1 Jan 1881 Jahr - Tuskegee Institutuion founded

Beschreibung:

In the industrial economy, the watchword for young people who hoped to secure good jobs was education. A high school diploma — now a gateway to a college degree — was valuable for boys who hoped to enter professional or managerial work. Daughters attended in even larger numbers than their brothers. Parents of the Civil War generation, who had witnessed the plight of war widows and orphans, encouraged girls to prepare themselves for teaching or office jobs and gain skills they could fall back on, “just in case.” By 1900, 71 percent of Americans between the ages of five and eighteen attended school. That figure rose further in the early twentieth century, as public officials adopted laws requiring school attendance. Most high schools were coeducational, and almost every high school featured athletics. Recruited first as cheerleaders for boys’ teams, girls soon established field hockey and other sports of their own.

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CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

In what ways did the Comstock Act reflect and contradict the realities of American life in the industrial era?

The rate of Americans attending college had long hovered around 2 percent; driven by public universities’ expansion, the rate rose in the 1880s, reaching 8 percent by 1920. Much larger numbers attended a growing network of business and technical schools. “GET A PLACE IN THE WORLD,” advertised one Minneapolis business college in 1907, “where your talents can be used to the best advantage.” Typically, such schools offered both day and night classes in subjects such as bookkeeping, typewriting, and shorthand.

The needs of the new economy also shaped the curriculum at more traditional collegiate institutions. State universities emphasized technical training and fed the growing professional workforce with graduates trained in fields such as engineering. Many private colleges distanced themselves from such practical pursuits; administrators argued that students who aimed to be leaders needed broad-based knowledge. But they modernized course offerings, emphasizing French and German, for example, rather than Latin and Greek. Harvard, led by dynamic president Charles W. Eliot from 1869 to 1909, pioneered the liberal arts. Students at the all-male college chose from a range of electives, as Eliot called for classes that developed each young man’s “individual reality and creative power.” In the South, one of the most famous educational projects was Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881. Washington both taught and exemplified the goal of self-help; his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), became a best-seller. Because of the deep poverty in which most southern African Americans lived, Washington concluded that “book education” for most “would be almost a waste of time.” He focused instead on industrial education. Students, he argued, would “be sure of knowing how to make a living after they had left us.” Tuskegee sent female graduates into teaching and nursing; men more often entered the industrial trades or farmed by the latest scientific methods.

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