America by Design by David F Noble

Author:David F Noble
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RulingClassStudies, TracingConcepts
ISBN: 9780307828491
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-01-22T23:00:00+00:00

In Europe various means had been devised to bridge the same gap. In Germany, for example, young graduates of the Gymnasium were required to work in mechanical shops for at least a year before gaining entrance to the Polytechnikum, or scientific school; a similar scheme was adopted in the Scandinavian countries. Glasgow University in Scotland evolved the “sandwich system” whereby a six-month academic year enabled students to spend the other six months in the workshops of industry, and thus earn money for their education. In the United States the technical schools conducted inspection trips to the industries as a way of introducing their students to “real world” conditions.30 The so-called shop movement, which began at Worcester in 1868 and MIT a decade later, brought the shop into the college for instructional purposes and to simulate industrial conditions. The shop movement, however, which spread to most engineering schools by the first decade of the new century, was largely unsuccessful and came under attack on two fronts. The industries maintained that the school shop could in no way approximate the actual situation in industry, and only a few of the best schools could even begin to afford up-to-date equipment such as existed in industry. The academics outside the engineering schools, moreover, had nothing but disdain for lowly shopwork and were loath to permit it on the campus, much less grant university credit for it.

The most promising resolution of the problem, one which intrigued engineering educators more than any other, was the cooperative course of the University of Cincinnati, set up in 1907 by Herman Schneider. As a young instructor of civil engineering at Lehigh University, Schneider had between 1899 and 1903 conducted what he called “pedagogic research into the problem of engineering education.” In the process, he had visited “the largest manufacturing concerns in the Eastern and Middle States, in order to obtain from the employers of engineers their views on the subject. In a great many cases the men consulted were graduates of the best institutions in the country.” In Schneider’s view, and the view of those whom he consulted, the problem of bridging the gap between the schools and the industries boiled down to three questions: “What requirements should the finished product of an engineering school fulfill?” “Where and how shall we get the raw material to make the required finished product?” And “Through what processes shall we put the raw material in order to obtain the required finished product?”31

By 1905 Schneider, now a professor at the University of Cincinnati, had reached his “somewhat radical and revolutionary” conclusions. He formulated a plan for a “cooperative course” whereby engineering students would be required to alternate between the college classroom and the industrial workplace in the process of earning their degree. In 1907, when he became dean of the College of Engineering at Cincinnati, Schneider launched his project. Initially the course was a six-year program of instruction in mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering, and was carried on in cooperation with a number of Cincinnati’s electrical and machinery companies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.