The Heritage of Elementary School Technology Education in the U.S.

Many of the current problems and opportunities of elementary-school technology (ESTE) have roots in the history of elementary-school industrial arts. In the US, industrial arts emerged during the progressive-education era as a convergence of two Western European educational movements. For several reasons, elementary school industrial arts was not able to achieve its promise during this era. In the 1960s and early 1970s, elementary school industrial arts once again became popular, but lack of agreement on a major issue whether industrial arts was a subject or a teaching method stalled progress in the field until the mid-1990s. Despite new interest in ESTE, the field has yet to reconcile issues that have divided technology educators for nearly a century. This paper serves a both a survey of the history of ESTE and a consideration of repeated patterns of historical impediments to its widespread implementation.

This historical survey is intended (a) to provide a chronological overview of the trends in general and industrial education which have led to modern elementary-school technology education (ESTE); (b) to demonstrate that at several points in its history, practitioners and theorists in ESTE and its precursors have influenced general industrial education, thus establishing the significance of ESTE in the history of industrial education in the United States; and (c) to suggest that problems in ESTE, such as its lack of a research base, its insufficient implementation in elementary schools, and the lack of consensus regarding its identity as a subject in its own right, have occurred previously at critical junctures in the past century. This paper also serves to fill a more basic need: no new survey of the history of ESTE has been available to the profession in twenty years.

At the outset of such a survey, the debate as to the philosophical forebears of technology education in the US should be acknowledged. One central issue is whether technology education was a direct descendant of industrial arts, or whether the two are only vaguely related. Pretzer (1997) opined that the rationale for technology education is "not just different from but fundamentally unrelated to earlier arguments for learning manual or industrial arts or industrial technologies" (p. 14). Similarly, Flowers (1998) questioned the value of teaching industrial arts history to prospective technology educators.

Volk (1996) also treated industrial arts separately from technology education, but suggested that "greater strength may exist in seeking common ground [and] not continuing policies of exclusion and fragmentation" (p. 36) between the two programs. It seems clear that whether or not technology education and industrial arts are philosophically similar, they are closely related historically. Thus they will be treated here as such.