The Co-Op Industrial Education Experiment, 1900-1917

Abstract

DURING THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial education became attractive to educators and industrialists. It seemed to be the answer to a vast amalgam of problems arising from the mechanization of the factory. If the work force were better trained, efficiency would improve, fewer accidents would result, and the workers would be more satisfied with their work. Unfortunately, some of the forms industrial education took were clearly exploitative of the workers and apprentices involved. One example was the experiment in co-operative education. The lobby and chief organ of the alliance between educators and industrialists was the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, founded in Boston in 1907. Within a year the N.S.P.I.E. had established chapters in eight states and lobby committees in twenty-nine others. Of the twenty-five member board of managers of the national organization, seven were educators by profession, twelve were industrialists, five were involved in some aspect of social work and one represented the royalty of the skilled labor movement, the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The first elected officers were Henry S. Pritchett (president of Carnegie Foundation), president; Everett Macy (Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Teachers College New York), treasurer; M. W. Alexander (General Electric Company), vicepresident; and C. R. Richard (director of Cooper Union), secretary. (1) Of the sixteen officers listed for the eight state branches, eight were industrialists and eight were educators. At least one-third of the membership were industrialists or educators. (2) At the federal level, the N.S.P.I.E. influentially promoted national aid to vocational education. In 1909, President Taft appointed two of the society's prominent members to the commission on National Aid to Vocational Education. The commission's recommendations were virtually written into law with the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. (3) At the state and local level the educational industrial coalition campaigned for vocational courses at the high school level and promoted in-