Historical and contemporary perspectives on workers' education in the United States

Workers' education concerns the education of adult workers as workers. That is, education that focuses on the work experience and cultural factors related to work. While workers' education has a rich history in the United States, the field has received relatively little attention from labor historians and almost none from education historians. As a first step to better understanding that history, this research explored and analyzed the dramatic changes that have taken place in workers' education since the 1920s.;From its inception, workers' education has been closely bound to, although certainly not indistinguishable from, the labor movement. The exploration of changes within workers' education, then, necessarily required attention to the labor movement as a whole. Entwined but distinct stories emerged. For example, when labor unions were suffering under the "open shop" drive of the 1920s, workers' education was flourishing.;With a few notable exceptions, most of the most exciting experiments in workers' education took place outside the labor unions. In the 1920s and 1930s, progressive educators sympathetic to the labor movement envisioned the education of working people as the best avenue for social change and reform. The Depression of the 1930s brought difficult times for all working people, but also witnessed an upsurge in labor union membership that offered new challenges to workers' education. Suddenly, many thousands of workers with no previous union experience had to be taught the responsibilities of union membership. Many labor unions developed a new interest in workers' education.;The massive strikes that followed World War II not only gave recognition to the power of labor unions, but also brought universities permanently into the field of workers' education. The 1970s witnessed the growth of degree-conferring programs in labor studies. Differing ideological perspectives of the sponsors of workers' education endeavors helped to explain the wide variety of programs throughout the history of workers' education.