York City alone there were
24,200 children between the ages of five and fifteen years not attending
any school whatever.

To meet these conditions the workingmen outlined a comprehensive
educational program. It was not merely a literary education that the
workingmen desired. The idea of industrial education, or training for a
vocation, which is even now young in this country, was undoubtedly first
introduced by the leaders of this early labor movement. They demanded a
system of public education which would "combine a knowledge of the
practical arts with that of the useful sciences." The idea of industrial
education appears to have originated in a group of which two
"intellectuals," Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, were the leading
spirits.

Robert Dale Owen was the eldest son of Robert Owen, the famous English
manufacturer-philanthropist, who originated the system of socialism
known as "Owenism." Born in Scotland, he was educated at Hofwyl,
Switzerland, in a school conducted by Emmanuel von Fellenberg, the
associate of the famous Pestalozzi, as a self-governing children's
republic on the manner of the present "Julior Republics." Owen himself
said that he owed his abiding faith in human virtue and social progress
to his years at Hofwyl. In 1825 Robert Dale left England to join his
father in a communistic experiment at New Harmony, Indiana, and together
they lived through the vicissitudes which attended that experiment.
There he met Frances Wright, America's first suffragist, with whom he
formed an intimate friendship lasting through many years. The failure at
New Harmony convinced him that his father had overlooked the importance
of the anti-social habits which the members had formed before they
joined; and he concluded that those could be prevented only by applying
a rational system of education to the young. These conclusions, together
with the recollections of his experience at Hofwyl, led him to advocate
a new system of education, which came to be called "state guardianship."

State guardianship was a demand for the establishment by the state of
boarding schools where children should receive, not only equal
instruction, general as well as industrial, but equal food and equal
clothing at the public expense. Under this system, it was asserted,
public schools would become "not schools of charity, but schools of the
nation, to the support of which all would contribute; and instead of
being almost a disgrace, it wo