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

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

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. To- day 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 Abbé Rosier, in France, to Turgot, then Minister of Finance, on "A Plan for a National School of Agriculture." Nothing coming of the proposal, the Abbé 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 Würtemberg, 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.