The Gardiner Lyceum was the first vocational trade school in the United States. The purpose of the school was for giving young men the skills they needed to accomplish their chosen trade. It was a vocational school education for farmers, agriculturists, and other specialized trades of the nineteenth century. It provided the scientific and technical education needed for their vocation or to become schoolmasters.
History
Robert Hallowell Gardiner founded the school in 1822 on land with buildings he gave to the new school. The school was given statewide recognition when there was an Act in addition to an Act to incorporate was passed in February 1823 by the state of Maine governor, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the State of Maine, the president of the Bowdoin College, the president of the Waterville College and others called the Board of Visitors. The directors of the Gardiner Lyceum school were men associated with higher education. The first principal and main instructor of the school was Benjamin Hale. The next principal was a professor of Hamilton College of New York and later president of the State universities of Missouri, Maryland, and Wisconsin. The next principal was a supreme judge in the state of New Hampshire. The next principal was a graduate of Brown University. Maine legislature provided the school with $2,000 in funds in 1823 when the school opened. The legislature provided the school with funds of $1,000 per year for six years starting in 1825. The first year in operation the school had twenty students. The school had 53 students in 1824. It had 120 students in 1825. In 1826 the student level fell off to only 55 pupils that included only 2 Gardiner native residents.
The courses were designed for the realistic and useful applications of mathematics and science with emphasis on liberal and cultural subjects. They were mainly designed to make scientific farmers and skillful craftsmen. The main object of the courses of the Gardiner Lyceum was intended to be something between High School, preparatory agenda for entering into college, and a college or university education. Gardiner Lyceum was intended as a practical vocational school that prepared the students with an immediate trade. The school was intended as a two-year agenda. The school was a lyceum, a secondary schooling that was more technical that High School and less scholarly than a college or university education. It was for trade training for immediate employment in the field of their choice. The courses of the school classes were in various fields of advanced mathematics, bookkeeping, surveying, mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, chemistry, natural philosophy, and natural history. There were also courses in navigation and carpentry. The principal object of the lyceum was in establishing young men to be practical in running a farm profitable or do professionally whatever occupation they chose. The agricultural courses were designed to give future agriculturist the practical training of science upon which he could run a farm or be associated with farming in his trade. The school provided potential leads for employment in hopes of getting a return on its expenses in training the student.
Laws of the Gardiner Lyceum and Regulations for its Government
There is a set of Laws printed in 1825 by P. Shelton on how the school was to be regulated - a copy held by the Library of Congress. In the Preface it gives the language It is almost unnecessary to add that this system is found not only to prepare young men for the real business of life, but to give them manliness of feeling and character.
Equipment
A stone building was built for the school. There was fourteen acres of land provided for agriculture training for those students that were going to become farmers and of agricultural occupations. The land was on the Kennebec River in Gardiner and worth about $4,000 at the time. The school had available to the pupils, besides books, a workshop at no cost to them which consisted of circular saws, models, minerals, and specimens in natural history. The school additionally provided modern equipment and tools for training.
Demise
The school struggled financially for 6 years from 1826 until it closed in 1832 for various reasons, but mostly due to lack of funds that it needed to continue running. Mr. Gardiner, the founder, then had to close the school.
Legacy
The concept of teaching "scientific farming" was first started by the Gardiner Lyceum. In the United States about a thousand similar schools teaching this concept were in place a decade later.
