Technological Education—Technological Style ed. by Melvin Kranzberg

Abstract

158 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Technological Education—Technological Style. Edited by Melvin Kranzberg . San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1986. Pp. vii + 104; ref­ erences. $10.00 (paper). This slim volume consists of twelve concise essays on the develop­ ment of technical education, primarily in Western Europe and the United States, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. As Melvin Kranzberg notes in his introduction, a common message delivered by the authors is that the direction of technological development in the countries discussed was influenced by the form of their respective institutionalizations of technical education, even as the latter were shaped by prevailing social and cultural values and interests. Four of the essays deal with themes in German technical education, three with French, two with American (U.S.), and one each with Brit­ ish, Indian, and Romanian. Eberhard Wachtler, Wolfgang Weber, and Hans-Joachim Braun give a very useful description of the initiation of technical education in the German states, beginning in the 18th century and continuing through the foundation of the Gewerbeschule and the Technische Hochschule. Wolfgang Konig adds a comple­ mentary discussion of the professionalization of German engineers with the emergence of industrial and state-funded research centers. Jan Sebestik and Alexandre Herlea describe the French commit­ ment to technician education through the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and the role of the Conservatoire in the creation of French industrial research laboratories. Robert Fox discusses the cli­ mate for technical innovation in France at the turn of this century. Kranzberg and Arthur Donovan deal with the evolution of the American engineering curriculum in the course of the 19th century, and Angus Buchanan describes the issue for the British of whether the technical could be the subject of an education, properly speaking, or merely of training. S. N. Sen describes the slow emergence of engineering colleges in India out of narrow technical training pro­ grams established to serve the needs of the Raj, and Stefan Balan very briefly surveys the history of Romanian technical education. These essays constituted an ICOHTEC Symposium on Technical Education that was part of the program at the 17th International Congress of History of Science held at the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1985. In spite of their brevity, or perhaps because of it, this is a provocative collection, recalling important foun­ dational issues in technology-society interactions and the need for further reading to build on these aperçus. The cross-national com­ parisons of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States are par­ ticularly suggestive. On the face of it, these four countries institutionalized technical education in quite distinctive ways, and yet it is not at all clear that in the end it made any difference. That is, in all of these, as in Russia and in Eastern Europe, the distinction between engineer and technician on the one side and between engineer and TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 159 scientist on the other, as well as the incorporation of the engineer into industrial and governmental entities which subordinate technical ex­ pertise to their own agendas, are pretty much the same. If correct, what dynamic is effecting this convergence and how does it bear on the autonomy of technology vis-à-vis its local institutionalization? Steven L. Goldman Dr. Goldman is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and director of the Science, Technology and Society Program at Lehigh University. He teaches and does research in the history, philosophy, and social relations of science and technology. Educationfor the Industrial World: The Écoles d’Arts et Metiers and the Rise ofFrench Industrial Engineering. By Charles R. Day. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Pp. ix + 293; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $30.00. The misleading reference to “industrial engineering” in the subtitle can be forgiven, since Education for the Industrial World is a valuable book, both for the subject it treats and the issues it raises. Current wisdom on French industry and engineering in the 19th century as­ serts that France had a relatively immobile society and its engineers were impractical people saturated with theoretical learning and higher mathematics more useful as a social cachet than applicable to the problems of...