The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will “adapt” workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it. (1915/1977, pp. 38-39)
John Dewey via Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 338).
Dewey’s reply was uncharacteristically blunt and forceful in rejecting Snedden’s arguments, as he deepened and clarified his own vision of vocationalism. It is worth quoting at length, since it defines the stark contrast between the two visions, a contrast that he saw much more clearly than his befuddled opponent.
John Dewey via Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (pp. 336-338).I would go farther than he is apparently willing to go in holding that education should be vocational, but in the name of a genuinely vocational education I object to the identification of vocation with such trades as can be learned before the age of, say, eighteen or twenty; and to the identification of education with acquisition of specialized skill in the management of machines at the expense of an industrial intelligence based on science and a knowledge of social problems and conditions. I object to regarding as vocational education any training which does not have as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as may be, the masters of their own industrial fate. I have my doubts about theological predestination, but at all events that dogma assigned predestinating power to an omniscient being; and I am utterly opposed to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men, no matter how well intentioned they may be….
Dr. Snedden’s criticisms of my articles seem to me couched in such general terms as not to touch their specific contentions. I argued that a separation of trade education and general education of youth has the inevitable tendency to make both kinds of training narrower, less significant and less effective than the schooling in which the material of traditional education is reorganized to utilize the industrial subject matter – active, scientific and social – of the present-day environment. Dr. Snedden would come nearer to meeting my points if he would indicate how such a separation is going to make education “broader, richer and more effective”….
Apart from light on such specific questions, I am regretfully forced to the conclusion that the difference between us is not so much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social. The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one which will “adapt” workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the business of all who would not be educational time-servers is to resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial system, and ultimately transform it. (1915/1977, pp. 38-39)
The narrow form of vocational education was a bust, since the preparation it provided was too narrow and backward-looking to be economically efficient and too complex to be implemented in schools.
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 170).
He (Dewey) charges that Snedden’s system of “narrow trade training” leads to “social predestination” and argues instead for a broad vision of vocational education that has “as its supreme regard the development of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity and executive capacity as shall make workers, as far as may be, the masters of their own industrial fate.”
Dewey had the last word in the debate in The New Republic, and reading both sides today, he comes away from the exchange as the clear winner on points. But if Dewey won the debate, it was Snedden who won the fight to set the broader aims of American education in the twentieth century. The debate was followed quickly by two events that set the tone for educational system for the next 100 years – the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act (1917), establishing a federal program of support for vocational education, and the issuance of the NEA report, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (1918). Both documents reflected key elements of the social efficiency vision that Snedden espoused and Dewey detested. Snedden’s vision has shaped the practice of schooling in the U.S. ever since, whereas Dewey’s more liberal vision has persisted primarily in the rhetoric of educators.
In this paper I seek to answer the question, How could someone as utterly forgettable as David Snedden trounce the great John Dewey in the contest to define the shape and purpose of American education? Drost is circumspect in judging his subject, but two reviewers of his biography of Snedden are less cautious in assessing the educator’s stature. Willis Rudy (1968, p. 171) put it this way: “David Snedden, professor of educational administration, emerges from these pages as the very prototype of the stock pedagogue-philistine figure of modern times, half-educated, anti-intellectual, instinctively hostile to humanistic culture.” Robert L. Church (1969, p. 394) reviewed the Drost book in conjunction with a biography of Edward L. Thorndike titled The Sane Positivist, and in his view, “If Thorndike was a ‘sane positivist,’ perhaps we should brand David Snedden an ‘insane’ one.”
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (pp. 330-333).
In his response, Bagley rejected both Snedden’s diagnosis of the problem with education and his prescription for a cure. He defended traditional liberal education against the charges made by his opponent, arguing that “The evidence for these sweeping indictments has, as far as I know, never been presented” (p. 162), and he asserted that Snedden’s distinction between education for production and utilization merely reproduced the old discredited distinction between education for gentlemen of leisure and education for workers. At the end he warned about “the danger of social stratification…inherent in separate vocational schools” (p. 170).
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 334).
He (Dewey) made two main arguments against the vision of vocationalism promoted by people like Snedden: this form of education was politically slanted toward the interests of manufacturers, and it was impractical in application. Noting that, though manufacturers had long provided special skill training to their employees,
It is natural that employers should be desirous of shifting the burden of their preparation to the public tax-levy. There is every reason why the community should not permit them to do so…. Every ground of public policy protests against any use of the public school system which takes for granted the perpetuity of the existing industrial regime, and whose inevitable effect is to perpetuate it, with all its antagonisms of employers and employed, producer and consumer.” (1914/1977, p. 55).
In addition he noted that the very factors that led to the destruction of the apprenticeship system – particularly “the mobility of the laboring population from one mode of machine work to another” (p. 56) – would also make vocational training in specific job skills impractical.
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 335).
But Dewey’s rejoinder had no apparent effect on Snedden, who continued making the same case for a socially efficient and vocationally useful form of education throughout the 1920s and 30s, the only difference being that his arguments grew increasingly extreme and his influence within education grew increasingly weak. More significantly, however, Dewey’s critique of social efficiency also had no significant effect on the direction of American public education, which by the early 1920s was lining up solidly behind the social efficiency vision. Herbert Kliebard (1987, p. 149) put it this way, in commenting on the long-term outcome of the debate, “Needless to say, Snedden’s version with its emphasis on occupational skill training was the ultimate victor in terms of what vocational education became, while Dewey’s ‘industrial intelligence’ in the sense of an acute awareness of what makes an industrial society tick is almost nowhere to be found.” In short, the administrative progressive vision of David Snedden, with its focus on social efficiency and educational utility, defeated the alternative progressive vision of John Dewey, with its focus on social justice and educational engagement.
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 338).
All children can learn because learning is natural; and a good system of education not only seeks to stimulate the learning process but deliberately tries to get out of the way of student learning. The complaints that the pedagogues had about their administrative counterparts in the progressive movement were that the stratified and vocationalized curriculum promoted by the latter would stifle the student’s urge to learn, block student access to a broad range of educational and social opportunities, and thereby reproduce rather than challenge the existing social structure.
Labaree, David. The Ironies of Schooling (p. 341).
