Science, Technology, and Education: Historical Perspectives

Intellectual and Social Foundations

How did science and technology affect nineteenth-century education? Consider the following two ways: (1) the relationship between the expansion of knowledge and the curriculum and (2) the influence of scientific theories on ideas about access to education. In the first case, science failed to penetrate American higher education to any substantial degree until the early nineteenth century. Scientific knowledge generated from the so-called scientific revolution as well as developments in mathematical sciences during the eighteenth century far outstripped what was taught in colonial colleges. The classical curriculum tended to dominate the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century undergraduate course of study.

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, however, college leaders began to recognize the vast explosion in scientific knowledge and its lack of study in higher education. Reform efforts appeared with the purpose of expanding scientific course offerings and increasing science faculty. In 1800, rare was the college that employed a single faculty member devoted exclusively to scientific studies. By 1860, these same institutions commonly had four. Social forces and developments during the antebellum period, such as rapid industrialization and the professionalization of science, facilitated the expansion of science instruction in education.

[Page 687]With the rise of industry came the decline of the apprenticeship model of education. The apprenticeship model had long afforded working classes a source of instruction that provided for social mobility. An apprentice would work for a master and, over the course of an extended period of time, learn all aspects of a trade and become a “master” in the process. Factory life provided no such social mobility, and thus, calls for practical and scientific instruction to replace the disappearing apprenticeship model encouraged the establishment of new kinds of institutes of technology, such as the Rensselaer School (1824) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1861). As such, social and intellectual forces came to bear on American education during the antebellum period in ways that not only transformed programs of study but also changed the composition of faculty at traditional colleges and inspired the creation of new institutions.

In the second case, scientific theories developed in nineteenth-century biology and geology had an impact on ideas about human nature and thereby influenced access to education. One of the most often-cited examples emerged from the work of Edward Clarke, a Harvard University professor of medicine. In 1874, he published Sex in Education, which described case studies of what he perceived to be the debilitating effects of higher education on women. Stress on the mental faculties of his subjects came, he argued, as a result of their attempts to complete advanced courses of study.

Although access to education of whatever form is socially constructed, Clarke sought to settle the matter of “separate spheres,” the ideology that placed women at home and men in the world of work, on a scientific basis. “The question of [the] woman's sphere, to use the modern phrase,” he stated in Sex in Education, “is not to be solved by applying to it abstract principles of right and wrong. Its solution must be obtained from physiology, not from ethics and metaphysics” (p. 12). His conclusion: Women should not attend higher education and should not attempt rigorous classical or scientific studies.

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