CULTIVATING A CONSTITUENCY FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE: Michigan Agricultural College's Work

[...]when one browses the early twentieth-century's documentary records for vocation-related education one encounters a bewildering variety: in how people talked and thought about work-related educational purposes, in the types of schools intended for different categories of students, in strategies implemented to incorporate "work" into curricula, and in ways of combining "academic" and "vocational" interests within an over-arching educational program. Trying to make sense of it, a 1916 National Education Association committee report spent 20 pages classifying "Types of Vocational Secondary Schools" and another 37 pages explicating "Dehnitions, Analysis, and Illustrative Examples" (Committee on Vocational Education 1916). Largely neglected are the varieties of vocation-related education that diverged from the chosen model, either the manual labor/crafts model of "industrial education" offered to African Americans and American Indians in boarding schools or the half-time work, half-time study model of "vocational education" that developed in urban public high schools under the influence of Smith-Hughes rules and dollars. Serving as faculty members at agricultural colleges, scientists at research stations, and experts in government agencies, Michigan's "agriculture" graduates infused a nationwide policymaking infrastructure that stretched from farms in the most-rural counties to the Washington DC offices of the United States Department of Agriculture (Ferleger 2000).