Teaching the World to Work: Industrial Education as U.S. Imperial Tradition^*

In 2015, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) distributed a press release touting the transformative effects of what it called a “new sustainable … workplace model” in Afghanistan. Implicit in the write-up was the idea that labor could redeem a nation torn apart by serial foreign interventions and civil conflicts. Vocational jargon was front and center: if Afghan jobseekers could grasp the “concept of networking” and seize “growth opportunities” a new culture of “workforce development” might accomplish what fourteen years of armed occupation had not. The story of Sayed Hamid, a twenty-seven-year-old loan officer from Mazar-i-Sharif trained by USAID’s Afghanistan Workforce Development Program, illustrated this for readers. Hamid attributed his career successes to skills learned through the U.S.-run program and suggested there would be profound shifts in Afghan society if foreign agencies focused closely on “labor market demand.”¹ A subsequent agency report framed his story within a larger one about the U.S. reinvigoration of vocational education in Afghanistan.²

Programs like this shadowed the United States on its two-decade march across Central Asia and the Middle East. In 2004, as the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) pursued the De-Baathification of Iraqi society, its planners lamented declining numbers of students in vocational schools.³ CPA analysts, Middle East specialists in the United States, and numerous transnational development agencies identified vocational schools’ inability to “provide a good supply of labor to the labor market in Iraq” as a hindering factor in national rehabilitation. Training ideologically reliable teachers and building up the ranks of labor in destabilized regions became pillars of the United States’ occupation policy. Alongside top-down reforms, the imagined rebirth of Iraqi society required bottom-up buy-in. This involved not only civic programs designed to promote democratic culture, but also instilling new labor values among Iraqi citizens.⁴

Afghanistan and Iraq are recent-but-glaring examples of how worker training is embedded in the United States’ global entanglements. Pick a country in Asia, Africa, or Latin America and there is a decent chance you will find a U.S.-funded vocational education program operating there. The six-decade history of USAID alone provides a wealth of case studies. A recent report from the organization boasts that between 1983 and 2009 it provided technical training to 177,717 people from sixty-two countries, including “tailored subject-matter programs, internships, observational study tours, on-the-job training, conferences, seminars, short courses, and workshops.”⁵ If we widen our gaze to include intergovernmental and transnational development programs subsidized by the United States the list becomes downright unmanageable.⁶

Depending on your politics, such initiatives might reflect the cynical finessing of labor power in service of a U.S.-led global neoliberal order, or genuine commitments to the economic improvement of allied states, or public relations campaigns designed to blunt the bad optics of world policing, or some combination of all these things. Or maybe you do not have a hot take on the United States’ longstanding interest in producing labor abroad—which, on its surface, is admittedly a topic that does not elicit the same passions as regime change, drone strikes, extraordinary renditions, or cyber warfare. More likely, being reminded of the U.S.-funded trade college or model farm recalls dense, acronym-laden reports of development bureaucracies or grainy promotional videos with leaden narration. These sterile by-products suggest that this is a subject beyond politics, beyond hegemony, and beyond world-making.

Peeling back this staid veneer, however, reveals the United States’ long history of linking the classroom, factory, and field to overlaid projects of nation- and empire-building. Using labor training to obliterate, accentuate, or otherwise manage difference, and to ideally profit in the process, is something of a U.S. tradition—one that long predates the emergence of contemporary developmental dogmas. The twenty-first-century development specialists who set about creating the new Iraqi or Afghan laborer tapped into this tradition, vesting faith in the notion that certain types of workers and certain types of work would secure long-term stability in the Greater Middle East. To identify the roots of initiatives like the Afghan Workforce Development Program we need to cast our gaze backwards in time.⁷

My lecture today explores the colonial origins of American labor education programs. It begins in the parochial schools of British North America and concludes at the dawn of Cold War development. In varied but mutually intelligible guises, these programs have long been legitimizing instruments in the construction and maintenance of U.S. continental and overseas power, acting as conduits for moral claims about the tutelary dimensions of U.S. imperialism while also serving the political and economic needs of the polity. Their connected manifestations provide a novel window onto the United States’ enmeshed global forms: the nationalizing settler state, the overseas colonial empire, and the global hegemon shaping a decolonizing world.

My purpose here is to take a long view of the United States as a pedagogical empire. By this I mean an empire that has been consistently preoccupied with managing foreign populations through directed programs of study, and one that has channeled resources towards this end for the past 200 years. Labor education has anchored this civilizational project. It surfaced in the expansionist visions of the early U.S. republic, grew through the late-imperial crest of the early twentieth century, and mutated to service the needs of the post-1945 empire.⁸ We should take it seriously rather than viewing it as something adjacent or epiphenomenal, analyzing it not merely as cover for the sharp bite of U.S. military and economic power, but as a mobilizing feature of empire operating in tandem with them. In labor education, the blunt logics of economic rehabilitation that have long justified U.S. power found their vehicle: a malleable set of practices that simultaneously validated inequality and conquest while also claiming to rectify them.

Nothing illustrates the centrality of labor training to U.S. nation- and empire-building as clearly as what was known as “industrial education.” Beginning in the nineteenth century, the term described instructive programs aimed at turning poor and racialized groups into laborers. These programs were a means of reproducing and embedding class hierarchies in co-constituted domestic, settler, and overseas spheres. Advocates of industrial education adopted a broad definition of “industry,” attaching it to any schooling with applied elements—thus it could take place not only in a workshop but also a farm field, a kitchen, or a local store. This was work as extension of racialized power, designed to root out undesirable cultural traits, bolster economic productivity, and, by extension, stabilize continental and overseas territories. It contained limited instruction in abstract academic topics and—informed by prevailing theories of race—was organized around the idea of incremental (and often finite) advancement through labor. Industrial education was embraced by the missionaries, teachers, politicians, military officers, corporate executives, and social scientists who helped build the U.S. empire. Its most concentrated expressions appeared between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War, although, as we will see, it cannot be neatly contained within this period.⁹

Curiously, searching for “industrial education” in a library catalog will not immediately conjure much of interest to a historian of U.S. foreign relations. In traditional literature on the topic, its colonial roots have been effaced. Your keyword search might produce books published prior to the mid-twentieth century with titles like Career Development Curriculum for Industrial Education Teachers or The Development of Industrial Education in Michigan.¹⁰ The last major scholarly survey of the topic—Melvin L. Barlow’s History of Industrial Education in the United States—was published in 1967 and spent much of its 512 pages revealing the incremental policy developments that incorporated manual training into U.S. public schools. Forgive me for not recounting them here.¹¹

Prior to this, we must go all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s to find comprehensive studies: Charles Bennett’s sweeping two-volume survey of industrial education on both sides of the Atlantic and Lewis Flint Anderson’s History of Manual and Industrial School Education. Both describe in detail industrial education’s origins in European philosophy and educational theory but provide little on how Americans reworked and redeployed these ideas beyond the technical schools of the Northeast and Midwest. Five pages in Anderson’s study brag of what he calls the “eminent success” of industrial schools for Black and Native American students, but he is entirely silent on how U.S. educators, philanthropists, and imperial administrators exported industrial education in the decades preceding the book’s publication.¹² By ignoring the colonial origins of industrial education, these scholars created an inert lineage, where ideas of applied learning gradually enlarged the possibilities of schooling for Euro-American children. The more turbulent histories remained absent.¹³

While there is no single account that threads together the broad contours of U.S. industrial education as a colonial practice, more recent scholarship has productively examined its constituent pieces.¹⁴ This work comes from disparate scholarly fields and subfields that are not always in conversation with one another: the history of the American West and North American Indians; Black intellectual history; histories of childhood, education, labor, and racial capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States; Philippine, Hawaiian, and Puerto Rican Studies; international history; and, in places, the history of U.S. foreign relations.¹⁵ Here we might think of Jacqueline Fear-Seagal’s research on Native American boarding schools, or Solsiree del Moral’s accounts of colonial education in Puerto Rico.¹⁶ Or we could read Paul Lawrie on the history of race management and African American labor in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.¹⁷ Or look at Julie Kaomea’s writings on missionary schools in Hawaii.¹⁸ Much of the most illuminating recent research is connective in nature. Publications by Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Malini Schueller, and Karine Walther explore education as a dialogue between different domains of U.S. power in the early twentieth century, while articles by Kalani Beyer do similar work on the nineteenth.¹⁹ But within histories of the United States and the World, we still lack an overarching genealogy of these ideas and practices despite their near-constant reappearance across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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The joining of the classroom and the workshop predates the founding of the United States. Traditional accounts of industrial education identify its origins in the exported influence of a Germanic Protestant culture of labor—particularly as expressed in the writings of the Swiss thinker Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Working with children from destitute families in the 1770s, Pestalozzi devised a system of learning that subordinated the word to the action with the aim of ameliorating poverty. His acolytes built on his ideas by establishing schools throughout Central Europe. In 1809, one of these men, an Alsatian teacher named Francis Joseph Neef, linked up with the Scottish-American geologist and philanthropist William Maclure to found a school dedicated to practical education in Village Green, Pennsylvania. The Village Green school anticipated an expansion of lyceums, mechanic institutes, and manual labor academies in the following decades. These institutions arose in response to the nascent industrialization of the U.S. Northeast, which was eroding apprenticing and guild systems, and offered skills training to the growing white laboring classes.²⁰

This version of industrial education’s transatlantic genesis provides an attractive origin story about how Europeans taught Americans to be modern workers. It is one that connects neatly to the later rise of public schooling and the booming industrial economy of the late-nineteenth century. A straightforward story, in other words, about a developing nation producing the human engines of its prosperity. Yet, as Kalani Beyer suggests, these efforts to create a new urban laborer obscured another strain of U.S. manual education, one that would be far more influential in shaping the character of what the historian Ian Tyrrell has called America’s “moral empire.”²¹

A fuller accounting reveals histories rooted in the North American colonial borderlands and connected to ideas about work, civilization, and Christian salvation.²² In the pre-Revolutionary era, schools for indigenous children mainly taught students to be missionaries and teachers, aiming to extend Euro-American cultural influence into the contested interior. But work also factored into curricula. Alongside religious instruction, the Delaware and Mohegan children at Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut—founded in 1754—learned the moral benefits of labor. White teachers trained boys in animal husbandry while girls spent time in settler homes learning domestic skills, creating an early template for gendered visions of vocational training.²³ Although important precursors to the programmatic efforts of the nineteenth century, these sorts of schools remained scattered and suffered from low enrollment, reflecting the colonies’ limited geography and their need to coexist with sovereign Indian nations along their borderlands.²⁴

Colonial variants of industrial education gathered steam in the early 1800s, accompanying the U.S. settler empire as it moved inland. Escalating white settlement brought with it new calls to train Indians to become yeoman farmers, but it was not until the 1810s that religious groups began developing more systematic approaches. Organizations like the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions looked to manual training models from Great Britain and Central Europe as a means of delivering indigenous peoples from the dual perils of settler violence and modern vice. Seeking greater economic security for this endeavor, missionaries pursued links with federal and state authorities by emphasizing the perceived benefits of uplift.²⁵

Labor training grew following the passage of the Indian Civilization Act in 1819 and the founding of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824. The latter was headed by the Quaker reformer Thomas McKenney, whose interest in education further linked it to frontier expansion.²⁶ It was in these missionary-run and government-subsidized tribal schools that what came to be known as industrial education evolved. Many, like the Choctaw Academy in Kentucky, emphasized hands-on instruction—students tailored clothes, cobbled boots, fixed wagons, and smithed iron.²⁷ In the late 1830s, the Bureau formalized manual labor schools as a key approach to indigenous education, with head William Medill declaring that “the mere teaching of letters to the savage mind is not sufficient to give a new direction to his pursuits, or render him useful to his people.”²⁸ Bureau efforts occurred alongside the ethnic cleansing operations that banished the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” to the Indian Territory. The Cherokee Nation managed to maintain a measure of control over the education of its children in its new homeland, establishing a common school system in 1841, but even their embrace of assimilationist pedagogies could not protect them from government meddling.²⁹ By the end of the 1850s, Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendents in territories ranging from Oregon to Texas reported on labor training in their schools.³⁰

Using these practices to undermine indigenous sovereignty extended beyond the Western territories into the Pacific, where U.S. settler missionaries tapped globalized templates of reform.³¹ Adult literacy campaigns in 1820s Hawaii evolved into settler-run schools for Kanaka Maoli children in the following decade. They emphasized familiar themes of faith, language, and labor. The most prominent of them, the Hilo Boys’ Boarding School on the Big Island, was established in 1836 by New England missionaries.³² At Hilo, labor underwrote the students’ tuition, food, and board, and served more lofty goals. As the son of the school’s founders, Francis Lyman, claimed raising kalo or sugar cane, tailoring clothes, and cooking meals, created “loyal citizens” who were “not afraid to work.”³³ Girls’ schools like the Wailuku Female Seminary also used manual labor to lessen operational expenses while preparing girls for a future of domestic toil.³⁴ Although perennially underfunded, schools like Hilo and Wailuku would have powerful effects on educational policy across the Hawaiian Islands as settler power advanced in the latter half of the century.³⁵

The roots of U.S. industrial education in the pre-Civil War Era reveal a growing polity that viewed labor as moral imperative, economic necessity, and means of control. This was not limited to instruction in the trades for Euro-American students but extended to rudimentary training for racialized out groups brought into the United States’ orbit through missionizing, conquest, and the slave trade. Prior to the 1860s, manual training as a form of colonial domestication remained largely the realm of religious organizations, particularly in overseas spaces like Hawaii where the white settler presence was not yet validated by looming statehood or a military presence. But there was evidence of growing interest from the branches of the federal government tasked with managing settler-indigenous conflicts, who began underwriting parochial schools in the United States’ western territories. These were the modest beginnings of an evolving partnership between state and non-state bodies that would crystallize around the idea that so-called “problem” populations could be corrected through labor.³⁶

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Industrial education programs grew in the decades following the Civil War. Three major factors drove their ascent. First, the vast social and economic implications of the end of slavery in the U.S. South, which saw millions of formerly enslaved people enter the labor market as free workers and U.S. political life as citizens.³⁷ Second, the drive to conquer and nationalize foreign lands in the trans-Mississippi West and the tensions over Indian integration this produced.³⁸ And finally, the rapid growth of economically deprived and culturally othered migrant underclasses in major U.S. cities and sites of corporatized labor.³⁹ Anchoring these developments was the construction of a dynamic industrial economy that thrived off the resource wealth of the continental interior, aggressively expanded the United States’ role in global markets, and required enormous reserves of labor power.⁴⁰ This complex set of factors expanded the cast of figures invested in industrial education, positioning it as a practice advocates believed would sanitize the moral rot of racial slavery and settler colonialism while also serving the economic and territorial imperatives of the state and private enterprise.

The Reconstruction-era South was a key site for articulating these visions of race management. Although reformers had pitched labor education for emancipated Blacks in earlier decades, the end of slavery produced new interest in the practice. In 1868, a Union Army officer named Samuel Chapman Armstrong founded the Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School on a former plantation site in Southeast Virginia. Born in Hawaii, Armstrong inherited ideas about industrial education from his missionary parents, who had helped establish it in the islands. His school operated on a restrictive notion of Black advancement at odds with many of the liberationist initiatives led by freed people. It stressed Armstrong’s own model of moral progress, which challenged the benefits of advanced education for Black populations and valorized manual labor.⁴¹ This approach preserved the white supremacist status quo from the political and economic disruptions of emancipation by using industrial education, in the words of the historian of education James Anderson, to “socialize blacks to understand and accept their disenfranchisement and to make them more productive laborers.”⁴²

In its first decades, Hampton was a teacher training school that prepared formerly enslaved students to teach what the black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois later called the “gospel of work and money.”⁴³ Hampton’s curriculum involved a basic liberal arts education attached to a comprehensive program of manual education, modeling the desired ideal for Black schoolrooms. Hampton students cut and sold lumber, built doors and window sashes, grew and harvested crops, mended clothing, and staffed the school printing press. Armstrong built relationships with northern firms, who capitalized on the six-to-ten cent hourly wages students received.⁴⁴ The road forward, he and his supporters argued, was not black out-migration from the South, but rather a marriage of cheap southern labor and northern capital. They sought to engineer this future through industrial education, creating a model that foreclosed on the possibility of equality.

The number of Black industrial schools multiplied through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the model was taken up by Hampton graduates like Booker T. Washington.⁴⁵ It also grew in the emerging juvenile carceral system, which housed disproportionate numbers of African American, indigenous, and migrant youth.⁴⁶ Early northeastern houses of refuge blossomed into a nationwide system of reform schools by the late nineteenth century on the back of youth justice reform. Adolescents sentenced by juvenile courts found themselves in worlds of work, serving as bound apprentices at the schools or being shipped out to nearby farms. Many of these institutions rebranded as “industrial schools” in the first decades of the 1900s to soften their image, but daily operations remained intensely punitive.⁴⁷

In 1878, Hampton coalesced with another arm of the industrial education movement when Captain Richard Henry Pratt brought twenty-two Indian prisoners from Fort Marion, Florida to be schooled in Virginia. During his three years as jailer to captured Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe warriors, the army officer became convinced labor education could solve the so-called “Indian Problem” facing the U.S. settler state. After a brief stint at Hampton, he successfully lobbied the Department of the Interior for federal support, securing funds and a disused army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.⁴⁸ The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in October 1879, receiving its first Lakota students directly from the warzones of the Northern Plains.

From its inception, Carlisle aimed to achieve full-spectrum cultural obliteration. Separated from their communities by vast distances, students found themselves in an environment where they were forbidden from speaking their native tongues, dressing in customary fashion, or practicing their spiritual beliefs—all things they would do secretly in small acts of individual and collective subversion. The curriculum leaned heavily on industrial education, modeling its workshops and fields on Hampton. During summertime, students were placed with local white families, where they worked as domestic laborers, toiled on farms, or staffed small businesses. Unlike Hampton, which sought to cultivate black subordination as a bulwark against political mobilization, Carlisle presented a vision of total immersion, wherein “Indianness” was erased and replaced by assimilated citizenship. Much of this hinged on the reproduction of settler norms, including vigorous attention to contributing value to society through labor.⁴⁹

As indigenous political sovereignty collapsed in the West, the Carlisle model appealed to government agencies seeking a means of rapidly annexing foreign territory but reticent to publicly endorse outright physical extermination. Such concerns came to the fore in the early 1880s, when multiple white-led advocacy organizations formed and attempted to shape federal Indian policy. Their numbers included not only religious leaders but also policymakers, military officers, and wealthy philanthropists. The groups liaised at meetings like the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, where speeches on the value of industrial education were commonplace. They also studied settler education systems in Canada and Australia in search of new insights and refinements.⁵⁰ Positioning their ideas as antidotes to the violence of frontier eliminationism, white reformers put forth blueprints for a rehabilitative empire—an imagined course correction that demonstrated the United States’ enlightened approach to expansion. Their efforts were challenged by indigenous progressives, who developed solidarities within the boarding school system and created their own advocacy bodies like the Society of Native Americans. Indian reformers forged cross-cultural and transnational links with Black and Australian Aboriginal groups, seeking to challenge the racial binaries of status quo progressivism.⁵¹

It was no coincidence that the height of settler race management coincided with the federal government’s push to nationalize the western territories. Federal investment in Indian education grew dramatically in the closing decades of the 1800s, from $20,000 in 1877 to nearly $3,000,000 by 1900. This influx of funds gave rise to a system of day schools, on-reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools stretching from Alaska to New Mexico, and California to Michigan.⁵² Over 300 schools using some form of industrial education existed by the early twentieth century.⁵³ Each pitched labor as resolution: a vehicle for destroying and reconstituting culture, enabling industrious citizenship, and manufacturing gendered domesticity. Their violent operation and traumatic legacies have been well-documented by scholars and activists, although a comprehensive public reckoning with the schools—like that currently ongoing in Canada and Australia—has yet to manifest in the United States.⁵⁴

Finally, in the East’s swelling cities and the West’s labor camps, Gilded Age and Progressive Era industrial education intersected with the politics of migration, with native-born reformers pitching it as a means of managing increasingly heterogenous spaces. As the historian of labor Julie Greene notes, the central tension of urban social policy during this period rested in the conflict between the needs of industrial capital for “servile, cheap, easily disciplined, [and] disposable” labor and bourgeois fears of a feral migrant mass mired in Old World customs and beholden to foreign religious organizations and political ideologies.⁵⁵ The lives of immigrant and first-generation children became a terrain of struggle for competing visions of Americanization, which played out in schools, settlement houses, orphanages, factories, and reformatories. Here, too, labor had its role—even among reformers who advocated cultural pluralism. Hull House founder Jane Addams saw industrial education as a valuable tool of cultural synthesis, writing in 1904 of its “humanizing power” and ability to bridge ethnic divides. To Addams, the practice could be detached from the harsh imperatives of industry and applied in an incorporating spirit that produced virtuous citizenship and self-sufficiency.⁵⁶

The triangular relationship between mass migration, labor reform, and industrial education was complex. The specter of the child worker created pressures for state and federal governments to limit the practice, and institutions like the settlement houses explicitly positioned themselves as spaces where children could experience childhood fully. Yet the notion of industriousness remained a central tenet of these Americanization programs. Such ideas were easily coopted by corporate concerns like the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, whose sociological department oversaw 16,000 workers from over thirty nationalities. From kindergarten, the children of these workers learned basketry, rug weaving, and wood carving with the expectation that they would one day follow their parents into life as unskilled laborers.⁵⁷

Federal funding for manual training courses in public schools arrived in 1917 with the passage of the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act, marking the beginnings of widespread adoption and standardization.⁵⁸ Backgrounding this expansion, however, was a long-standing synthesis of labor and education that had arisen to negotiate gradients of inclusion and exclusion in a nation built by empire. It presented itself as a means of reconciling “foreign” multitudes with a narrow vision of Americanness, offering tailormade outcomes on a case-by-case basis. In the New South, this meant preserving racialized distinction and servicing the national economy; in the western territories, it involved “solving” the violence of settler colonialism through the attempted cultural destruction of indigenous peoples; and in urban slums and labor encampments, it saw reformers and factory owners alike promote learning to work as a pathway to assimilation.

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The globalization of U.S. industrial education quickened after 1898, when the United States colonized territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The wars with Spain, the First Philippine Republic, and the Moros of the Southern Philippines brought millions of new foreign subjects under U.S. rule, raising contentious questions about what integration meant in an empire still struggling to define its identity. Within government, empire’s boosters leaned heavily on the language of humanitarianism to support their case for prolonged overseas intervention, drawing from the playbook of domestic and European colonial reformers alike. Unsurprisingly, education featured heavily in these debates on colonial obligation, used as evidence of U.S. commitment to the long-term transformation of Asian, South Pacific, and Caribbean societies. Newspaper reports touted the importance of colonial schools, which they claimed would simultaneously morally validate the U.S. overseas presence and create a new colonized workforce.⁵⁹ Located at the intersection of tutelage and economic development, industrial education soon entered these discussions.

Inherently colonial in its structure and goals, industrial schooling in the United States provided inspiration for the architects of the overseas empire. Many teachers and administrators in the new colonies were well positioned to draw from these schools, having worked in the U.S. South and Settler West.⁶⁰ They disparaged previous Spanish attempts at public education, claiming schools in Puerto Rico and the Philippines were underfunded, understaffed, underattended, and under the thumb of the Catholic fraternal orders. According to one teacher, the peoples of the islands required “not only academic training but industrial training as well.” She lauded the appointment of General John Eaton as inspector of education in Puerto Rico, citing his long involvement with Black and Native American schools.⁶¹ On offer in the colonies would be a now-familiar curriculum that stressed Americanization through English language learning, elementary academic subjects, and forms of manual training geared to the local environment. Speaking at Lake Mohonk in 1901, the educational reformer William Nicholas Hailmann made a case for the universality of labor education, advocating its application throughout the globe. “Work conquers the world for man,” he declared.⁶²

The founders of the colonial education system in the Philippines—Fred Atkinson, David Prescott Barrows, and Frank White—studied and toured schools in the United States, arguing among themselves and with Filipino critics about what balance of classical and manual instruction should be favored. Although Barrows initially critiqued the U.S. system, industrial training won out within a decade, favored by the long-serving Governor General William Cameron Forbes. Alongside English and arithmetic lessons, Filipino children engaged in gendered physical tasks modeled on those at U.S. industrial schools—perhaps not surprising given that the schools shared personnel. For animist and Muslim Filipinos, instruction leaned even further towards industrial education—an approach justified by their alleged religious and racial inferiority to Filipino Catholics.⁶³

In Puerto Rico, Commissioner of Education Martin Brumbaugh opened the Boy’s Charity School at Santurce, the first in a growing number of institutions that used industrial education. U.S. colonial authorities sent Puerto Rican youth to U.S. boarding schools, hoping the immersive experience would transform them. Sixty students went to Carlisle where they not only labored but also, much like Indian attendees before them, became conscious and critical of the ways U.S. imperial education racialized them and used labor training as a means of subordination.⁶⁴ In 1910, the Puerto Rican legislature formally embedded industrial education into its general education provision and two years later made it a required subject, hoping to promote what it called the “dignity of labor” to students.⁶⁵

Familiar practices applied in the United States resurfaced in the colonies. In the Philippines, student labor funded education, as was the case in industrial boarding schools in Mountain Province and settlement farm schools in Bukidnon.⁶⁶ Student-produced goods appeared in Philippine and U.S. fairs. Thousands of “industrial exhibits” were displayed in the Philippine Reservation at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, including student-made baskets, furniture, weapons, utensils, and pottery. A Bureau of Education report bragged that the exhibits demonstrated “progress in the use of appliances of higher civilization.”⁶⁷ A magazine, The Philippine Craftsman, emerged to advocate for “industrial work” in schools. It celebrated shopwork and agricultural training in all their forms, encouraging teachers to go forth and exploit the human and environmental potential of the islands. The second issue of the Craftsman compared the “trend of education thought in the United States and the Philippines” and reflected on industrial education in Korea.⁶⁸

In all these schools, the goal of education remained Americanization, although the term became more malleable after 1898. Each iteration of industrial education derived from a racial imaginary fixated on labor as the handmaiden of progress. This was an imaginary that selectively embraced or ignored particularities of culture, language, environment, and history to construct forms of unequal citizenship and colonial subjecthood. But the offshore territories expanded and modified what assimilation could mean. In the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other overseas domains, Americanization promised a how-to guide for subordinate modernity: maps of becoming that stopped short of the benefits conferred through full citizenship. The Filipino student worker was expected to be Americanized—to embrace U.S. labor practices, economic relationships, domestic arrangement, consumption patterns—but, unlike the Lakota or Cheyenne one, would not become a citizen. This was, according to Solsiree del Moral, an ideology of cultural displacement—one that eventually fused with the politics of colonized elites in a U.S. imperial patronage system premised on hybrid forms of control.⁶⁹

Increasingly tied to new visions of global—rather than U.S.—integration, industrial education became an exportable template for colonial development. Beyond the territorial empire, its most famed globalized form was the Tuskegee model. Founded by Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington in 1881, the Tuskegee Institute anchored its curriculum in labor and advocated an accommodationist approach to Black progress rooted in economic incrementalism. Washington’s refusal to attack the politics of white supremacy won him vocal critics among black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, but support from white philanthropists invested in the social gospel. Tuskegee’s approach to industrial education appealed to a variety of figures in Europe and Africa, where an Americanized labor force was tied to ideas of colonial profit and race management. This included Americanized Liberian elites seeking greater productivity from native workers, conservative middle-class Ghanaians and South Africans who sought Black advancement within the confines of European colonialism, and British and German missionaries and colonial officials attempting to bind education and labor to the growing colonial plantation complex. Tuskegee sent specialists to Liberia and German Togo to train locals, and school graduates circulated through other African colonies establishing schools.⁷⁰

The zeal for U.S. industrial education grew in Europe’s African colonies between the early twentieth century and the interwar years. It was an enthusiasm driven by administrators seeking to calibrate native policy with colonial commodity production and tightly connected to the rise of commercial plantations requiring large labor pools.⁷¹ As in the United States, it was also linked to the search for forms of mass education that dampened demands for civil equality. Tested in the cotton economy of the U.S. South and the post-1898 colonies, industrial education addressed these issues by tending to colonial modernization while short-circuiting anything but the most incremental demands for autonomy. In this way, the educational programs of the U.S. racial state fused with the anxious colonial policies of European empires, setting the stage for U.S. pedagogical interventions following the Second World War.

Experiments with industrial education in Africa illustrated how an Americanized world could be pursued without the further acquisition of colonies. In the Progressive Era, new initiatives arose that merged white philanthropy, social science, and civilizationism. Key among these was the Phelps-Stokes fund, established by a wealthy New York family with deep ties to race reform in the United States. The fund used its resources to insert itself into education on both sides of the Atlantic, placing a special emphasis on schooling for non-European peoples. Its intellectual steward was the Columbia-trained sociologist Thomas Jesse Jones, who provided a veneer of “scientific systemization” to agricultural and industrial training.⁷² The content of Jones’s ideas differed little from those espoused by Armstrong or Washington, but his ability to perform academic expertise lent Phelps-Stokes greater credibility at a time when uplift was increasingly challenged by the burgeoning eugenics movement. The fund sent research commissions to African states, liaising with Black leaders, European officials, business magnates, and missionaries in their efforts to promote the Tuskegee model there.⁷³

The Phelps-Stokes Fund was one cog in a network of philanthropic organizations dedicated to reshaping the world in the Progressive Era and interwar years. Collaborating with governments, universities, religious bodies, and corporations, these groups would help define the high modernist project of development. In a destabilized China, the Rockefeller Foundation worked to overhaul taxation and rural credit systems, reconcile language with a new transnational technical vernacular, train teachers to spread the gospel of modernization, and establish new centers of agricultural instruction.⁷⁴ In the Caribbean and Central and South America, U.S. interventionism created new military-corporate regimes that welcomed training programs. The U.S.-run government in Haiti, for instance, imported expertise throughout the 1920s to help operate its dozens of technical schools.⁷⁵ In interwar eastern and southern Africa, Office of Indian Affairs officials and British administrators shared strategies for managing the “livelihoods” of colonized peoples, speaking to a robust culture of transimperial exchange.⁷⁶

Within the interwar U.S. empire, populations targeted for improvement through labor increasingly subjected the practice to critique and revision. In the 1930s, damning reports raised the specter of child labor in American Indian schools. Indigenous activists and reformist officials in the Indian Service introduced child-centered approaches rooted in community and culture, destabilizing the previous program of assimilationism.⁷⁷ Likewise, Black social critics pushed for wider support and investment in African American liberal education by critiquing the historic over-emphasis on industrial training.⁷⁸ The Philippines and Puerto Rico retained robust manual training in public schools, but it was now entirely taught and administered by local teachers, who imagined futures for their students not always in sync with the colonial agenda.⁷⁹ Traditional white-led industrial education had reached its terminal point.

The ebb of industrial education programs in the territorial empire coincided with the rise of what Anne L. Foster has called an “empire of the mind”—a means of structuring global order in which the allure of U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms replaced the need for formal colonies. Modernizing societies would naturally gravitate to the U.S. model, proponents argued, whether through incentive, coercion, or force.⁸⁰ Progress was increasingly defined by specialists and charted on tidy graphs, which displaced the racial moralizing of colonial reports. Globalized forms of industrial education dispersed into the slipstream of this techno-rational approach, providing grist for expansive visions of education and labor development that would be elaborated in government initiatives, public-private partnerships, and corporate interventions after the Second World War.⁸¹ Loud rhetorical commitments to national self-determination obscured the origins of these new programs, yet their legacies remained.

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The spirit of industrial education survived into the Cold War era, nested within ideologies of assistance that stressed paced advancement for so-called traditional societies as a bulwark against communist infiltration.⁸² Writing for the Teacher’s College Journal in 1962, the academic administrator and development consultant Eldon Johnson captured the mood of this period, marrying geopolitical competition with secular educational missionizing. Education was a “popular American export,” he wrote. “We should step it up.” Stepping it up meant not only bringing more foreign students into the United States, but also giving large infusions of aid for education and training in the Global South.⁸³ Declaring the “old days of imperialism” dead, Johnson translated the project through the martial language of Cold War struggle, weighing school costs against those for Polaris submarines and Atlas missiles—but the roots of colonial civilizationism lingered in the article’s contention that a workforce mobilized by U.S.-backed education would create “developed competence” and the “rudiments of citizenship and self-realization.”⁸⁴ This was familiar language.

Johnson’s article coincided with the ratcheting up of Cold War development in response to cascading decolonization in Asia and Africa.⁸⁵ As the United States summitted the post-war global order, it created new pathways for institutionalized aid. This involved what Francis Bonenfant-Juwong calls the “globalization of Progressive educational thought,” which critiqued “passive” education in favor of experiential models geared towards students and their environments—an approach, as we have seen, with roots not just in public schooling and domestic rural reconstruction, but also longstanding forms of continental and overseas colonial control.⁸⁶ By the 1960s, organizations like USAID were mobilizing material, experts, and capital on the premise that the United States’ financial and geostrategic interests and the needs of formerly colonized societies slotted together cleanly.⁸⁷ On the ground, consultants and Peace Corps volunteers monitored and guided a host of agricultural and industrial training initiatives that cropped up in Asia, Africa, and Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s.⁸⁸ With their emphasis on societal renewal, these programs advertised themselves as alleviating material want and resolving political strife—correctives to the historical problem of empire and the contemporary problem of global communism. Their rationales lacked the same blend of overt racial denigration and Christian supremacism found in earlier colonial education models, yet within them were familiar desires: to retrain, to reform, and to remake foreign populations.

The origins of these desires are located deep within a multitude of paradigmatically colonial relationships that span the history of the United States. Industrial education threaded itself through citizen-making on the nationalizing edges of a settler empire, seeking to produce gradients of citizenship for indigenous, Black, and migrant populations through a lens of racial capability. It shaped the character of the U.S. high imperial civilizing mission in the early twentieth century, deployed as evidence of U.S. commitments to colonial modernization and used to shift societies away from traditional lifeways and “dangerous” contemporary ideologies. And it provided a departure point for a twentieth-century empire shifting gears, one that would come to define and advertise its power through neo-missionary development initiatives. In industrial education, we see how durable templates of imperial management arose from forms of subordination, exclusion, and qualified inclusion, and how the relative worth of peoples was measured through how they learned to labor. While the programs I have focused on today did not survive the imperial revisions of the mid-twentieth century, their legacy persisted in the idea that the United States must teach the world to work.

Footnotes