Training Schools

Before the 1800s, society viewed children as little adults and treated them as little adults on many different levels, including meting out adult punishments. While society looked to the family to guide the child and oversee his or her moral development, due to the negligence or absence of some parents, a number of children did not have parental supervision. These children often lived as vagrants in the city and would at times engage in delinquent acts for survival purposes. Toward the late 1700s, society's view of children began to shift. This shift was due in part to urbanization and the many vices that were attributed to city life. The leaders of the child-saving movement, predominantly middle-class women, were concerned with what they deemed the evil temptations available in the city, such as alcohol, comic books, and brothels. They believed that children were growing up too fast and were exposed to many unwholesome and immoral things.

With the family structure no longer guaranteed and cities expanding and offering numerous vices, society began to experience an upheaval in social control. The response was to establish reformatories where these young delinquents could be housed and where they would receive the moral teachings and discipline their parents had not given them. The first reformatory, known as New York House of Refuge (Platt, 1969), was established specifically to teach delinquent juveniles how to live properly and morally and taught this lesson through strict discipline and structure. Youth were assigned daily responsibilities and followed a rigid daily schedule. Along with the uniformity of their dress, the building was designed in a way that reinforced conformity to the rules and regulations of the institution.

In the 1850s, those who were involved in the juvenile justice system became disillusioned with reformatories due to the difficulty in implementing moral teachings. This difficulty was exacerbated by a lack of appropriate funding, overcrowded facilities, staff shortages, poor or inadequate programming, and inadequate physical structures.

As a response to these concerns, the idea of training schools was developed. Training schools, also referred to as industrial schools, solved several problems. First, juveniles learned a skill or trade they could use once they returned to society, and they received an academic and a moral education. Second, the working juveniles provided a source of revenue for the institutions, purportedly to offset the cost of housing them. Third, they provided a way to meet the demand for labor that had been a challenge for many of the factories and industrial companies.

Training schools were typically styled in the manner reminiscent of a home or cottage. Instead of having the feel of an institution, training schools were designed to create the feel of a home. The chores included farming duties and household responsibilities. Training schools located within the city typically taught juveniles any of the local trades. Vocational training for vagrant and delinquent youth was particularly important to the women involved in the child-saving movement who felt it was their calling to give these alleged wayward youth parental, spiritual, and moral guidance as well as secure housing and job skills. It was their belief that a key ingredient was missing from the children's lives and that was a maternal influence.

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