Last week I wrote about the Transportation-Communication Revolution that has fostered economic growth around the world.[1] Yes, it may have sped up the international spread of the coronavirus but, if so, that is a short-run effect. Prosperity has been the long-run result.
In the late nineteenth century another transportation-communication revolution took place, as railroads enabled products to be sold over vast geographical distances.[2] In the United States this led to the emergence of mass marketers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, which sent catalogs, products and even kits for building houses all around the country.
And it produced a new kind of education: correspondence schools.
I was going to present a paper on correspondence schools at this week’s Business History Conference, an international conference being held in Charlotte, North Carolina. Due to the governor’s state of emergency, I won’t be attending. So I’d like to share some thoughts here about this largely ignored experiment in American education.
If you are my age you may remember aggressive advertisements—e.g., “How to Make Money with Simple Cartoons”[3]—on matchbooks and in the back pages of popular magazines. One could learn how to correct one’s grammar, how to be a better salesman, how to draw and paint (even taking a course from Norman Rockwell), or how to play the piano—all by mail.[4]
But correspondence schools didn’t start out that way. Nearly the first and certainly the most famous was the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania, founded in 1891 to teach mine safety. Demand for its mail-order lessons was so great that the school added other technical subjects, such as mine surveying and mapping, mechanical drawing, electrical engineering, and on and on until ICS had 240 courses, ranging from advertising to window trimming.
And it had famous alumni, such as Walter Chrysler, founder of the Chrysler Corporation; World War I fighter pilot Eddie Rickenbacker; and even prize-winning architects.
Other schools came along. As early as 1899 Edgar Marburg, a professor of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, called the growth of correspondence schools “little less than phenomenal.”
Marburg spoke at the annual meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (SPEE). Like many educators, he was genuinely puzzled about these upstarts. He asked his audience, “Is the scheme to be regarded simply as a passing fad, or does it contain the elements of real merit and permanency? Are these schools attracting their immense patronage under false pretenses, or are they engaged in a worthy and successful effort to give their students generous returns on their investment?”[4] The following year, at another SPEE meeting, an engineer suggested that perhaps state-university-sponsored correspondence schools could cover students’ first year or two of college education.[x]
Indeed, a number of universities, such as the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin, had correspondence programs (the University of Chicago’s lasted until 1962). At Wisconsin, a memo to the university president read, “There are at least five private correspondence schools doing business in this state at present and making a big profit out of it. If a young man would pay a big price to join one of these schools, sometimes a thousand miles away, surely he will join a school of this sort under the control of the University if it is run upon the same principles.“[5]
According to the late James Watkinson (one of the few serious researchers into correspondence schools), more than four million people took courses by mail between 1890 and 1940, most of them seeking to improve their job status.[6]
But times changed. First, the Depression hit and families’ discretionary funds dried up. Already, some schools were developing a bad reputation for the entire genre. Then, vocational high schools became more widespread and technically oriented land-grant universities prospered. With greater mobility, more students could attend college, and the community college movement that began in the 1950s made it even easier. Correspondence schools became peripheral and more about learning social skills than true education.
One might easily forget the words of Thomas Commerford Martin, science writer and biographer of Thomas Edison:: “[I]t would be a serious oversight to forget these remarkable educational forces which during the last ten or twelve years have been sharpening the wits and satisfying the thirst for knowledge of hundreds of thousands of our best artisans and engineers—not one of whom ever saw his instructor face to face.”[7] Few now are even aware of those remarkable educational forces.[8]
[1] Joseph Connors, James D. Gwartney, Hugo Montesinos, “The Transportation-Communication Revolution: 50 Years of Dramatic Change in Economic Development,” Cato Journal 40, no. 1 (Winter 2020), 153-198.
[2] See Alfred Chandler,The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977).
[3] Advertisement for LaSalle Extension University in Popular Mechanics, January 1950, p. 42.
[4] Edgar Marburg, “The Correspondence School in Technical Education,“ Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education Vol. II (Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 17-19, 1899), Lancaster, PA: 1899: 80-92, followed by discussion:, 93-1 03, at 83.
[5] Memo from Charles McCarthy to Charles Van Hise, May 1906, 4. In Charles McCarthy Papers, 1889, 1906-1931, Reel 1 (P75-3930), Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison: University of Wisconsin.
[6] James D. Watkinson, “Education for Success: The International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 120, no. 4 (October 1996): 343-369, at 344
[7]Thomas Commerford Martin, “The Educational Value of Correspondence Schools,” Independent (1848) Aug. 7, 1902: 1896-1898, at 1896.
[8] I also wrote about correspondence schools in August 2018, exploring the question of why historians have paid so little attention to them.
That’s an amusing example. The first correspondence schools taught technical subjects (or law) but the other kind proliferated, too. In 1913, Ellis Parker Butler created a series of comic novels about “Philo Gubb, Correspondence-School Detective,” who manages to solve cases in spite of his gullibility. Sinclair Lewis took a shot at correspondence schools in his 1922 novel Babbitt. Says the middlebrow Babbitt: “I knew correspondence-school business had become a mighty profitable game—makes suburban real estate look like two cents!”
The ubiquity of correspondence courses in the early 20th century is demonstrated in the 1929 romantic film comedy “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover, ” starring Rudy Vallee. The plot is built upon Rudy’s character, a college boy, who takes a correspondence course on the saxophone from “Ted Grant.” Rudy and his friends form a band and the movie goes on from there—with the character of Ted Grant being part of the action. The acting is wooden at times, but the music is delightful. One can buy the video or see it on you/tube. It is a real period piece and an early talkie.
Here’s a segment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SK0hXAJIDk