Art education as work or play? Vocational education and the extracurricular in Chicago at Lane Tech High School, 1908–17

Between 1908 and 1917, Chicago city administrators and Chicago Public School (CPS) educators were rethinking how to best train workers for the city’s rapid expansion of manufacturing and industry. Following Murphy’s theory of social closure, which states that inequality is created by monopoly and exclusion, this article discusses how high-school students were differentiated and sorted according to their ability. This meant tracking working-class students primarily to vocational programmes, which also excluded from training that would advance them socially. Consequently, working-class students engaged in forms of art education based on ‘manual training’, while more privileged students entered commercial high school programmes where they often studied commercial and fine art, which were regarded as signifiers of prosperity. This article is developed in three aspects, as follows: (1) school buildings were designed to support curricula of social efficiency and social assimilation; (2) curricula differentiated and sorted students by ability; and (3) school administrators restricted social and recreational activities in high schools (including the fine arts and popular art forms), which resulted in student life going underground to create what came to be known as ‘the extracurricular’. These practices and social trends across the twentieth century were an informal art education in high-school popular culture; these extracurricular activities were also part of a culture of adolescence in public high schools, with art education and popular culture at the centre.