The Industrial Education Myth

FAIN: FT-12508-75

Elizabeth J. Burns
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL 32611-0001)

To study the true role of industrial education. Historians have assumed that industrial education was either an accommodation to the demands of white supremacists in the South who wanted to keep the negro "in his place" or an attempt to provide a cheap, trained labor force for the industrialization of the South. P.I. studied records of a small black school off the coast of South Carolina, Penn School, and has a different interpretation. His experience suggests that the industrial education program had as its goal neither economic exploitation nor social control, but rather moral and spiritual elevation. Study will delve into America's racial dilemmas in the past and in the present.