The Place of Polytechnics in Education 1

Abstract

THOSE of you who know what you are doing here and know what is being done in other places must feel that we are at a very interesting, almost a critical, time from an educational point of view. We may be said, indeed, to be at the beginning of a new renaissance—a new birth of learning, just in the same way that our forbears, A.D. 1000 up to A.D. 1200, were in the forefront of that first renaissance. But the trouble is that the dark ages did not cease then, for we have had a dark age since, and it is to correct this second dark age that this new birth is necessary. Now what did the inhabitants of Europe do at that first renaissance? They kept on the schools which had been brought down by the different rulers, the different church authorities, from the time of the Roman Empire. The Roman schools, judging from what the Romans did from Scotland to the south end of the Red Sea, must have dealt with the science of the time, and that perhaps is the reason that the earliest universities always included “the nature of things” in their curricula. A modern public schoolmaster might not think their education complete because Latin and Greek were the modern languages then, and the students were taught no dead ones; but, be this as it may, at the renaissance they insisted upon the teaching of Latin, because then everybody who was anybody spoke Latin—it was the lingua franca of Europe—and not to speak Latin was to belong to the corps of the deaf and dumb. Secondly, they had to learn Greek, because the movers in the educational world at that time were chiefly doctors, and they had learned all they could about doctoring and surgery from bad Latin translations of bad Arabic translations of the Greek authorities, so that when the Greek manuscripts became available all the world was agog to learn Greek in order chiefly that they might learn medicine and surgery. Now, I want to point out to you that in this we had education founded absolutely and completely upon the crying needs of the time. Very good. Then if we are going to do anything like that in our new renaissance, what ought we to do if we are to follow precedent? We must arrange our education in some way in relation to the crying needs of the time. The least little dip into the history of the old universities will prick the bubble of classical education as it is presented to us to-day. Latin was not learned because it had the most magnificent grammar of known languages. Greek was not learned in consequence of the transcendental sublimity of ancient Greek civilisation. Both these things were learned because people had to learn them to get their daily bread, either as theologians or doctors or lawyers, and while they learned them the “nature of things” was not forgotten.