MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. 257 



TECHNICAL EDUCATION AT THE MASSACHUSETTS 

 INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. 



By Professor GEORGE F. SWAIN. 



WITH the enormous progress in the arts and sciences which has 

 characterized especially the last half of the nineteenth century, 

 education has kept well abreast, although its progress has been grad- 

 ual and it is not always easy to recognize the great advances that 

 have been made. In the sciences, a discovery is made or a machine 

 invented that in the course of a few years forms the basis of a new 

 industry, gives occupation to thousands and places within the reach 

 of almost every one conveniences previously attainable only by the 

 few. In education no such sudden revolutions occur, and great changes 

 are introduced by degrees without producing any commotion or any 

 surprise. From the days of Erasmus and Eabelais, if not earlier, educa- 

 tional reformers have urged the importance of studying things rather 

 than books about things, of cultivating the hand and eye as well as 

 the mind, of training the perceptive powers, of cultivating a habit of 

 observation and discrimination, and of developing the faculty of judg- 

 ment. Yet, notwithstanding all that has been said and written, pro- 

 gress in this direction has until recently been very slow. Carlyle, 

 apparently looking at the matter almost from the old scholastic stand- 

 point, expressed the opinion that the true university of modern times 

 was a great library; books, not things, should be studied. It would 

 conform more to the modern point of view to say that the true univer- 

 sity of the twentieth century is a great laboratory. Even the function 

 of a library in our modern institutions of learning is perhaps more that 

 of a laboratory than that of a mere storehouse of facts and opinions. 



It is perhaps not too much to say that the development in the 

 direction indicated has been greatest in our own country; that the 

 United States have taken the lead in the revolution against the old 

 method of teaching, and that at the present time the higher schools 

 of this country are examples of the best practice and the highest 

 development of the laboratory method. It may, therefore, be of in- 

 terest to give the readers of this magazine a brief account of the school 

 which has in these respects been one of the foremost, if indeed it 

 has not led the schools of this country, the Massachusetts Institute 

 of Technology. 



With the development of the natural sciences and the growth of 

 the constructive arts, natural science long ago gained a place in the 



VOL. LVII.— 17 



