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

since been developed in connection with the new municipal universities, while good engineering colleges have also been created at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at the Scottish and Irish universities.

 

THE NEW IMPULSES TO DEVELOPMENT. During the first six decades of the nineteenth century, France, the German States, and the United States were slowly moving toward the creation of special schools for technical education. After about 1860 the movement increased with great rapidity. A number of events contributed to this change in rate of development, the most important of which were:

 

1. The development attained by pure science, by about 1860. (See chapter XXVII, part II, p. 723.)

 

2. The Industrial Revolution (p. 728), which changed nations from an agricultural to an industrial status, opened up the possibilities of vast world trade, and created enormous demands for technically trained men to supervise and develop the rapidly growing industries of nations.

 

3. The London Exhibition of 1851, which displayed to the world the applications of science to trade, manufacturing, and the arts, made in particular by England. This opened the eyes of Europe and America to the possibilities of technical education, and led to the creation, in 1853, of a national Department of Science and Art (p. 638) for England. This began the stimulation, by money grants, of technical education and instruction in drawing, and exerted from the first an important influence on English education.

 

4. The passage by the Congress of the United States of the Morrill Land-Grant-College Act, in 1862, which provided for the creation of colleges of engineering, military science, and agriculture, in each of the American States.

 

5. The militarily successful wars of Prussia against Denmark, in 1864; Austria, 1866; and France, 1870-71. These revealed to other nations the importance of sound military and engineering education for a nation, and so tremendously stimulated German technical education that the new nation soon arose, in many lines, to a position of world industrial leadership (369).

 

6. The Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, in 1876, which repeated the work of the London Exhibition of 1851, and gave a new meaning to the scientific and engineering education then developing in the new American Land-Grant Colleges.

 

7. The work of Virchow in Germany (1856) in developing pathology; of Pasteur in France, after 1859, in establishing the germ theory of disease; the English surgeon Lister, about the same time, in developing antiseptic surgery; and the new work of physiologists and chemists. Combined these have remade medical science, and have opened up immense possibilities for benefiting mankind.

 

Following these important stimuli to activity, the important nations of the world began the earnest development of technical education, and later medical education, with the result that this new development has affected educational practice all over the world. The new ideas have spread to all continents, and to-day the call for technical education comes not only from the older nations and such new countries as Canada, Australia, South Africa, and the South American States, but from such ancient and backward civilizations as Japan, China, Siam, the Philippines, the East Indies, Egypt, Persia, and Turkey.

 

In consequence to-day numerous and expensive engineering colleges and research institutions are maintained by the important world nations. Today the trained engineer goes to work his wonders in all corners of the globe, and his task has become primarily that of organizing and directing men in the work of controlling the forces and materials of nature so that they may be made to benefit the human race. So rapid has been the development that, out of the earlier comprehensive type of engineering, to-day dozens of specialized types of engineering education and specialization have been evolved, covering such related fields as civil, mechanical, mining, metallurgical, electrical, architectural, chemical, electro-chemical, marine, naval, sanitary, biological, and public-health engineering. No longer can a nation hope to develop its resources, care properly for the modern needs of its people, or be counted among the important industrial or agricultural nations if it neglects the development of technical education.

 

SCIENCE APPLIED TO AGRICULTURE. France also was the direct inheritor, through the monks, of the old Roman agricultural knowledge and skills, though up to the nineteenth century no attempt to organize agricultural instruction took place anywhere in Europe. The earliest effort in that direction was a proposal made in 1775 by Abb� Rosier, in France, to Turgot, then Minister of Finance, on “A Plan for a National School of Agriculture.” Nothing coming of the proposal, the Abb� submitted the proposal to the National Assembly, in 1789, and the same idea was later presented to Napoleon, but without results. The first person to give practical form to the idea was Fellenberg (p. 546), who conducted his manual-labor agricultural institute at Hofwyl, from 1806 to 1844, and inaugurated a plan of educational procedure which was soon afterwards copied in Switzerland, France, the South German States, England, and the United States. One of the earliest institutions to be established outside of Switzerland was the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, founded by the Agricultural Society of W�rtemberg, in 1817, at Hohenheim, near Stuttgart.

 

The earliest schools to teach agriculture in France were the Royal Agronomic Institution at Grignon (1827); the Institute at Coetbo (1830), and the Agricultural School at San Juan (1833). By 1847 twenty-five agricultural schools were in operation in France, to several of which orphan asylums and penal colonies were attached. In 1848 the French Government reorganized the instruction in agriculture and gave it a national basis. It ordered the creation of a farm school in each department of France; a number of higher schools for agricultural instruction at central places; and a National Agronomic Institute for more advanced instruction. A treasury grant of 2,500,000 francs to establish the system was voted. In 1873 elementary instruction in agriculture was ordered given in all village and rural elementary schools.

 

In the United States a number of agricultural societies were formed early in the century, and a private school of agriculture was opened in Maine, in 1821, and another in Connecticut, in 1824. With the opening-up of the new West to farming and the change of the East to manufacturing, after about 1825, the agitation for agricultural education for a time died out, reappearing in Michigan, in 1850. In that year a new constitution was adopted which required the legislature to create a State School of Agriculture, and in 1857 the Michigan Agricultural College opened its doors. Two years later a “Farmers’ High School,” which later became the Pennsylvania State College, was opened in central Pennsylvania. In 1862, in the midst of the greatest civil war in history, the American Congress passed the very important Morrill Act, which provided for the creation of a college to teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military science in each of the American States. It was a decade before many of these institutions opened, and for a time they amounted to but little. They had but few students, little money, and the instruction was very elementary and but poorly organized. Cornell University, in New York State, was one of the first (1868) of the new institutions to get under way and find its work. The Centennial Exposition (1876) gave the needed emphasis to the engineering courses, and by 1880 these were well established. The agricultural courses did not flourish for two decades longer, and the military science not until the World War, Despite feeble beginnings, the result of the aid given by the national government has in time proved very valuable, and to-day very large sums of money are being appropriated by the American States and Territories for instruction in engineering, agriculture, home economics, and related sciences, and large numbers of students are now enrolled for this technical training.

 

THE RECENT NEW INTEREST IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century agricultural education has awakened new interest in many lands. The German States have created many schools for instruction in agriculture and forestry. Denmark has regenerated the rural life of the nation (R. 370) by its “People’s High Schools” and its special schools for instruction in agriculture. Italy has recently made special efforts to extend agricultural instruction to its people. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have established agricultural schools. In Algiers, Morocco, Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, good beginnings in agricultural education have been made.

 

As agricultural knowledge has been worked out and classified, and agricultural instruction has become organized, it has become possible to relegate some of the more elementary instruction to the school below. This was done in European nations before it took place in the United States. In 1888 the first American agricultural high school was established in Minnesota. By 1898 there were ten such schools in the United States, but since 1900 the development has been very rapid. By 1920 probably a thousand high schools were offering instruction in agriculture, while elementary instruction in agriculture had been introduced into the rural and village schools of practically every American agricultural State.

 

The agricultural schools, colleges, and experimental stations established by the national, state, and local educational authorities of different nations have added another new division to the work of public education, and one which is both very costly and very remunerative. Out of the work of these schools has come a vast quantity of useful knowledge, and hundreds of important applications of science to farm and home life. Old breeds in stock and grains have been improved, new breeds have been derived, and productivity has been greatly increased. Through the teachings of home economics the farmer’s home is being transformed, while the applications of science made in these schools are modifying almost every phase of agricultural life and rural living.

 

MEDICINE AND SANITARY SCIENCE. Closely related to sanitary, biological, and public-health engineering has been the enormous recent development of medicine and surgery. Within half a century instruction in these subjects has been entirely transformed, and large and costly laboratories and hospitals are now required for the work. There has also been much specialization in medical training, within recent years, and especially has preventive medicine been developed. Extending the newly found biological and medical knowledge to the animal and vegetable worlds has resulted in a similar development of veterinary medicine [10] and plant pathology. A combination of medical knowledge with engineering and chemistry has produced the sanitary engineer, while medical knowledge and applied biology has produced the public-health expert. [11]

 

So important, too, has the control of all kinds of disease become, now that people, animals, insects, plants, and goods move so freely along the great trade routes of the world, that nations everywhere feel the necessity, now that scientific research has revealed to questioning man the methods of transmission of the diseases which once decimated armies and cities, destroyed stocks, and ruined harvests, of developing ample quarantine service and medical staffs to cope with diseases—human, animal, and plant—from without, and to control those which arise within.

Nations too poor as yet to provide such service for themselves are today having such provision made for them by other nations, or by great national foundations, [12] so that other lands may be protected from the ravages of their diseases and the economic wealth of all may be increased. The element of Christian charity has also entered into the service, the labors of Dr. Grenfell in Labrador, and the work of the Rockefeller medical and surgical boat traveling among the Philippine Islands and its hookworm work on every continent, being good examples of such Christian effort.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 232. THE PEKING UNION MEDICAL COLLEGE

A well-equipped center for instruction in western medicine, endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. A similar school is being created at Shanghai, in central China. Existing medical schools at two other points, and nineteen hospitals scattered over the Republic, have also been aided by this American foundation. In addition, many medical missionaries, Chinese physicians,