Products of US Performance: A Material Rhetorical Education at North Bennet Street Industrial School, 1890–1910

ABSTRACT

This essay examines rhetorical education for children of immigrants at North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. NBSIS, located in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Boston’s North End, taught children of elementary and grammar school age through a manual training pedagogy and specifically, the Sloyd method of handiwork. I analyze archival documents using frameworks of Sloyd, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and usability theories to argue that products made during manual training and Sloyd taught children of immigrants how to become citizen workers as defined by white, middle-class values. Students’ material works were products of US performance intended to develop students into industrious, moral workers; influence immigrants’ households and other users of products; and direct students to self-correct and strive to become better workers. This essay highlights that materials help define, assess, and regulate learning, especially for young learners, within complex historical contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• historiography
• materiality
• rhetorical education

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to Jacqueline Rhodes and the two anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful feedback. Thank you to Matthew D’Ippolito for copyediting assistance. Many thanks to Ellen Cushman for guidance, and thank you to Elizabeth Britt and Mya Poe for feedback on earlier versions of this essay. The Records of the North Bennet Street Industrial School housed at Schlesinger Library made this essay possible.

Notes

¹ It is important to note that Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz was a supporter of polygenism. Rhetorics within NBSIS records hint at the school’s preoccupation with science and Darwinian philosophies and the underlying scientific racism that these invoked. The school’s library included works such as Henry Herbert Donaldson’s Growth of the Brain, Jean-Marie Guyau’s Education and Heredity, and James Mark Baldwin’s Mental Development. President of Harvard University Charles W. Eliot—whom NBSIS frequently mentioned—championed admissions testing that later paved the way for large-scale testing that was leveraged against immigrant groups, particularly southern European immigrants. See Norbert Elliot; Jeanne D. Petit’s work on race and literacy testing during the Progressive Era.

² Throughout this essay, I mainly use the term “children of immigrants” since the children were US citizens. However, as I note, citizenship is nuanced, and for NBSIS, these children were considered foreign. Therefore, sometimes I use the term “immigrant children.”

³ The Arts and Crafts Movement was closely associated with the Aesthetic Movement, but its members “tried to use art as a vehicle to reform society,” while the Aesthetic Movement foregrounded beauty and “placing artistic values above ethical ones” (Stankiewicz 169).

⁴ I have made the choice to analyze rhetorics of NBSIS and the Sloyd Training School together, as both schools shared the same teachers and location. Documents pertaining to the Sloyd Training School are housed within NBSIS records. For clarity, I always use the term NBSIS.

⁵ Moving away from the notion that citizenship is solely an individual’s legal status, Wan constructs citizenship as trait-based, pulling from Aihwa Ong’s idea of cultural citizenship and attention to the “everyday processes whereby people, especially immigrants, are made into the subjects of a particular nation-state” (Ong 737). For more on rhetorics of citizenship, labor, and the body, see Jennifer Keohane and Paul Stob.

⁶ While progressive European New Education methods are attributed to normal school instruction and college writing instruction, rhetorical studies has little accounted for how they were actually used in lower grades and nonliteracy-focused institutions. Findings from NBSIS records complicate the idea that these were straightforward methods that endorsed student freedom of choice, and this complexity arises from the very fact that students were children whom teachers sought to discipline and shape at an early age. See Amy J. Lueck for more on rhetoric and composition’s high school–college divide and for New Education within nineteenth-century high schools.

⁷ In discussing Sloyd models, Swedish Sloyd educator Otto Salomon stated, “[Models] should be capable of being finished by the children without help. Hence models should not be a part merely of something, but the whole” (73). Although teachers could not complete work for students, they were allowed to assist students through their instruction. Salomon describes how teachers must possess “educational tact,” broadly defined as a teacher’s innate and learned instinct “which accurately determines for the teacher when and how he should act” (14). For example, teachers determined what was challenging or unchallenging for a student. Although educational tact was “partly a natural gift,” teachers could also gain it with experience (13). Educational tact can be framed as kairotic, as teachers needed to determine correct responses given context. And over time, teachers were better equipped to do this.

⁸ Clearly, NBSIS was envisioning creating citizen “men” through labor. As Enoch, Keohane, Heather Allen Pang, and Petit address in their scholarship, the laboring body and manual training were imbued with gendered connotations.

⁹ Relevant to this conversation, in describing how Progressive Era reformers organized children’s play and playgrounds in order to instill morals in urban youth, Dominick Cavallo claims that children internalized the rules of team sports through shame. Cavallo writes, “Shame is nonspecific and diffuse; it is mobilized to punish the person’s failure to measure up to the idealized, projected image he has of himself, and which others have of him” (116).