be found in the upper anatomical laboratory, McGraw hall, or obtained by addressing the writer, to whom also, for the present at least, the signed copies may be sent.

No one will be asked to sign this paper; but it is to be noted that even the smallest sum expresses the opinion of the subscriber and constitutes a memorial to the faculty.

Wednesday evening, July 8

THE PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL SCHOOLS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION

ANNUAL ADDRESS BY PRES. FRANCIS A. WALKER, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

My subject is, the place of schools of applied science and technology in the American system of education; but it may conduce to a better understanding if I offer a few preliminary remarks regarding three different kinds of schools which are at present greatly confused in the public mind.

We have, first, the trade school. Schools of this class may be of a very elementary or of a very advanced order; their pupils may be mere children, or they may be grown men and women; the work prosecuted in them may have reference to the most petty of mechanical trades, or it may be in preparation for artistic avocation of no low degree. That which characterizes schools of this class, that which makes them trade schools, is the purpose to train the actual workers in industry, and to train them for what it is presumed will be their occupation in life. In the main, it is not the object of these schools to train the overseers and superintendents of labor, but the individual operatives. In general, too, the work of these schools assumes that the particular avocation for life of those who enter them is already practically determined. Efforts at industrial education in Europe have very largely taken this form. The trade schools of Switzerland, Holland and France are schools in which young people are taught definite trades, generally such as are carried on in the immediate region.

Schools of this class are not altogether unknown in the United States. The trade schools of Col. Auchmuty have acquired a wide celebrity. The Cooper institute of New York has long carried on a large and diversified work of this character, and more recently the

Pratt institute of Brooklyn, in addition to its work of general education, has undertaken to prepare young people directly and specifically for their work in life.

Whether the time has come in the development of the educational and industrial system of the United States for the incorporation of trade schools into the general scheme of public instruction may well be doubted. But I see no reason to question that that scheme might, in every considerable community, be advantageously supplemented by schools set up under municipal control, or by private enterprise, for teaching under skilled and scientific direction the arts and trades practiced in those communities respectively.

The second class of schools now to be spoken of are those in which the mechanic arts are taught as a means to general education. The great prototype is found in the imperial Russian school whose superb exhibit at Philadelphia in 1876 led immediately to the establishment of a high school of mechanic arts as a subordinate feature of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first scion from the tree thus planted in American soil was the Manual Training school of St Louis, a constituent part of the Washington university of that city. Of recent years, high schools of this class have been thickly set over the United States, specially at the west.

The object sought in schools of this class is not the teaching of trades, but the complete and symmetrical education and development of the pupils. There is here no presumption that the pupil will take for his vocation in life the trade which he is called to practice in the school. The arts adopted for the purposes of this kind of instruction are no longer those which are pursued in the immediate region, but those which are best adapted to the purposes of the teacher. No pecuniary use is sought to be made of the product of these exercises any more than would be done with the products of grammatical or arithmetical exercises. The object in view is not construction but instruction. The entire value of manual training, so called, is realized, not in merchantable goods but in the minds of the pupils.

The pressing need for the introduction into our public school system of studies and exercises like those under consideration is largely the result of modern conditions. A generation ago there was an abundance of useful work to occupy the time and energy of almost every school-boy out of school. These tasks constituted, in some respects, the most useful part of his training. They wrought into the very fabric of his being the idea and sentiment of a common family interest; they gave scope and play to the creative and con

structive faculty; they trained eye and hand to accuracy and precision; they taught the child to respect toil and to value the fruits of labor; they sweetened the bread of poverty and made sounder the sleep of childhood. To-day under the new conditions of production it would, in almost every city home and in many village homes, cost more to keep a boy usefully employed than to feed him in idleness. Even play of any satisfactory sort is scarcely practicable in our modern cities. Search any large city on a pleasant Saturday afternoon and, out of thousands of boys who should be doing something with energy and enthusiasm, their muscles all strung, their blood tingling in their veins, you will not find one in 50 doing anything which would be even a poor caricature of old-fashioned country sport. It is the fastgrowing appreciation of this state of things which is giving direction and force to the popular demand for the introduction of manual training into our public schools.

The last of the three classes of schools comprises schools of applied science and technology whose purpose it is to train engineers, architects, geologists, chemists and metallurgists for the work of their several professions. These schools do not aim to educate the men who are to do the manual work of modern industry, although manual exercises may be, sometimes are, and I think always should be largely prescribed in them as a means of general education; as affording play and scope to the constructive and inventive faculty; as affording a practical knowledge of the materials of construction. which can not fail to be useful in the practice of the several professions; and, finally, as developing the economic sense, the sense, that is, of cost, the sense which appreciates the relation between effort and result. It is this class of schools which form the subject of my remarks this evening.

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I have said that these schools do not aim to educate the men who are to do the work of modern industry. It,further may be said that in the main they do not even aim to educate the men who are to oversee and direct the work of others- the men who are to act as superintendents of labor. It is the function of this class of schools to train those who shall investigate the material resources of the country or project operations for the development of these resources, to be carried on by bodies of labor and of capital under the direction of persons who have received their education and training in schools of different order, or through practical experience in the mine, the field and the shop.

The earliest of the American schools of this class is never to be

mentioned without honor- the Rensselaer Polytechnic institute of Troy. The splendid work done by this school of civil engineering and bridge building, especially before the civil war, rightly entitles it to a high place in the history of American education. The school which next deserves to be mentioned is the Sheffield Scientific school. At a much later date than the Troy Polytechnic, yet still long before the civil war, the foundations of this noble school were laid at New Haven, with little of observation and less of encouragement, by a small group of devoted men of the highest scientific endowments. It was in 1847 that the Yale catalogue announced the formation of its department of philosophy and arts together with the appointment of Benjamin Silliman, jr, as professor of chemistry and the kindred sciences, as applied to the arts, and of John P. Norton as professor of agricultural chemistry and vegetable and animal physiology. In 1852 William A. Norton was appointed professor of civil engineering, and organized the engineering section of the college. In 1860 Chester S. Lyman was appointed professor of industrial mechanics and physics. In the same year with the formation of the department of philosophy and arts of New Haven the Lawrence Scientific school was founded at Cambridge, though the latter was destined to become more renowned as a school of research than as a school of instruction.

Among the vast changes in the spirit and life of our country, in the arts, the industries, the ideas, the aspirations of the American people which were brought about by, or which coincided with, the great struggle from 1861 to 1865, none is more remarkable than the rapid development of schools of applied science and technology. It is no part of my duty to name even the most important of these, or to attempt to divide among them the honor of what they have as a whole achieved. I shall confine myself to accounting, as far as I may, for the rapidity with which these schools have spread over the land and to estimating their place in our educational system.

The nearest and easiest thing to say regarding the growth of scientific and technical schools since the fortunate conclusion of the civil war, is that the industrial development of the country had reached the point where it had become necessary that the enterprises into which our labor and capital were to be put should be organized and directed with much more of skill and scientific knowledge than had been applied to our earlier efforts at manufactures and transportation; and so in the fullness of time scientific and technical schools came.

In this view there is much of truth. The vaster

enterprises of these later days, the ever increasing possibilities of modern commerce and industry, the intensifying severity of competition due to quickened communication, fast mails, cheap freights and ocean cables had indeed created an urgent want for greater technical skill and more highly trained intelligence. The old wasteful ways of dealing with materials, the rule-of-thumb methods of construction, the haphazard administration, characteristic of our earlier industrial efforts could not have been continued without greatly retarding the national development and without irreparable loss in the result. But not at the time spoken of had this want become one of which our people were generally conscious; much less had it created a demand for such institutions which would of itself have sufficed to bring them into existence. The establishment of scientific and technical schools in the United States was to constitute a striking instance of the principle that in some things supply must create demand.

Economists and people generally are so much accustomed to think of the more usual condition in which demand creates supply that they often forget - indeed to many it never occurs that there is another large class of cases, and these far the most important of all, in which the opposite rule obtains. In the lower ranges of life, in matters of clothing, food and shelter, and indeed in holding on to whatever advances civilization has once fairly and fully made, whether in material or in higher things, the conscious wants of humanity will in all ordinary cases suffice to secure the due supply without any organized public or private effort other than that originating in personal interest. But in all things high and fine, and generally also in every advance which material civilization is to make, there must be a better intelligence than that of the market, which shall apprehend, not what the people want, but what they ought to want; there must be disinterested efforts on the part of the natural leaders of society, which shall secure, at whatever sacrifice, such a demonstration of the merits and advantages of the yet unknown thing, such a supply of the new good, as shall create the demand for it. It will not be till that want has been fairly and fully wrought into the public consciousness that the supply may thereafter be left to take care of itself.

The American schools of technology illustrate in an eminent degree the law of human progress which I have stated. These schools did not come into existence in obedience to a demand for them. They were created through the foresight, the unselfish devotion, the