This project compares technical education programs in nineteenth-century Philadelphia in order to understand how people thought about skill, technology, and what children should learn in that time of industrial change. Technical education prepares children for productive lives as adults, and the adults providing it expect to teach boys how to become men and to teach girls how to become women. Some children will learn to become good factory workers, while others will become good engineers. Studying technical education allows us to examine the ways work and technology are related to ideas about gender, ethnicity and social class. Technical education, defined broadly, includes teaching juvenile delinquents how to sew as well as teaching promising young apprentices how to make mechanical drawings. But such opportunities were provided selectively, based on educators' expectations about what children would be doing as adults. Careful study of reports, managers' minutes, and curricula allows the PI to develop evidence about what children learned and how it was justified. For example, in the public schools of the 1880s and 1809s, when arguments for curricular change were often couched in language about democracy and opportunity, some children-middle-class high-school boys-were taught to understand science and theory and design, while other children-recent immigrants, expected to work in factories by age 14-were taught to copy an object chosen by their teacher, with an emphasis on neatness and obedience. Girls' training, even when it led to paid work in industrial textile design, was described in terms of women's domestic talents.
