- America's First Printing School
- "Every school boy and girl who has arrived at the age of reflection
- ought to know something about the history of the art of printing."
- -Horace Mann (1796-1859)
- European and early Colonial American printers learned the trade as apprentices. The apprentice system, originally established by the European printing guilds, was both a means of education and control the number of workers, wages, and competition. In America there was a spirit of expansion and growth. Competition was encouraged. There was no need to limit the number of workers.
- Robert Owen and William Maclure established the Workingmen's Institute in New Harmony, Indiana in the early nineteenth century. It was a social experiment to establish a worker's Utopia. In 1827, Maclure purchased a copperplate printing press for the school and hired Cornelius Tiebout as America's first printing teacher.
- A school "newspaper" was established in 1828 as a training instrument and a tool to spread the agenda of New Harmony. It was called "The Disseminator". The masthead read "Edited, printed, and published semimonthly in the east end of New Harmony Hall, by the pupils of the School of Industry, at one dollar per annum in advance: THE DISSEMINATOR of useful knowledge, containing hints to the youth of the United States from the School of Industry."
- In keeping with the ideals of the community the paper avoided local news and consisted of articles on science and education taken from other publications. It also contained a great deal of Owen's and Maclure's social dogma.
- At the Institute, printing was viewed as part of a well-rounded education. In the early age of lithography, the Institute used this new process to teach art and drawing. "The pupils are all taught how to design on the stone. . . the boys . . . by setting types, they practice accurate spelling and become familiar with the construction of all languages which they print, and they can earn their bread in case of necessity."
Copyright (C) 1997 by Frank Granger
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