Correspondence Schools
Today, International Correspondence Schools. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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I’ve just found two 1906 editions of International Correspondence Schools (or ICS) textbooks on my dusty shelves. One is titled Arithmetic, Elements of Algebra, Logarithms, and Geometrical Drawing. (No mention of calculus.) The other is titled Surveying, Mapping, and Astronomy. (Here, astronomy deals mainly with celestial navigation.) Both books include solutions of typical examination questions.
These books followed the creation of the ICS. One might feel that America rediscovered distance education during the Covid spread. Well, that certainly gave it a push. But distance education got a really powerful boost in 1892 – when the University of Chicago’s president vigorously supported it.
The embryo of ICS had then been around for a year. One Thomas J. Foster had been concerned with mining safety. And that’d led to a test for prospective miners. Foster began providing materials to prepare miners for their test. And now, with the idea of distance education on the drum, so to speak, he dove in and quickly created a vast array of correspondence courses.
By the turn of the twentieth century, one out of every twenty-seven Americans had taken an ICS course. The service had also changed names several times by then. It’d finally settled on “ICS of Scranton”. And that lasted all the way up ‘til 1996, when it finally went bankrupt. Even then, Scranton, Pennsylvania, kept providing distance learning in different forms.
But the whole enterprise really had begun slowing down years earlier. In particular, the GI Bill, just after World War II, had sent an entire generation off to college. And that rejuvenated higher education. College, not distance education, was now the normal road to one’s choice of work.
And an ICS education was nothing like college. It had its own distinctive flavor. No concept of liberal education – no thought that it might pay to know more than the nuts and bolts of our trade.
Still, ICS touched my life when I was a senior in high school, back in 1947. I’d just taken a huge interest in drafting. So a local land surveyor lent me his ICS drafting course material. And I happily added those exercises to my own high school course work. It helped me hone a skill. Education? That’d come later.
So: back to my old books: They’d arisen close on the heels of the ICS – the International Correspondence School. They gathered its lessons into textbooks. And looking at them, we see no attempt to provide what anyone might see as a college education.
But I admire them at the same time I believe in liberal education. They remind me how important it is to look, clear-eyed, at the nuts and bolts – to remain grounded in the essential details of any working life.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
I.C.S. Reference Library: Leveling, Circular Curves, Stadia and Plane-Table Surveying, Topographic Surveying, Hydrographic Surveying, United States Land Surveys, Mapping, Astronomy. Scranton International Textbook Company, 1906, 1907. Available online here.
I.C.S. Reference Library: Arithmetic Elements of Algebra, Logarithms, Geometrical Drawing. Scranton International Textbook Company, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1904, 1906. Available online here.
Distance education - Wikipedia
William Rainey Harper, University of Chicago President who championed distance education. I should mention that he had already begun some distance learning courses by 1892.
ICS Learn - Wikipedia (This is the source that reports 1 in 27 Americans had taken ICS courses by 1900.)
International Textbook Company - Wikipedia
This Episode first aired on August 24, 2026.