American Education and Vocationalism: A Documentary History, 1870-1970.

Overview & Synopsis

The editors have chosen 21 selections which illustrate the development of industrial and trade education, believing this aspect of vocationalism in education to be the primary concern of the vocational education movement during its most important phase, the years from 1900 to 1917. While vocationalism has changed since 1917, most of what has happened can be best understood as a reworking and consolidation of themes and practices established during the earlier period. From this perspective, the editors provide a 56-page introduction to the volume in which they show how the documents chosen for inclusion reflect the turn-of-the-century approaches to vocational education and how they reveal the extent to which American education had accepted the ethics of the emerging corporate order. The document selected include papers, speeches, excerpts from longer works, and reports of committees from industry and/or education associations. Most of the publications were issued between 1878 and 1913. However, excerpts from the Russell Report (1938), the Commission on Life Adjustment Education of Youth Report (1951), a paper by James B. Conant (1961), the Advisory Council on Vocational Education Report (1968), and an interview with Sidney P. Marland (1971) are included. (Author/AG)