Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE AMERICANS AND GERMANS LOOK AT EACH OTHER'S SCHOOLS
- 1 American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth Century
- 2 Interdependence between Democratic Pedagogy in Germany and the Development of Education in the United States in the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Prussian Volksschulen through American Eyes: Two Perspectives on Curriculum and Teaching from the 1890s
- 4 American Responses to German Continuation Schools during the Progressive Era
- PART TWO VARIETIES OF TEACHERS AND STYLES OF TEACHING
- PART THREE GERMAN SCHOOLS IN AMERICA
- PART FOUR THE GERMAN INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION
- Index
4 - American Responses to German Continuation Schools during the Progressive Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE AMERICANS AND GERMANS LOOK AT EACH OTHER'S SCHOOLS
- 1 American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth Century
- 2 Interdependence between Democratic Pedagogy in Germany and the Development of Education in the United States in the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Prussian Volksschulen through American Eyes: Two Perspectives on Curriculum and Teaching from the 1890s
- 4 American Responses to German Continuation Schools during the Progressive Era
- PART TWO VARIETIES OF TEACHERS AND STYLES OF TEACHING
- PART THREE GERMAN SCHOOLS IN AMERICA
- PART FOUR THE GERMAN INFLUENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION
- Index
Summary
The development of vocational education was long treated as the neglected stepchild of American educational history. In recent decades, however, historians have reaffirmed the conclusion already reached in 1921 by Paul Douglas, professor of labor relations at the University of Chicago, that the campaign for vocational education was probably the most important educational movement in the United States during the first two decades of this century. At its height, between publication of the Douglas Commission Report in Massachusetts in 1906 and enactment of the federal Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, this often controversial campaign was conducted by such powerful interest groups as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the National Educational Association (NEA), and the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE). Leading educators including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Eliot formulated positions on industrial education.
Recent historiography has evaluated this campaign from several ideological perspectives. Whereas some historians have viewed the campaign as a positive attempt to adapt education to the increasingly industrial and technologicalsociety emerging in the United States at the turn of the century, others have argued that vocationalism meant an accommodation by the schools to the labor force needs of nascent corporate capitalism and entailed the abandonment of equal educational opportunity.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995