A Manual Training Method as Literate Practice: Rhetorics of the Sloyd Training School for Teachers, 1904-1914

Abstract

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association’s publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd’s relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd’s ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My sincerest thank you to RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Lisa Mastrangelo for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.

2 For more on the origins of Sloyd, see Charles Alpheus Bennett, Brynjar Olafsson and Gisli Thorsteinsson, Otto Salomon, and David J. Whittaker.

3 I acknowledge that Cultural Rhetorics can provide an alternative framework for this research. However, I do not consider Sloyd as a decolonial practice or situate it within decolonial scholarship, as Sloyd was grounded in western epistemologies and assimilationist practice.

4 Rose specifically discusses the term idiot and how it “encompassed people with a wide range of impairments, including cerebral palsy, epilepsy, deafness, and what would later be described as autism, as well as cognitive disabilities” (14), and it “had yet more meanings: the result of sin, an appropriate object of study for those seeking to understand the natural world, and an innate characteristic of certain races” (16).

5 See Thomas C. Leonard, Jeanne D. Petit, Katrina M. Powell, and Steven Selden for scholarship on Progressive Era racism and violent and discriminatory practices like sterilization, literacy tests, and immigration quotas.

6 In the 1893 Report of the Commission Appointed to Investigate the Existing Systems of Manual Training and Industrial Education an educator claimed that when a child was taught manual training and worked with materials like clay, this would provide “moral power,” “implant[ing] in the child habits of industry, clearness, accuracy and harmony, which in attitude and motive influenc[ed] his whole development, and coordinate[d] him with his fellows in social and benevolent organizations” (Hopkins 33). Lueck also draws attention to manual training as a comprehensive pedagogy, stating, “Advocates saw hands-on learning as a way to integrate mind, body, and spirit in a more holistic approach to learning, and so the movement promoted using your hands and body to learn, not developing particular skills or preparing for specific jobs” (“‘She Is Not’”).

7 In 1907, North Bennet Street Industrial School—where the STS was housed at the time—began prevocational classes with permission of the Boston School Committee; it was the second place in Boston to do so (Lazerson 185).

8 Taylorism—referring to the Progressive Era engineer and “so-called father of scientific management” Frederick Winslow Taylor—pertained to industrial efficiency and “the careful specification of the task to be performed and the ordering of that task in the most efficient sequence” (Kliebard 80; 81). But its philosophies influenced education and the “management” of schools, such as the belief in curriculum differentiation to make instruction more efficient, as students would only learn curriculum suited for their projected “future role in life” (Kliebard 84).

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Notes on contributors

Laura Proszak

Laura Proszak is an Assistant Professor and Composition Coordinator within the Department of Literature and Language at Mercy University, New York. Her research centers on archival studies and rhetorical education at late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century schools. Laura can be contacted at [email protected].