Learning for Work

I swear I'm writing, just not for my newsletter

Hi there. It’s been a while.

I am happy to report that I have been reading and writing a metric ton. Thousands of words typed. Thousands of pages read. Dozens upon dozens of pages written.

It’s just that none of it is for The Blue Scholar. At least not directly.

I entitled this dispatch “Learning for Work” for two reasons: 1) that has been locus and focus of my reading and writing—in my primary career as an “industrial educator” (more on that shortly), and in my secondary career as a seminarian and clergy-in-training, I have been reading absolute gobs that contribute to my learning in hopes that I will become a better teacher of both plumbers and pray-ers; and 2) because that is the title of a new, brilliant book which I have recently reviewed.

None of what I write for my primary career is available for you (not that you’d have much use for it anyway: field technician communication training, technical instruction for new plumbers, company culture initiatives, etc., etc.), but as for my secondary career, I did submit an essay from school to The North American Anglican (a publication that is exactly what it sounds like it is: devoted to discussing issues of Anglicanism in North America) and not only was it accepted and published to their website back in July of 2024, the Editor-in-Chief, Jesse Nigro, thought it worthwhile to include my piece in their Fall 2024 print issue. This is my first time being published in a physical magazine and I could not be happier. If you would like to read the essay—which looks at the Anglican schema for growth in holiness, particularly as it is expressed in the Book of Common Prayer, through the lens of apprenticeship—you are welcome to do so here.

I would usually include a highly cringe selfie of me holding the print edition, a look of elation on my face, but the magazine was swallowed whole by a void in the postal service’s system and a new copy hasn’t yet arrived, so a screenshot of the web edition will have to suffice. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing.

So that’s that re: the first reason for the title of today’s newsletter. As for the second…

A while back I was contacted by the Editor-in-Chief of Front Porch Republic, of which many of you may be familiar, asking me to review a new book which was yet to be released at that point in time, Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity, authored by journalist and historian Connie Goddard. I was given a generous window of time to read, mull over, and write a review for the text, so I agreed.

And boy am I glad I did.

Dr. Goddard, in her professional career, has had particular interest in Progressive Era Chicago and this career-spanning focus comes to bear on her book, which traces the development of the “industrial education” movement (and “industrial educators,” which is how I referred to myself earlier). Where was the beating heart of this movement? You guessed it: Chicago. She not only gives us a who’s-who of industrial educators of the era and the first formally written history of the Chicago Manual Training School (you were dying for it, I know), but she draws out the dynamic interplay between the competing ideals of the Industrial Revolution and of the humanist pedagogues that were training students who would enter the kind of world the Industrial Revolution was making. What were they to teach? And in what manner? What is education now for?

Ultimately, the latest stages of the industrial education movement would catalyze the Smith-Hughes Acts of 1917 and become what we know more commonly as “Vo-Tech” in public high schools (she actually touches on that term, “high school,” the origin of which I was previously unfamiliar) or “shop class” or “trade schools” or “vocational colleges.” It is a truly fascinating story.

At the risk of being accused of horn-tooting, I will share that my review of Goddard’s book has been received positively. Teddy Macker, (one of?) the (many?) campaign and policy speechwriter(s?) for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he was still in the presidential running, reached out to me directly to say that I “did a great job lucidly distilling various big ideas and urgent questions” related to education and that “we are ripe for change in regards to education. We have lost the plot. Your essay will hopefully help us find the plot again.”

Dr. Goddard herself wrote an email to Jeff Bilbro, EIC of FPR, with very kind words for me and even said I taught her some things about her own book that she had not seen. High praise, indeed!

And so I will tease you with the opening paragraphs of that review below and then encourage you, if you’d like to read it to its completion, to visit Front Porch Republic’s website.

If you do, leave a comment letting them know Nate from The Blue Scholar sent you.

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What is education for? And by what means can one be educated? To those who do not come from an educational background or have not given these questions much thought, the answers might appear self-evident: “Transferring information” and “by teachers and books and lectures and assignments.” While somewhat true, these replies are woefully reductionistic. Of course philosophical debates, spanning anthropological, political, social, economic, theological, methodological, and moral lines of reasoning, have raged across centuries—indeed, millennia—in search of satisfactory responses, and to this day there is not anything close to an accepted consensus.

American history is replete with stories of educators and their own answers to these questions. Historian and journalist Connie Goddard, in her Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity, tells a handful of them. Some of their names are well known, others less so. John Dewey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Du Bois, and Ella Flagg Young might be among the former; Theodore Weld, Charles Ham, Calvin Woodward, and William Valentine among the latter. All of these figures, differing as they did across educational matters great and small, had this much in common: education must consist of the marriage of head and hand.

Why? “The harmonious growth of the whole being,” according to the father of the kindergarten Friedrich Froebel; for Charles Ham, “manual training tends to correct vicious mental impulses,” which is important since “intelligence is the basis of character”; Calvin Woodward wanted to “put the whole boy to school,” head, hand, and heart, and in an 1878 address quoted Thomas Carlyle who said, in Goddard’s words, that “the knowledge of material things was as necessary to the development of the intellect as knowledge of the abstract”; for Dewey, manual training alongside classical education was for equipping “pupils for their life in the community with the hope of improving the community itself.” These and other nineteenth-century pedagogues were all proponents of industrial education.

On my reading of Goddard, she articulates a threefold reason as to why this might be. The American Industrial Revolution seems to have affected at least three domains of human existence deeply enough that it resulted in three unique but related responses, three attempts at reintegrating what had become disintegrated by industrialization. All three involve the application of handcraft as an integral part of their efforts. For the atomized individual, the first domain, there was manual education; for the second, a torn social fabric, there was the so-called new education; finally, as antidote for the tortured industrial aesthetic, there was the Arts and Crafts movement which had begun in England and made its way to American soil. Goddard mentions the influence of the third but focuses on the development of the first and second. Each, if placed on a Venn diagram, would share overlapping ideals, yet each of these movements employed the use of labor toward different ends.

To help us understand those ends, Goddard sets the development of manual or industrial education in the context of Progressive Era Chicago when schools and workplaces were in dynamic relation, both responding to the kind of America the Industrial Revolution was making. Labor was unionizing in an effort to weather volatile market forces; children were leaving school at thirteen and fourteen years old for lack of interest and, in some cases, to take up family or factory work; prisons were filling with inmates whose “industrial fate” (John Dewey’s term) was sealed due to lack of education and employable skills; immigrants from Germany, Poland, China, and Italy flocked to Chicago with the hope of escaping crop failure and joblessness; former craftsmen working small-scale businesses, no longer able to compete with manufacturing plants and factories, became wage-earners. All these factors and more converged on the Windy City, resulting in a decades-long pedagogical experiment that ultimately changed the landscape of American education.

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If you would like to finished this book review, please visit Front Porch Republic here: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2025/01/educating-hands-for-human-flourishing-or-economic-growth/

And if you enjoy the review, I encourage you to purchase and read Dr. Goddard’s book.