Company-Sponsored Schooling

Educating Good Workers

In 1913, a number of interested companies formed the National Association of Corporation Schools, an organization supporting the educational efforts of businesses as diverse as the Colorado Fuel and Iron in Colorado; Ellsworth Collieries and Cambria Steel Companies in New Jersey; Akron Iron in Buchtel, Ohio; the huge Piedmont and Pelzer textile manufacturing plants in South Carolina; and the Red Jacket Consolidated Coal and Coke Company in West Virginia. These and many other companies operated their schools to reduce absenteeism and turnover, increase workplace efficiency, defeat union organizing campaigns, and raise the moral quality of their workers. The children enjoyed what seemed to be an unalloyed benefit of free schooling, but it was often an education that also increased dependence on a single industry and failed to provide skills and knowledge that might have been taken elsewhere.

Many company schools began with a sponsored kindergarten program. Company and school officials recognized that education would be most effective if [Page 157]children were brought into the system at the earliest possible age, even in industrial sites such as coal mining that generally offered little work to women, who were free to stay home with their children. In addition, many industrialists recognized that their workplaces would later be more stable if the language barriers between immigrant workers could be removed. The kindergartens provided an opportunity for students, at the best possible age, to be immersed in English.

Following kindergarten, children often found themselves in company schools whose primary purpose was not general education but the teaching of the proper “habits of industry,” deference to authority, and appreciation for efficiency on the job. These attributes became more crucial as technological and managerial advances allowed for the increasing recruitment of unskilled or semiskilled workers. Tending dirty and dangerous machines, these employees engaged in often repetitive and boring hours of work, which created an immediate need for “industrial discipline.” Company officials throughout the country discovered that six or seven years in their schools could develop in children the discipline they needed to complete their work, and to do so while becoming progressively more efficient and loyal.

Seeing these advantages, hundreds of industrialists made substantial investments in company schools. They built the schools, often immediately next to the factory; set the curriculum; and hired, trained, and paid the teachers who often lived on the factory premises in boarding houses or “teacherages.” In many cases, company officials also helped to write or design books that instructed students on typical school subjects, but in the context of the industry itself. Cotton mill workers, for example, learned math—but often only by calculating answers to practice problems that foreshadowed the work they would soon face in the mills. In every instance, company officials kept a close eye on expenditures and the effect their investments were having on the transformation of their employees into efficient, loyal, and docile workers.

...