Industrial Education

Christopher M. Span & Brett G. Grant

As African Americans emerged from enslavement, one of their chief concerns was obtaining a quality education to advance themselves. This concern manifested itself in myriad ways, one of the most well-known being in the form of industrial education. Industrial education taught youth the requisite knowledge and skills needed to perform agricultural and mechanical labor. The goal was to design an education system that taught African American youth a trade so they could accordingly find work and establish themselves in the U.S. social order. Proponents of industrial education, most prominently Booker T. Washington and his mentor, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, deemed it the best way of efficiently instructing African Americans following the Civil War. Notwithstanding their lofty expectations, however, few African Americans benefited from being schooled in an industrialbased curriculum. This entry looks at how both men contributed to the development of industrial education. By the end of the 19th century, the ...

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