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Work—Study—Live:
The Resident Youth Centers of the NYA

A New Blueprint for Education

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"Twenty years old and he has been hopping freight cars on the bum for two years."

A 1935 survey of depression youth found there were at least 3 million between the ages of 16 and 25 who were on relief and eligible for NYA assistance. Of this number, 1,700,000 were in urban areas and over a million in rural sections. Less than 40 percent had gone beyond the 8th grade and less than 3 percent had any college study. Many had become hoboes. The transit service of the WPA in a single day in May 1935 counted 45,000 young people registered in its camps and shelters.

The in-school phase of the NYA mainly provided financial assistance to some 2,134,000 young men and women to continue their education. They were assigned work by their schools and colleges to justify such funding. In the meantime, the NYA studied what to do about the out-of-school and unemployed youth.

Experience had shown that the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been established several years earlier than the NYA, did not meet the most realistic and urgent needs of depression youth. Although the Corps members were paid wages for their work, the CCC was an economic and employment dead end. It may have provided a physically healthy and disciplined environment but it left former members with no specific work experience that fitted them for existing jobs. Furthermore, it excluded women. Following a stint in the Corps, most of its enrollees returned to the dismal conditions they had left.

CCC Workers Peeling Potatoes

In addition to the work of the CCC, a number of other precedents in this country and in Europe were drawn on to formulate the NYA plan. In an article on the NYA, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, a writer and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, "the first one grew, literally grew, out of conditions in connection with a rural Louisiana technical training State institution in southwestern Louisiana. It was a simple, practical question of feeding and lodging boys from relief families who lived too far away from the institution to profit by part-time elementary courses." Other people contended the pattern was an American imitation of Danish folk schools. Then there was the experience of four work-study-homes that had been established in Arkansas in response to the depression. Their results in combining work—the growing of food—with study and an alternative to home life gained national attention. They were found to promote a degree of job training, health, enthusiasm and good citizenship. As Mrs. Fisher described it, the work-study-home concept caught on "as naturally as Golden Bantam corn spread into American gardens, not because it was new but because it was a much better variety." The NYA was in some important ways a continuation of old, local American educational traditions, modified and considerably enhanced for relevance to conditions of the twentieth century.

These three elements: work, learning and living, were all given a substance and content pertinent to the problems of the depression.

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