ironically false dichotomy: mental v. physical
I discovered the Smith-Hughes Act through “Shop Class as Soulcraft” (PDF)1
The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 gave federal funding for manual training in two forms: as part of general education and as a separate vocational program. The invention of modern shop class thus serviced both cultural reflexes of the Arts and Crafts movement at once. The children of the managerial class could take shop as enrichment to the college-prep curriculum, making a bird-feeder to hang outside mom’s kitchen window, while the children of laborers would be socialized into the work ethic appropriate to their station through what was now called “industrial arts” education. The need for such socialization was not simply a matter of assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who lacked a Protestant work ethic.
This raises the chicken-or-egg question as to the origins of the connection between immigrants and the manual arts. I would have assumed that poverty (or at least, economics) and the social isolation of the manual arts is what made that connection. But even the assumption that the manual arts are socially isolating is predicated on my preconceptions built from the late 19th century. I’ve contacted Crawford to ask after more evidence, but it’s an interesting point in the history of pedagogy.
Consider the following,
Of the Smith-Hughes Act’s two rationales for shop class, vocational and general ed, only the latter emphasized the learning of aesthetic, mathematical, and physical principles through the manipulation of material things (Dewey’s “learning by doing”). [...] The act’s dual educational scheme mirrored the assembly line’s severing of the cognitive aspects of manual work from its physical execution. Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of “white collar” versus “blue collar,” corresponding to mental versus manual. These seem to be the categories that inform the educational landscape even now, and this entails two big errors. First, it assumes that all blue collar work is as mindless as assembly line work, and second, that white collar work is still recognizably mental in character.
Paradoxically, the impetus behind hands-on, project-based learning as well as the constructivist and [especially!] constructionist philosophies is dependent upon the primacy and efficacy of the “manual.” Unfortunately, we don’t really have language for the physical that does not discount the mental. Circumventing this, the language of constructionism and constructivism relies on precisely the vocabulary Crawford uses in discussing the psychic value of manual work: engagement, empowerment, relevance, and social embeddedness. I suppose the next step is finding those source that provide the arguments for the denigration or separation of the manual and mental. Given how entrenched the stereotyping of vocational and technical education as second-class has become, I’m fascinated by this long-standing cultural oversight, unsupported by an institution as explicitly and carefully supported as education.2
- Thanks again to Colleen Kaman for the link. [↩]
- That is, I am less surprised by our societal blindness to the problems with our educational system, given the explicit infrastructure we’ve built around it. [↩]
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