TECHNICAL EDUCATION. Techni cal education as the term is now used is a branch of professional education. The name itself might properly include military education, agricultural educa tion, or industrial education. But these branches have their own specific designa tions, and it is only with the last named that technical education is likely to be confused. And yet there is a difference. Industrial education looks to increasing the efficiency of human effort in produc ing material goods. It develops skill of hand without rising to the dignity of a profession. It teaches trades, it estab lishes manual training schools, it takes the workman from his task and patiently shows him a better way of working. It is fostered by the Federal Government, by the states, by cities, and by private corporations.
Technical education looks to the higher training of the individual. It is based on scientific study. It begins with fun damental branches, as Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, and proceeds to apply these to the problems of daily life. It stimulates the discovery of new truth, but more constantly the new ap plication of old truth. It is engineering education in the widest possible use of that term. In its beginnings it was ele mentary, but there was a constant effort to elevate the study into the rank of the learned professions. This effort was furthered by the intimate relation ex isting between the mechanic arts and the fundamental sciences. This made the en gineer a student. There was and is no easy road into the profession of en gineering.
The first engineering school, after ward called the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was opened in 1825 at Troy, N. Y., through the generous aid of Stephen van Rensselaer. Mr. van Rens selaer was a Harvard graduate and keenly alive to industrial development. He was familiar with the Fellenberg School at Hofwyl, Switzerland, a kind of manual training school for the poor. He stated the aim of his new school to be the instruction of persons "in the appli cation of science to the common pur poses of life." Prior to this time there
seems to have been no conception of en gineering as a profession in any part of the United States. Such engineering work as was done fell to men trained at West Point, or in foreign schools, or in the school of personal experience. It is probable, too, that van Rensselaer had no definite purpose of establishing a new professional class. However, after the death of Amos Eaton, the first senior professor, the Rensselaer Polytechnic In stitute became more definitely a school of civil engineering.
In spite of growing industrial develop ment no further schools of this nature were established until 1847. In that year a school of applied science was started at Yale, which afterward grew into the Sheffield Scientific School, and the Lawrence Scientific School was es tablished at Harvard. The University of Michigan also made preparations at the same time for a course in civil en gineering. These were the only en gineering schools opened before the Civil War. The Rensselaer Institute gradu ated 318 men before 1860, and the Law rence Scientific School at Harvard 49, as has been said in spite of "an uncon cealed disdain on the part of the regular faculty." The next impulse to technical educa tion came from the Federal Government with the passage of the famous Morrill Act in 1862. The starting point of this legislation was a desire to promote agri cultural education, but the mechanic arts were included in the plan and seem to have reaped in some quarters a more profitable harvest than agriculture. When the states received their land script some turned over the funds to existing institutions, some established agricultural schools, some colleges of ag riculture and the mechanic arts, and some made the land grant the basis for a full university development. At pres ent there are 46 institutions operating as land grant colleges under the Morrill Act and including engineering education in their program.