Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation

Chapter 4: Training for Occupational Efficiency

Chapter 4 Training for Occupational Efficiency Vocational Education The educational program of the segregated school featured vocational education as the curricular track suited to the particular needs of the Mexican community. Teachers, administrators, researchers, and boards of education functioned as a single mind when it came to planning such educational programs for Mexican children. These programs placed such a pronounced emphasis on vocational, non-academic education that quite often the Mexican school became known as the industrial or vocational school of the district. Vocational education not only applied to the Mexican community, but in theory and practice its proponents specified its usage for students of inferior mental ability as well. A strong tendency of academics and the general public emphasized vocational training for the working classes as a means out of poverty and as a move up the social scale. However, the theory behind vocational education stipulated that, in the main, those identified as the intellectually slower student should be so placed so that in a “normal” population only about 20 percent would be labeled slow to 88 Chicano Education & Segregation mentally retarded. Thus, vocational education included both Anglo and Mexican children; however, the disproportional enrollment of Mexican children determines the issue here. For practically all Mexican children found themselves performing vocational course work in the schools. As in the case of the research upon the intelligence of Mexican children , an examination of the emphasis upon vocational education must begin with the national economic and social changes occurring in the late nineteenth century. The School as Industrial Training Agency As mass compulsory education gradually expanded at the turn of the century, schools incorporated the productive training functions formerly reserved for the family, community, or apprentice system.1 This earlier training system corresponded to that era of capitalist production when the owners of capital were also, by and large, the direct producers of commodities. Gradually, technology developed that separated the owners from direct production, so that two social categories emerged: (1) the owners of capital, or the employing class, and (2) the nonpropertied labor, or direct producers. The later nineteenth century also witnessed the economy emerge as a system of corporate industrial production based largely upon socialized labor. This meant that the producers of commodities were not, as was the case in the early nineteenth century, owners of the means of production. Adolescent youths also emerged as an identifiable social entity principally because that age group, no longer needed in the labor force as in the earlier epoch, became increasingly superfluous to production (except in the case of family migrant labor, as we shall see in chapter 5). Consequently, schools took over as holding institutions and as socialization agents in the era when entirely new forms of productive processes and social classes became permanent elements of the twentieth-century social order. Public schools were assigned the responsibility of inte- Training for Occupational Efficiency 89 grating all youths into the objective social, economic, and political conditions of the period. Thus, schools had the task of training for a class society, for a complex industrialized form of a division of labor, and for the particular types of political ideals necessary to maintain the unity of society in spite of the socioeconomic divisions that separated its citizens into a hierarchical social order.2 This naturally meant that not everyone could receive the same level of education even if all demonstrated equal capability or preparation for it. Some received training destined to place them in the higher more powerful echelons of the division of labor, and therefore the social order; the type of training introduced to others inevitably prepared them to fill in the slots at the lower echelons. The course work for this latter group emphasized vocational education, or training suited for industrial wage-labor. Vocational education had two aspects. The first consisted of the adaptation of the individual to the general economic activities within the larger society. The second emphasized technical, trade, or industrial training. Thus, vocational education prepared the individual to find his place in a skilled, semiskilled, or unskilled manually oriented occupations . Vocational education provided a direct linkup between the school, the student, and the economy. In fact, its adherents designed all vocational education to serve the existing labor needs in business and industry. Thus, according to a 1945 state of California Department of Education publication, vocational education existed for “the preparation of workers for jobs that do or...