ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the social and economic context into which vocational education was born. As Americans began to understand that industrialization was ushering in a new era, they still failed to perceive a connection between economics and schooling. Like most reforms and innovations in American educational history, manual training was supported by diverse groups and individuals with conflicting conceptions of its function in the curriculum and its relationship to the political conversation of the era. To business and industrial leaders, manual training served a purely vocational function, grounding a larger strategy to move American education on a two-track European curriculum. The African Americans won the right to a public schooling characterized by industrial education. For business leaders, vocational education promised to create values and attitudes toward work that would serve their interests. Education leaders found in vocational education a way to establish the legitimacy of schooling that had been attacked for its disjuncture with changing social and economic conditions.
