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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
In 1890, William Sellers, leader of Philadelphia's mechanical community, signaled the end of the nineteenth-century system of workshop apprenticeship. Speaking before the Engineers’ Club he declared that “The crafts which once supplied the comforts and even the luxuries of life have been so divided and subdivided, that few masters of an art… could now find the occasion to practice it; the system of apprenticeship, which had theretofore provided a succession of skilled workmen, became impracticable with the vast army that required to be taught the special details of an art only.” The search for an alternative system started in the 1870s as owners of advanced machine works contemplated a horrifying world in which the city's youth roamed free without the steadying hand of an employer or grounding in vocational skills. In 1878 the Baldwin Locomotive Works, in association with the Spring Garden Institute, pioneered a new system of industrial training—a radical departure from nineteenth-century apprenticeship. Apprentices received instruction in the full range of manual skills from an experienced journeyman on the shop floor but, with the new system, training took place in the shop and classroom under the direct charge of the firm. Sociologist Harry Braverman suggested that the division of labor under industrial capitalism split the work of skilled mechanics by separating conception and execution of tasks. In the sphere of education, a parallel force led to the demise of apprenticeship and the triumph of industrial training. The classroom conquered the workshop.
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