The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

In 1891 the independent Kingdom of Siam, [9] awakened from its age-long isolation by new world influences, sent a prince to Europe to study and report on the state systems of education maintained there. As a result of his report a department of public education was created, which later evolved into a ministry of public instruction, and elementary schools were opened by the State in the thirteen thousand old Buddhist temples. These schools offered a two-year course in Siamese, followed by a five-year course in English, given by imported English teachers. Schools for girls were provided, as well as for boys. Since this beginning, higher schools of law, medicine, agriculture, engineering, and military science have been added, taught largely by imported English and American teachers. In consequence of the new educational organization, and the new influences brought in, the whole life of this little kingdom has been transformed during the past three decades.

GENERAL ACCEPTANCE OF THE STATE-FUNCTION CONCEPTION. The different national school systems, the creation of which has so far been briefly described, are typical and represent a great world movement which characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century. This movement is still under way, and increasing in strength. Other state school organizations might be added to the list, but those so far given are sufficient. Beginning with the nations which were earliest to the front of the onward march of civilization, the movement for the state control of education, itself an expression of new world forces and new national needs, has in a century spread to every continent on the globe. To-day progressive nations everywhere conceive of education for their people as so closely associated with their social, political, and industrial progress, and their national welfare and prosperity (R. 336), that the control of education has come to be regarded as an indispensable function of the State. State constitutions (R. 333) have accordingly required the creation of comprehensive state school systems; legislators have turned to education with a new interest; bulky state school codes have given force to constitutional mandates; national literacy has become a goal; the diffusion of political intelligence by means of the school has naturally followed the extension of the suffrage; while the many new forces and impulses of a modern world have served to make the old religious type of education utterly inadequate, and to call for national action to a degree never conceived of in the days when religious, private, and voluntary educational effort sufficed to meet the needs of the few who felt the call to learn. What a few of the more important of these new nineteenth-century forces have been, which have so fundamentally modified the character and direction of education, it may be worth while to set forth briefly, before proceeding further.

II. NEW MODIFYING FORCES

THE ADVANCE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. The first and most important of these nineteenth-century forces, and the one which preceded and conditioned all the others, was the great increase of accurate knowledge as to the forces and laws of the physical world, arising from the application of scientific method to the investigation of the phenomena of the material world (R. 337). During the nineteenth century the intellect of man was stimulated to activity as it had not been before since the days when little Athens was the intellectual center of the world. What the Revival of Learning was to the classical scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the movement for scientific knowledge and its application to human affairs was to the nineteenth. It changed the outlook of man on the problems of life, vastly enlarged the intellectual horizon, and gave a new trend to education and to scholarly effort. What the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been slowly gathering together as interesting and classified phenomena, the scientific scholars of the nineteenth century organized, interpreted, expanded, and applied. Since the day of Copernicus (p. 386) and Newton (p. 388) a growing appreciation of the permanence and scope of natural law in the universe had been slowly developing, and this the scholars of the nineteenth century fixed as a principle and applied in many new directions. A few of the more important of these new directions may profitably be indicated here.

[Illustration: FIG. 215. BARON JUSTUS VON LIEBIG (1803-73)]

In the domain of the physical sciences very important advances characterized the century. Chemistry, up to the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century largely a collection of unrelated facts, was transformed by the labors of such men as Dalton (1766-1844), Faraday (1791-1867), and Liebig into a wonderfully well-organized and vastly important science. Liebig carried chemistry over into the study of the processes of digestion and the functioning of the internal organs, and reshaped much of the instruction in medicine. Liebig is also important as having opened, at Giessen, in 1826, the first laboratory instruction in chemistry for students provided in any university in the world. By many subsequent workers chemistry has been so applied to the arts that it is not too much to say that a knowledge of chemistry underlies the whole manufacturing and industrial life of the present, and that the degree of industrial preeminence held by a nation to-day is largely determined by its mastery of chemical processes.

Physics has experienced an equally important development. It, too, at the beginning of the nineteenth century was in the preliminary state of collecting, coördinating, and trying to interpret data. In a century physics has, by experimentation and the application of mathematics to its problems, been organized into a number of exceedingly important sciences. In dynamics, heat, light, and particularly in electricity, discoveries and extension of previous knowledge of the most far-reaching significance have been made. What at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a small textbook study of natural philosophy has since been subdivided into the two great sciences of physics and chemistry, and these in turn into numerous well-organized branches. Today these are taught, not from textbooks, but in large and costly laboratories, while manufacturing establishments and governments now find it both necessary and profitable to maintain large scientific institutions for chemical and physical research.

The great triumph of physics, from the point of view of the reign of law in the world of matter, was the experimental establishment (1849) of the fundamental principle of the conservation of energy. This ranks in importance in the world of the physical sciences with the theory of evolution in the biological. The perfection of the spectroscope (1859) revealed the rule of chemical law among the stars, and clinched the theory of evolution as applied to the celestial universe. The atomic theory of matter [10] was an extension of natural laws in another direction. In 1846 occurred the most spectacular proof of the reign of natural law which the nineteenth century witnessed. Two scientists, in different lands, [11] working independently, calculated the orbit of a new planet, Neptune, and when the telescope was turned to the point in the heavens indicated by their calculations the planet was there. It was a tremendous triumph for both mathematics and astronomy. Such work as this meant the firm establishment of scientific accuracy, and the ultimate elimination of the old theories of witchcraft, diabolic action, and superstition as controlling forces in the world of human affairs.

The publication by Charles Lyell (1797-1875) of his Principles of Geology, in 1830, marked another important advance in the knowledge of the operations of natural law in the physical world, and likewise a revolution in thinking in regard to the age and past history of the earth. Few books have ever more deeply influenced human thinking. The old theological conception of earthly "catastrophes" [12] was overthrown, and in its place was substituted the idea of a very long and a very orderly evolution of the planet. Geology was created as a new science, and out of this has come, by subsequent evolution, a number of other new sciences [13] which have contributed much to human progress.

[Illustration: FIG. 216. CHARLES DARWIN (1809-82)]