Social Efficiency, Beauty, and the World’s Work

Abstract

In the years before the First World War, art education and the normal art school entered a period of retrenchment, retreating from the rhetoric of cultural uplift in the flood tide of a great movement for industrial education. Governor William Douglas appointed the Commission on Industrial and Technical Education—or Douglas Commission, as it was known—in June 1905, charging nine commissioners to investigate educational needs for ‘different grades of skill and responsibility in the various industries of the Commonwealth.’ The commission held public hearings in different parts of the state to gain information on leading industries: agriculture, boots and shoes, building trades, clothing, electrical apparatus, furniture, printing and bookbinding, textiles, and watchmaking.