The future looks promising for the field of career and technical education (CTE). The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 eases the way to create multiple pathways for high school students to get to college and careers. Philanthropic foundations are funding innovations in career preparation. State departments of education are revamping program guidelines and graduation requirements. In many states, governors have made career preparation a priority. While people plan CTE's future, Educating a Working Society looks to its past. This book explores twentieth-century efforts to bring schooling and work closer together. Chapters feature timely topics, such as public controversy over vocational programs, the influences of racism in philanthropic giving, students' choices in course taking, teachers' efforts to combine the academic and vocational missions of schooling, and contemporary trends in college and career readiness initiatives. Using schools to prepare youth for work has a long and troubled history. The contributors to this book dive into that history, bringing up compelling issues that challenge conventional wisdom about the history of education.

A volume in Studies in the History of Education Series Editor: Karen L. Riley, Auburn University at Montgomery How do people use education to respond to change? How do people learn what is expected of "good citizens" in their communities? These questions have long concerned educational historians, civic educators, and social scientists. In recent years, they have captured national attention through high-profile education reform proposals and civic initiatives. The historian who reviews the relevant literature, however, will discover something odd: most of it focuses on schooling, despite the fact that, prior to the middle of the twentieth century, formal schooling played only a small (but significant) part in most people's lives. What other educational forces and institutions bring civic ideals to bear upon minds and hearts? This question is rarely raised. At issue is a conceptual problem: we, today, tend to equate "education" with "schooling." Do county fairs and farmers' associations have anything to do with civic education? Drawing insights from debates at the time of the "founding" of the history of education as a branch of modern scholarship, this author asserts that they do. Using the life of county fairs, farmers' associations, and farmers' institutes as its central thread, this book explores how prominent town-dwellers and leading farmers tried to use agricultural improvement to grow towns and to shape civic sensibilities in the rural Midwest. Promoting economic development was the foremost concern, but the efforts taught farmers much about their "place" as "good citizens" of industrializing communities. As such, this study yields insights into how rural people of the nineteenth century came to accept the ideal that "town" and "country" were interdependent parts of the same community. In doing so, it reminds educators and historians that much education and learning - particularly of the civic sort - takes place beyond the schoolhouse.

The future looks promising for the field of career and technical education (CTE). The Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 eases the way to create multiple pathways for high school students to get to college and careers. Philanthropic foundations are funding innovations in career preparation. State departments of education are revamping program guidelines and graduation requirements. In many states, governors have made career preparation a priority. While people plan CTE's future, Educating a Working Society looks to its past. This book explores twentieth-century efforts to bring schooling and work closer together. Chapters feature timely topics, such as public controversy over vocational programs, the influences of racism in philanthropic giving, students' choices in course taking, teachers' efforts to combine the academic and vocational missions of schooling, and contemporary trends in college and career readiness initiatives. Using schools to prepare youth for work has a long and troubled history. The contributors to this book dive into that history, bringing up compelling issues that challenge conventional wisdom about the history of education.

A volume in Studies in the History of Education Series Editor: Karen L. Riley, Auburn University at Montgomery How do people use education to respond to change? How do people learn what is expected of "good citizens" in their communities? These questions have long concerned educational historians, civic educators, and social scientists. In recent years, they have captured national attention through high-profile education reform proposals and civic initiatives. The historian who reviews the relevant literature, however, will discover something odd: most of it focuses on schooling, despite the fact that, prior to the middle of the twentieth century, formal schooling played only a small (but significant) part in most people's lives. What other educational forces and institutions bring civic ideals to bear upon minds and hearts? This question is rarely raised. At issue is a conceptual problem: we, today, tend to equate "education" with "schooling." Do county fairs and farmers' associations have anything to do with civic education? Drawing insights from debates at the time of the "founding" of the history of education as a branch of modern scholarship, this author asserts that they do. Using the life of county fairs, farmers' associations, and farmers' institutes as its central thread, this book explores how prominent town-dwellers and leading farmers tried to use agricultural improvement to grow towns and to shape civic sensibilities in the rural Midwest. Promoting economic development was the foremost concern, but the efforts taught farmers much about their "place" as "good citizens" of industrializing communities. As such, this study yields insights into how rural people of the nineteenth century came to accept the ideal that "town" and "country" were interdependent parts of the same community. In doing so, it reminds educators and historians that much education and learning - particularly of the civic sort - takes place beyond the schoolhouse.