Pratt Institute - Prattonia Yearbook (Brooklyn, NY)

Page 31 text:

Sates reflected the Founder’s intent to give training to young men in the trades and the shop. Classes were opened in manual training, wood- turning, tinsmithing, carpentry, plumbing, stone-cutting, house- and sign-painting, black- smithing, bricklaying, plastering—these rapidly to give way to more responsible technical pur- suits, the distinctly “trade” courses being later shifted to the Evening School, where they gradually yielded to work related to the main scientific concerns of the Department. The transition to larger things was progressive, and the earlier “engineering” courses included Electrical Construction, Steam and Machine Design, Applied Electricity, Applied Chemis- try, and Machine Construction, while the School of Science and Technology was steadily making its way into high standing and responsi- bility in the engineering field. The Department of Commerce did not prove quite compatible with the Institute’s scheme of de velopment, separating itself into an independ- ent business-school since known as Heffley School.

Page 30 text:

ordering of human relations, and women them- selves were content to occupy their exclusive place under the sun. So there soon came about the Women’s Department at the Institute which took charge of all matters “domestic.” So much so, that two departments were evolved —Domestic Art and Domestic Science—Art having to do with sewing, dressmaking, shirt- waist-making and millinery—the two latter of special significance in the hey-day of the balloon-sleeve shirt-waist, and when women’s hats were monumental structures of flowers and fruits, feathers and ribbons, each resultant tri- umph of art and ingenuity termed a “‘creation.” Domestic Science embodied hygiene, nursing, cookery, laundry-work—definitely utilitarian. Art and Science were later merged into a com- mon cause as the Department of Domestic Art and Science, which, after a second brief separa- tion, took on new dignity when the term “Household”? was adopted, implying the growth of the work into trade and institutional im- portance. The Department of Mechanic Arts at first

Page 32 text:

The High School, for which a separate build- ing was erected, was an effective plea for man- ual training in common school education. It was a high school dedicated to a “higher kind of use than the common public sees.” After sixteen years of successful demonstration under capable leadership, when the principle of the manual training high school became recognized and adopted in public education, the High School had fulfilled its fruitful mission in 1905. An equa lly effective demonstration of an educational need was the Kindergarten De- partment, later the School of Kindergarten Training, which, also in its own building, on the corner of Willoughby Avenue, was out- standing as a pioneer in its field, until the uni- versal acceptance of the kindergarten in pri- mary education in 1917 deprived the school of its reason for being after a quarter century of pointing the way. The charter of Pratt Institute provided for the establishment and maintenance of a Free Library—the one specific purpose the Founder therein expressly stated. In the autumn of 1886