Michael B. Katz

Youth and Early Industrialization in a Canadian City

In this essay we ask a straightforward question: Did the stages in the lives of young people alter during early industrialization? To attempt an answer, we shall compare the major dimensions in the experience of young people within one city prior to and during early industrialization. In particular, three broad issues frame our inquiry into specific patterns of residence, education, work, and marriage and into the way in which class and ethnicity affected the shape of experience. Those three issues are universality of adolescence, the relations between parents and children, and the social consequences of public education. We begin with the issues.

School Attendance and Early Industrilization in a Canadian City: A Multivariate Analysis.

THE RELATIONS between the origins of public educational systems and school attendance remain far from clear. For instance, the proportion of children receiving some sort of formal education did not increase automatically with the extension and elaboration of school facilities. Carl Kaestle has argued that proportionally as many children attended school in New York City in 1750 as in 1850. Elsewhere he and Maris Vinovskis have shown the surprisingly high rate of attendance of children in rural New York and Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century, prior to the so-called common school revival. And our own work has demonstrated that in at least one industrializing city the upward curve of school attendance among adolescent young people was not secular. (1) School attendance, of course, was a differential process. It varied according to place, age, sex, class and ethnicity. However, the exact nature of that variation still has not been delineated. In an earlier article Katz showed why it is important to understand patterns of school attendance and outlined some of the principal ones he had uncovered in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1851 and 1861. Davey developed the analysis much further in his study of working-class school attendance in Hamilton in the latter part of the nineteenth-century. However, both examinations

Book ReviewDown from Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment. By Joel F. Handler. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. ix+269.

Since the late 1970s, governments in the United States have shed responsibility for operating many services. All levels of government more often use private contractors to accomplish public purposes; the federal government has delegated power to the states; and state and local governments have devolved authority to local councils and institutions. Joel Handler equates decentralization, deregulation, and privatization as instances of this localizing impulse. In Down from Bureaucracy, he asks, “What are the consequences of these moves for citizen empowerment?” (p. 5). Handler has a clear thesis: “Decentralization—the deliberate allocation of authority to lower bureaucratic units, whether public or private—is a major technique for managing conflict,” and it “often works to the advantage of most of the important stakeholders.” This, he believes, is why decentralization in its many guises has become “ubiquitous throughout public programs” (p. 10). He illustrates his thesis with discussions of theory and wide-ranging case studies: the history of welfare, Reagan-era deregulation, the response of Arizona’s government to expanding social needs in the 1980s, the local control of educational financing and exclusionary zoning, and privatization. (He concludes that what matters is not the form of ownership—public or private—but the “institutional arrangements,” mainly the presence of competition, without which privatization just creates new bureaucracies.) The book’s last section asks how empowerment starts and is maintained. Here his case studies focus on worker safety and the frail elderly (“empowerment by invitation”) and current-day Chicago school reform (“empowerment by conflict”). I do not find Handler’s thesis convincing—for three reasons. First, “managing conflict” remains a cloudy idea. Is it displacing conflict from one arena to another, avoiding the eruption of conflict in the first place, or co-opting disadvantaged stakeholders into structures that do not disrupt existing relations of inequality? Second, a variety of goals, scrupulously described by Handler, drive each of his examples. In only a few cases does managing conflict appear the most important. (Advocates of contracting out, e.g., would describe their goals as cutting labor costs and increasing productivity.) Why, then, privilege one explanation? Third, in one instance Handler has the story backward. A more accu-

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By examining small concrete situations, this work suggests that the creation of public school systems in America was a conservative response to rapid industrialization and that myths about the history of public education have hindered reform by masking weaknesses inherent in its origins.