Labor and Learning in Pursuit of Happiness: How Schooling with Pre-Revolutionary Roots Continued to Nurture New Jersey
In the three decades prior to the Revolution, some boys in pursuit of higher education were fortunate to find themselves boarding at one of the “log colleges,” as they were known, that proliferated in the Delaware River Valley to prepare them for admission to the school that became Princeton. Tales told of the education provided by these schools include a fond remembrance by Benjamin Rush, who attended one south of Philadelphia before going on to Princeton, becoming a physician, and signing the Declaration of Independence.
Rush relayed that in addition to good manners, habits of prudence and attention, and knowledge of scripture in Latin and Greek, he and his fellows learned practical agriculture. The harvesting and haymaking, Rush claimed, contributed to their good health and respect for industry – meaning, in this case, manual labor. Along with other founders of our nation, Rush believed that real happiness was best pursued by a combination of learning and labor. Writing in 1800, he asserted that “Rural employments . . . establish early ideas of a connection between industry and property,” and they lay a foundation for other pursuits or pleasures, regardless of their economic necessity.
Whether or not New Jersey’s log colleges required agricultural labor in return for the learning provided, doing so is part of the lore of these early prep schools. Further, that tradition laid the foundation in the state for further combinations of learning and labor, accompanied by the conviction that the two together would make a major contribution to happiness, which the founders defined as being good rather than just being happy.
In the 1850s, a utopian community called the Raritan Union was established in Perth Amboy. An integral part of the community was a school known as Eagleswood, which was headed by the abolitionist Theodore Weld. Previously, he had been a forthright advocate for “manual labor in literary institutions,” a conviction he carried with him to Perth Amboy – records tell of his instructing students in the use of tools essential to daily life.
Eagleswood House at the Raritan Bay Union, 1858
By the 1870s, the idea of combining labor and learning was spreading nationwide, and New Jersey was at the forefront. Rutgers, designated in 1862 as a land grant school, was offering courses in agriculture; Stevens Institute, founded in 1870, was one of the nation’s first schools of technology. State education officials and manufacturers, though, focused on the needs of younger students. An Industrial Education Act, passed in 1881, was also a pioneering effort. It helped municipalities fund programs in public schools that had a joint purpose: they both encouraged boys and girls to continue their education beyond the age of 13 and provided training in the sort of skills needed by local industries. The cities of Newark and Hoboken were among the first to take advantage of this provision. Advocates of manual training claimed that, absent the skills to make a living, young people would become “either a mendicant or a rogue.” And neither would contribute to the pursuit of happiness.
Another outcome of the commitment to combining learning with labor was a charter granted, circa 1880, to the Technical Industrial Education Association of New Jersey. Fostered by a group of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) pastors, a small boarding school in Bordentown was established in 1886. Still recalled by the name of the town, the school provided both an academic education and practical experience that could enable students to earn a living. As with the log colleges, religious and moral training, along with the habits of good citizenship, were inculcated in the students.
In 1894, seeing this small school as a “star of hope,” state education officials acquired it, named it the Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth, and purchased an estate overlooking the Delaware to be its campus. As with similar schools elsewhere, students took academic courses in the morning and trade-related ones in the afternoon. And, as with earlier institutions, they contributed their labor to pay for their learning by helping to maintain the campus.
In following decades, the state continued to initiate programs that combined learning with labor, contending that industrial education, as manual training came to be known, was as essential as learning acquired from books. It also trained “judgement and the executive faculty,” attributes needed for the pursuit of happiness as Benjamin Rush would have understood it.
It’s a tradition the state can be proud of, particularly as we prepare to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial. New Jersey not only has a long history of combining learning with labor, its officials and institutions have used the combination to encourage equality, civic engagement, and industry – all virtues envisioned by our founders.
Sources
New Jersey Council of Education, “An Authoritative Definition of Manual Training,” Science 13, no. 309 (January 4, 1889).
Report of the Commission on Industrial Education, Submitted to the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey, in accordance with Joint Resolution No 11, Approved April 14, 1909 (Trenton: MacCrellish & Quigley, State Printers, 1909).
Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (Simon and Schuster, 2024).
Benjamin Rush, ”Samuel Finley: New Side Educator” (1800), in Douglas Sloan, ed., The Great Awakening and American Education (Teachers College Press, 1972).