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arguments fell on deaf ears. Even parents disagreed. They wanted children at home doing manual labor. In the 1800s, primary schooling, if it happened at all, had traditionally fallen to churches and parents. Informally organized groups of parents contributed to a teacher’s compensation, either by paying what amounted to a pittance or offering a gift, say, of food, like a bushel of wheat. Older and younger children were taught together. Most boys left to work on the farm or in factories by thirteen years of age. Only upper-class children benefited from trained tutors or religious leaders, and these students were then funneled into Ivy League universities.
    The industrial revolution would change that attitude. The Pennsylvania Assembly was one of the first states to create a Free-School Law, in 1834 and 1836, which became the basis of a statewide system of tax-supported grammar schools for young children. Throughout the 1800s, other states followed, and eventually government-funded grammar schools became common.
    High schools, however, were still rare in 1905. Some of the first high schools were Boston English Classical School, started in 1821, and Philadelphia’s Central High School, which opened to a distinguished pool of male students in 1838.
    Nineteenth-century boys would need preparation to do more high-tech industrial jobs, and high schools made for perfect training centers. Philadelphia, a city that had been a “center of politics, religion, intellect, arts, and letters,” according to historians Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, was transforming itself into the “Workshop of the World,” or so said the city’s chamber of commerce. Philadelphia had become an industrial giant, dominant in steam locomotives, textiles, the railroad, and all things iron, steel, and coal. Transatlantic steamers charged down the Delaware River from Liverpool and Antwerp, only two miles from the Northeast school.
    Northeast Philadelphia was packed with so much industry that local neighborhoods took their nicknames accordingly: There was Brewery Town, a German section of Northeast Philadelphia packed with factories like the Schaefer Brewing Company, along with Gasoline Alley, a burgeoning transportation industry hub near Broad and Lehigh that began with carriages and wagons and moved on to Packards, Cadillacs, Fords, and Studebakers. Northeast Philadelphia was home to the largest textile industry in the world. Philadelphia produced more textiles than any other American city, employing 35 percent of the city’s workforce, with 7,100 separate companies, most of which were clustered within a few miles surrounding the Northeast Manual Training Center. Carpet manufacture was were another homegrown Philadelphia industry.
    Also headquartered within a mile of the soon-to-be neighborhood high school, Northeast Manual Training Center, were prominent companies such as Baldwin Works, which built one of the first American-made locomotives in the 1830s, and by 1884 had thirty-eight buildings and nineteen thousand employees; the Quaker Lace Company, with eighty looms spinning tablecloths and lace curtains; John Bromley and Sons, the oldest and largest carpet manufacturer in the country; and the Stetson Hat Company, which produced three million hats by the 1920s. With more than twenty buildings (including its own hospital), thirty acres of floor space, and thirty-five hundred employees, Stetson was the size of a small town.
    Immigrants, who doubled Philadelphia’s population from 500,000 in 1870 to 1,000,000 in 1920, lacked mechanical skills in a day when demand for such labor was surging. As the Philadelphia economy surged forward, the interests of educational proponents entwined with those of capitalists, and that made high school an appealing idea.
    From its first year, the Northeast Manual Training Center would enjoy decades of success as one of the nation’s most prestigious public high schools. Graduates like