ideas about manual training held by advocate Nicholas Murray Butler with those of opponent William Torrey Harris and considers overlooked connections between industrial education and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

An absorbing merger of history and storytelling, Learning for Work looks at the people who shaped industrial education while offering a provocative vision of realizing its potential today.

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