Vocational Education
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the inclusion in the public schools sch of of courses which have as their object the practical training of the pupils in the technical details of trades or professions, as distinguished from the purely academic courses of those schools in which Latin formed one of the chief studies. The first instance of vocational training is on record as the law passed by Massachusetts, in 1642, which authorized the towns to educate the children of shiftless parents in useful trades. Virginia passed a similar law in 1646. In 1824 the House of Refuge for delinquent boys society of the children of criminal parents. Later vocational training was extensively put into practice in reformatories throughout the county. It was introduced in schools for normal chilnot till 1890, however, that the idea was dren, but between that year and 1905 vocational training courses were introduced in the public schools of over two hundred cities. It is now almost universally a part of the curriculum of all public schools, especially in the high school grades. In February, 1917, the Smith-Hughes hes Act was passed by y Congress, which created a Federal Board of Vocational Education, which was granted a large appropriation by Congress for the purpose of instituting vocational training courses in the various States, largely for adults, in co-operation with the educational authorities of the States and municipalities. The main object was to provide for sailors and soldiers who had been injured and crippled during the war, so that they might be fitted for a return to civilian life.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 with the Smith-Hughes Act barely four years old, and read it chiefly as a scheme for retraining soldiers and sailors "injured and crippled during the war." That rehabilitation work went instead to the veterans' agencies that became the Veterans Administration, while the Federal Board of Vocational Education itself was abolished in 1933 and its duties folded into the federal education office. Smith-Hughes money nonetheless flowed for decades, superseded by the Vocational Education Act of 1963 and then by the Carl D. Perkins Act of 1984, which still funds the field today. The biggest change is in framing: what Collier's called vocational training is now usually called career and technical education, precisely because the older label came to suggest a lesser track for other people's children een already voiced against it by John Dewey in the 1910s.
Written for this edition, 2026.