Caps and gowns: Historical reflections on the institutions that shaped learning for and at work in Germany and the United States, 1800-1945

This study undertakes to explain how and why Germany and the United States came to institutionalize such radically different educational and training systems. Germans relied heavily upon regulated apprenticeships supplemented by vocational schooling to prepare and certify the majority of their youth for work. Americans, in contrast, formally educated, trained, and certified their young almost exclusively in schools. These divergent strategies had strikingly different consequences for the distribution of knowledge and skills in the two societies, as well as for the way in which work came to be organized. While, for instance, Americans worried far more than Germans about inclusiveness in determining educational "winners," their institutional practices produced far larger numbers of educational "losers.".;Moreover, the study illuminates the intimate relation between regionally and nationally institutionalized patterns of learning and how people worked. In the process, it offers a new way of looking at the historic character, function, and fate of apprenticeship in Germany and the United States, answers why Americans have become so preoccupied with schooling, provides an entirely new interpretation of the origins, nature, and development of vocational education in the two societies, and stresses the key role of certification practices throughout. Knowledge and skills were integral to the process of industrialization. They, however, often had little to do with formal schooling. Scholars have therefore broadly slighted the scope and significance of work skills--especially of the "manual" variety--and of their contributions to industrial development. Linking work to home, training to education, and production to reproduction, this study of skill and its institutional sources elucidates how the subtle interplay of education and the economy has powerfully shaped the character and wealth of regions and nations, and of the individuals who have inhabited them.