The History Of Education - Ellwood P. Cubberley (classic novels for teens .TXT) 📗

Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries have also recently attained to world prominence. In Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, the Philippines, India, Egypt, Palestine, Algiers, and South Africa, new universities have been created to advance the national welfare. The South American nations have also established a number of promising new foundations, and given new life to older ones. Often nations swinging out into the current of western civilization have developed their universities before popular education really got under way.

 

In no country has the development of university instruction been more rapid than in the United States and Canada. New and important state universities are to-day found in most of the American States and Canadian Provinces, some States maintaining two. These have been relatively recent creations to serve democracy’s needs, and upon the support of these state universities large and increasing sums of money are spent annually. [5] In no nation of the world, too, has private benevolence created and endowed so many private universities of high rank as in the United States, [6] and these have fallen into their proper places as auxiliary agents for the promotion of the national welfare in government, science, art, and the learned professions.

 

From small collegiate institutions with a very limited curriculum, a century ago, stimulated in part by the German example and in part responding to new national needs, universities to-day, in all the leading world nations, have developed into groups of well-organized professional schools, ministering to the great number of special needs of modern life and government. The university development since the middle of the nineteenth century has been greater than at any period before in world history, and with the spread of democracy, dependent as democracy is upon mass education to obtain its leaders, the university has become “the soul of the State” (R. 369). The university development of the next half-century, the world as a whole considered, may possibly surpass anything that we have recently witnessed.

 

THE STATE SCHOOL SYSTEMS AS ORGANIZED. We now find state school systems organized in all the leading world nations. In many the system of public instruction maintained is broad and extensive, beginning often with infant schools or kindergartens, continuing up through elementary schools, middle schools, continuation schools, secondary schools, and normal schools, and culminating in one or more state universities. In addition there are today, in many nations, state systems of scientific and technical schools and institutions, and vocational schools and schools for special classes, to which we shall refer more in detail a little further on. The support of all these systems of public instruction to-day comes largely from the direct or indirect taxation of the wealth of the State. Being now conceived of as essential to the welfare and progress of the State, the State yearly confiscates a portion of every man’s property and uses it to maintain a service deemed vital to its purposes.

 

The sums spent to-day on education by modern States seem enormous, compared with the sums spent for education under conditions existing a century ago. In England, for example, where the first national aid was granted, in 1833, in the form of a parliamentary grant of �20,000

(approximately $100,000), the parliamentary grants for elementary schools had reached approximately �12,000,000 by 1910, with an additional national aid for universities of over �1,100,000. The year following the World War the grants were �32,853,111. In France a treasury grant of 50,000 francs (approximately $10,000) was first made for primary schools, in 1816. This was doubled in 1829, and in 1831 was raised to a million francs. By 1850, the state aid for primary education had reached 3,000,000 francs; by 1870, 10,000,000 francs; by 1880, 30,000,000; and by 1914, approximately 220,000,000 francs. In addition the State was paying out 25,000,000 francs for secondary schools, and 10,000,000 francs for universities. In the United States the total expenditures for maintenance only of public elementary and secondary schools was $69,107,612, in 1870-71; had reached $214,964,618 by the end of the nineteenth century; and was $640,717,053 in 1915-16, with an additional $101,752,542 for universities. By 1920 the total expenditures for the maintenance of public elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States will probably total a billion dollars. These rapidly increasing expenditures merely record the changing political conception as to the national importance of enlarging the educational opportunities and advantages of those who are to constitute and direct the future State.

 

II. SCIENTIFIC

 

In no phase of the remarkable educational development made by nations, since the middle of the nineteenth century, has there been a more important expansion of the educational service than in the creation of schools dealing with the applications of science to the affairs of the national life. Still more, no extension of instruction into new fields has ever yielded material benefits, increased productivity, alleviated suffering, or multiplied comforts and conveniences as has this new development in applied scientific education during the past three quarters of a century.

 

SCIENCE INSTRUCTION IN THE SCHOOLS. At first this new work came in, as we have seen (p. 774), but slowly, and its introduction into the secondary schools of France, Germany, England, the United States, and other nations for a time met with bitter opposition from the partisans of the older type of intellectual training. In Germany it was not until after Emperor William II came to the throne (1888) that the Realschulen really found a warm partisan, he demanding (1890), in the name of the national welfare, that the secondary schools “depart entirely from the basis that has existed for centuries—the old monastic education of the Middle Ages”—and that “young Germans and not young Greeks and Romans” be trained in the schools (R. 368). During his reign the Realschulen (six-year course) and Oberrealschulen (nine-year course) were especially favored, while permission to found additional Gymnasien became hard to obtain. The scientific course in the French Lyc�es similarly did not prosper until after the coming of the Third Republic (1871) and the rise of modern scientific and industrial demands. In England it was not until after 1870

that the endowed secondary schools began to include science instruction, and laboratory instruction in the sciences began to be introduced into the secondary schools of the United States at about the same time. In the United States, too, the first manual-training high school was not established until 1880, but by 1890 the creation of such schools was clearly under way. Other nations—Switzerland, Holland, the Scandinavian countries—also began to include laboratory science instruction in the work of their secondary schools at about the same time. The decade of the seventies witnessed a rising interest in instruction in science which carried such work into the secondary schools of all progressive nations.

To-day, in nearly all lands, we find secondary-school courses in science, or special secondary schools for scientific instruction, occupying a position of at least equal importance with the older classical courses or schools. As science instruction has become organized, and a knowledge of the principles of science has become diffused, object lessons, Realien, nature study, or elementary science instruction has very generally been put into the elementary or people’s schools for the younger pupils. As a result, young people finishing the elementary schools to-day know more relating to the laws of the universe, and the applications of these laws to human life and industry, than did distinguished scholars two centuries ago.

 

All this work in the elementary schools, middle schools, people’s high schools, secondary schools, or special technical schools of middle or secondary grade has been of much value in diffusing scientific knowledge and scientific methods of thinking and working among large numbers of people, as well as in revealing to many the possibilities of a scientific career. The great and important development of scientific instruction, however, since about 1860, has been in the fields of advanced applied science or technical education, and has taken place chiefly in new and higher specialized schools and research foundations. The fields in which the greatest scientific advances have been made, and to which we shall here briefly refer, have been engineering, agriculture, and medicine.

 

THE BEGINNINGS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION. The beginnings of technical education were made earliest in France, Germany, and the United States, and in the order named. France and German lands, but particularly France, inherited through the monasteries what survived of the old Roman skills and technical arts. In the building of bridges, roads, fortifications, aqueducts, and imposing public buildings, the Romans had shown the possession of engineering ability of a high order. Some of this knowledge was retained by the monks of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the monasteries they erected and the churches they built. Later it passed to others, and is evidenced in the great cathedrals and town halls of Europe, and particularly of northern France. In military and civil engineering the French were also the true successors of the Romans. As early as 1747 a special engineering school for bridges and highways (_�cole des Ponts et Chauss�es_) had been created, and a little later a special school to train mining engineers (_�cole des Mines_) was added. These were the first of the world’s higher technical schools. After the Revolution, the new need for military and medical knowledge, as well as the general French interest in applied science, led to the creation of a large number of important higher technical institutions (list, p. 518), most of which have persisted to the present and been enlarged and extended with time. Napoleon also created a School of Arts and Trades (R. 282), and a number of military schools (p. 590).

 

In German lands there was early founded a series of trade schools, [7]

which have in time been developed into important technical universities.

After the creation of the Imperial German Empire, in 1871, these schools were especially favored by the government, and their work was raised to a rank equal to that of the older universities. To the excellent training given in these institutions the German leadership in applied science and industry, before 1914, was largely due. [8] It has been the particular function of these technical universities to apply scientific knowledge to the industries and the arts, and to show the technical schools beneath and the directors of German industries how further to apply it (R. 371). Of their work a recent Report [9] well says: While in other countries the development of science has been academic, in Germany every new principle elaborated by science has revolutionized some industry, modified some manufacturing process, or opened up an entirely new field of commercial exploitation. In the chemical industries of Germany … there is one trained university chemist for every forty working-people. It is important to realize that the development of Germany’s manufactures and commerce has depended not upon the establishment of any monopoly in the domain of science, not upon any special advancement of science within her own boundaries, but primarily upon the practical utilization of the results of scientific research in Germany and other countries.

 

The creation of the United States Military Academy, at West Point, in 1802, marks the American beginnings in technical education. In 1824 the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute was begun, largely as a manual-labor school after the Fellenberg plan, to give instruction “in the applications of science to the common purposes of life,” and about 1850 this developed into one of the earliest of our four-year engineering colleges. In 1846

the United States organized a college for naval engineering, at Annapolis, to do for the Navy what West Point had done for the Army. In 1861 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded, opening its doors in 1865. This was the first of a number of important new engineering colleges, and eight others had been established, by private funds, before 1880.

 

The development in England came a little later. Good engineering schools have