Learning a Trade: The Politics of Industrial Training in Boston, 1880–1940

This paper explores the restructuring of pathways to work into industry and the trades in Boston between 1880 and 1940. As larger workshops and factories eroded traditional forms of apprenticeship and on-the-job learning, employers, trade unions, philanthropists and school officials sought alternatives. Public industrial education drew a wide coalition of supporters, championed as a democratic alternative to elitist academic institutions and a promoter of industrial competitiveness. However, the politics of education at the municipal, state, and federal level contributed to industrial trade schools’ insulation from the labor market, and while they suffered from perennially low enrollment, institutes for engineering professionals and high school commercial courses for white-collar workers expanded rapidly. I argue that politics of training and credentialing at multiple geographic scales was essential in shaping the landscape of formal education, a process which in turn shaped the labor market and subsequent strategies of economic development.