Distance art Education: The Federal School and Social Engineering in the United States, 1900 to 1925

The Federal School was a correspondence art school in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the early 20th century At that time, scientific methods changed the organization and practice of commercial art training and industrial education, which included correspondence courses from the Federal School Standards of intelligence were determined with intelligence testing, and students were tracked into vocational or professional programs depending on their scores The Federal School contradicted itself as it promoted stereotypes in which intelligence correlated to race, ethnicity, and sex roles The same stereotypes appeared in the curricula of the Federal School, making it a part of the larger configuration of education and mass media that socially engineered cultural production The Federal School was a mail-order correspondence art school in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century It was known later as Art Instruction, Incorporated, and is known today as Art Instruction Schools The school has remained accredited by the Distance Education Training Council, and the correspondence course provides 24 college credits (Art Instruction Schools, 2005) This article gives a history of the Federal School, the way art was taught there, and its Master Course in commercial art It also addresses the larger context of art and industrial education in the United States that was socially engineered with intelligence testing and admissions tracking In this way, racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes were held in place in broadly defined social policy, which influenced the Federal School My approach to this article emerged from an interest in early forms of distance education as correspondence courses Though these courses opened opportunities for many who had no access to art schools, they also reinforced several racial and gender role stereotypes My aim was to see if these issues could be positioned among the histories of art education An examination of selected archives and histories 1 revealed the structures set forth by the scientizing of education and mass media, which held institutional racism and sexism firmly in place within the technocracy of mass media educational structures in the first quarter of the 19th century The first section of this article provides a cultural orientation to the Federal School’s early years Next, the scientific orientation and the social stereotypes embedded in the Federal School Master Course are discussed as they appeared in lessons on drawing, cartooning, and lectures called “chalk talks” in which the speaker drew an illustration as he or she told a story