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c h ap t e r 2 New Selves / Old Selves, Class Dreams / Class Nightmares Frederick Taylor’s story about Schmidt and the pig iron is one of the founding legends of scientific management. It is usually remembered now for the derogatory terms in which Taylor characterized the worker he was looking for and the arrogance with which he went about convincing Schmidt to up his daily quantity of moving ingots of pig iron for Bethlehem Steel—with ‘‘no back talk,’’ as Taylor had memorably phrased it (Braverman 1974, 105). It is worth recalling, however, that Taylor began his story with a gesture that would become increasingly familiar over the next few decades of industrial expansion. He explained that he had first isolated and then carefully studied the specific task of moving pig iron. From his study he had determined an optimum quantity possible to move in a given period of time, and only then did he go in search of a worker who might be induced to meet his requirements for how the task could best be carried out. The sequence of Taylor’s reasoning bears out the general logic Marx had emphasized half a century earlier. The division of labor in capitalist industrial production is predicated on a conception of the production process as intricately divided into a discrete series of tasks by management, with the end of lowering labor costs and maximizing profit. The division of labor among workers, who does what in the production process, results from the prior study and organization of tasks. Thus Schmidt makes an appearance in Taylor’s reasoning only at the end of a long process of study, and ‘‘who’’ he must be is calculated on the basis of what exactly he must do in relation to Taylor’s overall knowledge of the organization of tasks in production. 17 18 New Selves/Old Selves Charles Prosser and other early-twentieth-century advocates of vocational education often had more in common with Taylor than with educational theorists such as John Dewey, who had advocated a form of vocational training in Democracy and Education and elsewhere. Dewey conceived of vocational skills as integrated into a total curriculum of study and personal development, while Prosser’s thinking more closely mirrored Taylor’s emphasis on the requirements of specific jobs. By the second decade of the twentieth century, however, Prosser was already an influential figure in the development of a vocational-education system. Thus, unlike Taylor, who described himself as looking for the appropriate worker, Prosser foresaw vocational education as capable of producing the kind of workers appropriate to specific slots in an industrial economy. Published in 1925, shortly after the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, Prosser and coauthor C. R. Allen’s Vocational Education in a Democracy set the direction for much of the subsequent growth in vocational education in accordance with Prosser’s expectations for training students. By 1938, in ‘‘A Forecast and a Prophecy,’’ intended to anticipate the third decade of vocational education and written for Edwin Lee’s collection Objectives and Problems of Vocational Education, Prosser expressed satisfaction with two decades of rapid growth, but he argued a need for even more exacting uses of the basic principles he had established. His first principle echoes Taylor’s logic directly in its emphasis on studying actual job tasks: ‘‘The occupation will be studied to learn what are its demands on workers in skill and knowledge’’ (409). The purpose of vocational training can then be accomplished more efficiently, as the fifth principle explains: ‘‘The teaching content of the school for the occupation will be made up of these demands [on workers] and of the experiences in skill and knowledge—in doing and thinking—which are necessary to prepare the student to meet these demands’’ (410). The tenth principle marks training boundaries: ‘‘As functioning knowledge is what is required, all the knowledge in every field which bears on this occupation will be culled, organized, taught, and used in the training, and only that knowledge. Only the mathematics that is used in this occupation will be taught, and, likewise , only that science and only that drawing will be taught. Similarly, only those ‘shop kinks’ or ‘office kinks’ or ‘home kinks’ or ‘farm kinks’ [his list mirrors the early occupational groups established for vocational training] that function in the occupation will be taught’’ (410). The addition of home economics as a recognizable and funded program had meant...

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