I Learn What Graduate Courses Are About

Over my lifetime I have loved reading history—especially big-themed books about the rise of the Western world and the causes of the Industrial Revolution. No, I did not expect to duplicate that kind of subject matter when I started an academic course of history.

I expected instead some chunky medium-sized themes in European history. I thought I would learn things like why the Hapsburgs fell, what caused World War I, why did the German states take so long to form a nation, why did France have so many credit problems, and why was the Hanseatic League successful?

My expectations were off-base. Had I been starting an undergraduate history major, such (yes, some unanswerable) questions might have been subjects of discussion. But graduate school is different. The emphasis is more on writing (especially a thesis) than on acquiring facts. Indeed, if I dare say so, the success path for graduate students and other researchers is to find something that no one has noticed before, research it, and then prove it shouldn’t be obscure at all!

To my surprise, I actually made such a discovery in my class on historical writing. Years ago, I had come across a 1908 article by Lincoln Steffens about how the University of Wisconsin was starting an extension program that would beat the correspondence schools at their own game. So what exactly were

these correspondence schools? Historians had written little about them; I found just one academic article about the leading school, International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania, or ICS. Yet by 1910, 1,334,234 students had been enrolled there (the school kept meticulous records, most of which have been destroyed, but contemporary speeches and articles report them). ICS’s courses were initially quite technical—mine safety, mine surveying and mapping, mechanical drawing, and electrical engineering; a number of successful architects got their degrees from ICS. Later ICS expanded to well over 200 courses, from advertising to window trimming.

In 1925, a writer for the Carnegie Corporation of New York estimated that “four times as many persons were studying by correspondence with privately owned schools as there were in all the resident colleges, universities and professional schools combined.” He exaggerated ( I doubt intentionally), but the enormity of this movement was real.

So why have historians largely ignored these schools? My first thought was that they are private schools, and “private education” goes against the grain of most humanities scholars. Second, they developed a bad reputation because of their brash advertising (kind of like for-profit schools today). My third thought was that the schools were on the wrong side of history—by the time of the Great Depression, they were largely gone, victims of subsidized land-grant colleges and public vocational high schools, greater prosperity, more cars and better roads—all of which made mail-order education largely obsolete.

But being on the wrong side of history did not hold back famous historians like E.P. Thompson, who wrote about socialism in nineteenth-century Europe, which largely failed.  So my first thought—that there is an animus against private education, even for the masses, especially with raucous advertising—gains strength in explaining their neglect. In any case, my paper on ICS has not, so far,  been accepted for publication.