Work, Education, and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890-1920

This essay examines the ideological origins of vocational education in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the leading participants in the vocational movement, it asks why people across a broad spectrum of political and economic opinion seized on vocational education as an instrument of economic reform. The essay argues that vocational reformers often differed with one another about the form that vocational education should take and the purposes it should serve but that what united them all was a desire to rationalize the operation of the economy without directly attacking private property or the class structure. The result was to transform questions about the nature of work and inequality into matters of socialization and training, thereby institutionalizing the idea that preparation for work was a primary function of American education.