Class Consciousness and the Junior College Movement: Creating a Docile Workforce

Abstract

Perhaps no movement in American education remains more riddled with contradiction than the junior college movement, the birth and rapid spread of two-year colleges during the early twentieth century. Junior colleges welcomed the working class and provided affordable education at convenient locations (see Cohen and Brawer; Dougherty; Ratcliff). The new and democratic institutions largely failed to deliver on their promise of transferring students to four-year colleges and universities, however, and instead created a low-prestige campus where guidance counselors and vocational programs micromanaged the ambitions of blue-collar students (see Brint and Karabel; Clark; Karabel; Shor). Despite these rich contradictions, scholars in rhetoric and composition have largely overlooked the junior college movement as a site for historical narrative. Those interested in the gatekeeping functions of higher education—the ways colleges and universities transmit hegemonic values to students, and the problematic allegiance between education and corporate America—have much to learn from the history of the two-year college. I am suggesting, first, that historians of rhetoric and composition turn their attention to sites of contradiction, diversity, and class conflict—sites such as the junior college movement. Second, I am proposing that we create historical narratives that vigilantly ascribe agency to the individuals and collectives who hold the cultural power to shape institutions and movements.