Arthur G. Wirth

As the United States entered the twentieth century it faced the fact that it had become an urban-industrial society. New processes of technology and corporate, bureaucratic organizational forms were changing the world of work and the life-style of Americans. The capacity to survive under the new conditions was dependent on education as never before in history. Many sectors of the public-farmers, industrialists, workers, and progressive reformers like settlement house leaders and women suffragettes-looked at the public schools and found them wanting.

The criticism of public schooling was strident and complex. It included groups as diverse as proponents of progressive education who wanted a new schooling to "free children and reform society" to those who pressured schoolmen to meet the business efficiency criteria which presumably marked the operations of industry and commerce. I shall make no effort to confront the total range of the debate, and shall limit my comments to one of the strong pressures of the time-the demand for a more practical schooling which would serve the new skill needs of industry and business. This movement for vocational education culminated in the passage of the first federal legislation to aid pre-collegiate education-the Smith-Hughes Act Of 1917.

The acknowledged leader of the coalition which formed to lobby for such legislation was Charles A. Prosser, Executive Secretary of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education and the effective author of the Smith-Hughes Act. He was a proponent of the social efficiency philosophy. I shall attempt to show how the features of Prosser's philosophy of education left their marks on the American approach to vocational education in the decades after 1917. General educators tend to be less informed about vocational education than any other aspect of the system. A look at the concept of vocational training represented in Prosser's orientation may help explain the relative isolation of vocationalism in the American pattern of schooling.

Charles A. Prosser came from a family of steel-workers in New Albany, Indiana. As a student and young professional, he was noted for his "get-up-and-go," a quality which later enabled him to win success when he moved to New York and the East. In 1898, while teaching physics, chemistry, and literature in the New Albany High School, Prosser succeeded in completing two years of legal training in one at the University of Louisville Law School. He won the honors of both classes and all the prizes for which he competed. The following year he was appointed Superintendent of New Albany Schools. While serving in that post (1900-1908), he became President of the Indiana State Teachers Association, "the youngest man ever elected to the position." He left Indiana to begin doctoral study at Teachers College, Columbia University. There he became a student under David Snedden and developed his first interest in vocational education. His dissertation was A Study of the Boston Mechanic Arts High School. He obviously impressed his mentor, for Snedden, when he became Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, invited Prosser in 1910 to fill the new post of Deputy Commissioner for Vocational Education. Prosser's meteoric rise was capped two years later (1912), when he became the full-time Executive Secretary of the prestigious National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. In this capacity he became involved in the whirl of events which led to enactment of the Smith-Hughes law.

The Smith-Hughes Act was passed after years of preparation and political maneuvering. The final draft won the approval of groups as divergent as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, the American Federation of Labor, the major farm organizations, settlement house leaders, and the National Education Association. The coming together of such ordinarily feuding factions is a rare event. It is even more remarkable to find them agreeing on so controversial a matter as the introduction of federal power into the operation of public schools. Many men contributed to this agreement; but there is general agreement that the one individual most responsible for it was Prosser.

By the time Prosser received his appointment from N.S.P.I.E., the Society had decided to promote its cause by securing action through federal and State legislatures. Prosser immediately became active in helping to draft a bill by Senator Page of Vermont which, in fact, became the legislative source for both the Smith-Lever and Smith-Hughes Acts. (The Smith-Lever agricultural extension bill was passed first in 1914, as a concession to farm interests, in return for a promise from farmers to support vocational education later). In January Of 1914, Congress approved a joint resolution authorizing President Wilson to appoint a Commission to study national aid for vocational education. The Commission was conveniently composed of a group of Congressmen and citizens who had been ardent advocates of industrial education. Among them was Dr. Prosser. The Commission's two-volume final report¹ contained a section on "proposed legislation" which, with minor changes, became the text of the Smith-Hughes Act. Dr. Prosser's son, William, recalls seeing his father write the "proposed legislation" at their dining room table!²

Prosser was instrumental in working out the final wording of Smith-Hughes to satisfy groups like the N.E.A. and the A.F. of L. After Congress approved the bill (1917), Prosser was named Executive Director of the newly created Federal Board for Vocational Education. His vigorous leadership was manifest as every state in the Union accepted the provisions of the Act within a year. As the first chief administrator of the Act, Prosser saw to it that the bare bones of the law were filled in with operating procedures consistent with the principles he had built into the legislation.

We turn briefly, then, to examples of Prosser's theories of vocational education as they were reflected in Smith- Hughes.

Grant Venn pointed out that the Smith-Hughes Act established the pattern for nearly 50 years of Federal aid in the field of vocational education. "In fact, its major provisions remained untouched by amendment until 1963."³ The great strength of the Act was that it was designed directly to meet a compelling need of the new America-the need to provide American industry with the complicated work skills required in a technological society. The genius of Charles Prosser lay in his capacity to focus energies unwaveringly on creating functional programs to accomplish this task.

Yet from the beginning, there were doubts in some quarters about the educational orientation of the Act. Its strengths in securing quick short-term gains were also the source of its fundamental flaws.

A Commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to review the effectiveness of the Act expressed misgivings in a report issued in 1938.⁴ The Chairman, John D. Russell of the University of Chicago, stressed the point that the Act was marked by a specificity of prescription for programs and administration which was a feature of no other federal legislation for education, such as the Morrill or Smith-Lever Acts. This specificity, said Russell, tended to limit imaginative experimentation with curricula and led to interference with institutions of higher education by prescribing details of teacher education. Narrow concentration on skill training resulted in almost total neglect of the cultivation of broad social and economic insights in students. The law seemed to foster a restricted quality of mind, as reflected in the type of leadership found in the federal office of vocational education. The Chairman thought he detected an inbred, parochial quality in the office and a tendency toward isolation from the mainstream of American education.

A look at some of the principles cherished by Dr. Prosser may help to explain both the strengths and weaknesses of the Act.

One of its cardinal tenets was the definition of vocational education so that it would accommodate only specific job training programs. Prosser was fond of quoting a friend, Charles R. Allen: "The purpose of vocational education is to help a person secure a job, train him so he can hold it after he gets it, and assist him in advancing to a better job."⁵ Vocational education was, in brief, "training for useful employment," and nothing else.

Prosser insisted that all vocational content must be specific and that its source was to be found "in the experience of those who have mastered the occupation." The content must come from the minds of competent workers, and it will have "little or nothing in common with corresponding content in any other occupation. In setting up its program, therefore, the [all] day vocational schools must provide as many specific courses or groups of courses as there are occupations for which it proposes to train."⁶ Prosser was convinced that to produce trained workers ready for useful employment, vocational programs had to be managed not by general educators but by those qualified and committed to advance "real vocational education." He pushed hard for "the dual system": for vocational education administered separately from general education.

Throughout his long career, Prosser repeated endlessly the arguments for his position. Traditional scholastic education, he maintained, aimed to prepare the citizen for the worthy use of his leisure time. Traditional schoolmen, committed to the task of fostering "leisure culture," operated from the psychological tradition of faculty psychology and formal discipline. This, they thought, would lead to general mental training and "cultural appreciations." There were several clear reasons why new programs of vocational training could not be entrusted to such men. "Culturists" were cut off from the practical world of work, and their outmoded theory of learning made them incapable of managing genuine skill training programs. "Vocational education," Prosser argued, "only functions in proportion as it will enable an individual actually to do a job . . .Vocational education must establish habits: habits of correct thinking and of correct doing. Hence, its fundamental theory must be that of habit psychology."⁷ The new scientific psychology pioneered by Edward Thorndike, said Prosser, assumed that the mind is a habit forming machine. There was an obvious fit between this psychological theory and vocational education, when the latter was conceived as "essentially a matter of establishing certain habits through repetitive training both in thinking and doing."⁸ In contrast to the theory of general mind training of the discredited faculty psychology, Thorndike's theory taught that "all habits of doing and thinking are developed in specific situations." Prosser deduced correlatively that the content of vocational training should be determined by "the actual functioning content" of a given occupation. "If you want to train a youth to be an efficient plumber, you must select the actual experiences in the practice of the plumbing trade that he should have and see that he gets these in a real instead of in a pseudo way."⁹ Furthermore, general studies like mathematics or science should ideally be broken into short units which would bear "directly on specific needs of workers in the performance of specific tasks or operations." They should, when possible, be taught by the craftsman-teacher skilled in the task, rather than by general mathematics or science teachers.

A prototype of the plan favored by Prosser was established in the short unit courses which he developed while Director of the Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis. "In garment making, one unit might deal with kimonos, one with underwear, and another with house dresses."¹⁰ Training should be done either on the job, as in cooperative-work programs, or in settings which duplicated as closely as possible the environment of the workshop itself. At the Dunwoody Institute, units were programmed in great detail to lead students step by step through the skill development cycle. Students punched in on time-clocks and instructors behaved like shop foremen rather than public school teachers. A no-nonsense attitude prevailed. If students were not punctual, orderly, and efficient, they were asked to leave. (This Spartan regimen was made possible because Dunwoody was a private training school.)

If this brief description of Dunwoody conveys a feeling of Prosser's orientation, some of the features he favored in Smith-Hughes can readily be understood. Approved programs had to meet the criterion of "fitting for useful employment" persons over fourteen but under college age who were preparing for work on farms, in trades, in industrial pursuits, and the like. Federal funds were given only for support of vocational training classes. General education costs were to be borne by the States and local school districts. At least 50 percent of subsidized instruction had to be devoted to "practical work on a useful or productive basis." Funds for the training of teachers were restricted to those who "have had adequate vocational experience or contact in the line of work for which they are preparing."¹¹

Since his rationale excluded general educators from the management of vocational training, Prosser fought as long as possible for a separately administered type of vocational education. In the final politicking prior to 1917, he had to make some concessions; but in the main, he created a framework which permitted vocational programs to stand apart. The Smith-Hughes Act did establish a Federal Board for Vocational Education, separate from the U.S. Office of Education, and responsible only to Congress. The seven member Board consisted of the Secretaries of Labor, Commerce, and Agriculture and three citizens representing labor, agriculture, and manufacturing and commerce. The Commissioner of Education was added partly to allay the anxieties of the N.E.A. Philander Claxton, Commissioner of Education, helped to secure a separate board for vocational education by maintaining that the U.S. Office of Education staff was not properly constituted to administer the provisions of the Act.¹²

Prosser was immediately appointed Executive Director of the Federal Board and served in that office in its first two crucial years. He established the initial tone of administration. States were given the option of setting up separate boards, or of administering vocational education under the aegis of their general Boards of Education. In actuality, both the language of Smith-Hughes and the administrative style of Dr. Prosser assured that vocational education would function largely as a separate aspect of education within the States.

Vocational education became firmly established and expanded in the years ahead. By the time John F. Kennedy became President and the Russians launched their first Sputniks, some of the shortcomings of Smith-Hughes had become apparent. The feeling of urgency grew as discontented urban minorities faced job obsolescence as a result of their inferior education and training. Review procedures were established, and the first fundamental revision of vocational education legislation was readied for President Johnson's signature in 1963.¹³ Detailed analyses of evolving economic conditions and recommendations for procedural changes in vocational training appeared in profusion. We shall mention a few of these shifts in orientation which could eventually lead to major philosophical and power changes in American education.

The critics of the 1960's identified two central failures of vocational education: (1) its lack of sensitivity to changes in the labor market, and (2) its lack of sensitivity to the needs of various segments of the population. Critics charged that Smith-Hughes programs had been confined to a very narrow part of the spectrum of work activities and had failed to make imaginative adaptations to the demands of a fast changing economy. By concentrating on the job requirements of industry and by restricting its efforts to secondary school age students, Smith-Hughes also failed to give priority to the vocational needs of all groups in the community.

The 1963 Act announced as its aim the development of vocational education for persons of all ages in all communities. This was to be accomplished with a unified concept of vocational education, rather than by sharply separated programs for vocational, agriculture, home economics, trade and industries, or distributive education. Special attention was to be paid to the needs of disadvantaged persons who had dropped out of school, lacked basic education skills, or needed re-training.

Several of the basic "operational principles" of the revision of the sixties illustrate dramatically the departure from Prosser's preferences.

Vocational education cannot be meaningfully limited to the skills necessary for a particular occupation. It is more appropriately defined as all of those aspects of educational experience which help a person to discover his talents, to relate them to the world of work, to choose an occupation, and to refine his talents and use them successfully in employment....

The objectives of vocational education should be the development of the individual, not the needs of the labor market....

It is no longer possible to compartmentalize education into general, academic, and vocational components. Education is a crucial element in preparation for a successful working career at any level. . . . Culture and vocation are inseparable and unseverable aspects of humanity....

The practice of structuring teacher education along the traditional occupational category lines perpetuates fragmentation of vocational education, severs it further from general education and hinders adaptation to labor market conditions.¹⁴

The 1968 evaluators also suggested that pedagogical techniques inherent to vocational education, such as opportunities for multi-sensory experiences and the relation of classroom study to out-of-school experience, might also enliven general education. They suggested that studies which relate learning to the world of work could be important at all levels, from the elementary school on.

Clearly, important aspects of Charles Prosser's concept of vocational education had become inadequate by the 1960's. We are at a moment when the relations of pre-vocational and vocational studies to general education are ripe for reconsideration.