The Industrial Revolution leaves us with many questions: Was the revolution in industry
simply an issue of new machinery or mechanical innovation? Did young boys and girls
work and live shoulder to shoulder for more than twelve hours a day? Was industrial
capitalism nothing more than a clever system devised by clever capitalists to exploit the
labor of ignorant workers? Was the revolution in industry the product of conscious
planning or did it appear spontaneously?
The revolution was something more than just new machines, smoke-belching
factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living. Everyone was
affected in one way or another. The Industrial Revolution serves as a key to the origins of
modern Western society. As Harold Perkin has observed, the Industrial Revolution was no
mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and production, but a social revolution
with social causes as well as profound social effects.”
The Industrial Revolution helped to develop social studies due to the mere fact that
it became easier to study social habits of people that were centralized in big cities. Before
the revolution most families were rural, and spread out among the country on farms and in
small towns. The revolution changed family structure and social structure forever. The
revolution also brought us the new working class, and the middle class.
Another thing that changed drastically was education. Before the Industrial Revolution,
there was no formal education, only a passing along of knowledge from generation to
generation. Children learned how to farm, cook, clean, build, etc. Children and parents
