EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

JANUARY, 1918

I

CHARACTER AND FITNESS IN EDUCATION

Without doubt the greatest development of our time has been the systematic study and promotion of efficient methods, or in other words making a number of blades of grass grow where one grew before.

It is not, therefore, surprizing that so many establishments exist under conditions of which the following is not an exaggerated description:

First. Raw material is received without specification and no more examination than to determine that it is material. Second. Sixty-five to seventy-five per cent of this raw material is thrown out during the process of manufacture, after having been more or less worked upon or, in the language of the shop, spoiled during the process of manufacture.

Third. Each foreman or head of department, selected with little regard to his capacity for the work in hand, doing what he likes in his own line, having little regard to the character of material, or to the work which others are doing; frequently with no knowledge of the qualities required in the finished product, and often undoing the work of some other department, more frequently duplicating the same.

Fourth. Where the attempt is made to put all of the material into the same form of machine, regardless of the kind of material, be it brass, steel, cast iron, or concrete.

1 Reprinted by permission from the Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education.

Fifth. Where the men who use the finished product usually consider it a failure and generally work it over when they do not kick it out entirely, except in those few cases where the product happens to fit.

Sixth. Where no systematic study is made as to the suitability of the finished product for the work it is intended to do. One would say that should such a plant be subject to the ordinary laws of business, failure would be a question of time only, and yet the description does not inaccurately portray the conditions which obtain in the average school of engineering, probably to a greater extent in a modern university, and accounts for the all pervading educated misfit.

This condition was tersely described in a recent inaugural address of a university president, as follows:

"It is a sad commentary on the educational institutions of the country that those upon whom are showered their choicest honors are seldom if ever those whom any one would care to resemble."

When we realize that in the old academic type of education the matter of utility of the subject was not only ignored, but was most studiously avoided (see the toast to pure mathematics), and when we consider that utility is the final test of technical education we begin to see that modern technical education has caused a big step in advance of the culture of the civilized world, and when we take into account the condition of our technical schools as described above, we can understand why it took over 2,000 years from the university at Athens to the university of the present day to do what comparatively little civilizing was done, and when, as someone remarked recently, the growth of civilization in the last forty years has been greater than in the previous 2,000 years, we can appreciate more completely the possibilities of engineering education.

A member of the faculty of one of our universities was heard to boast that his university was founded on the university at Athens. Would we be so far wrong should we feel that the university has not grown much above its foundation? Many of our universities have grown far above such a

foundation, are veritable sky scrapers, but the student is too apt to find that the elevators are not running today,

It may be claimed that the entrance examination on the fourteen-unit basis is a specification, but is it anything more than an indication that the student's mind exists and has had some training? It does not differentiate between brass, pig iron, steel, green timber or seasoned, between a memory mind or a reasoning one, between a self-confident mind or the contrary, between one who can grasp only facts and draw conclusions from a general view of a limited number of them or one who reasons step by step.

Has the student the mentality of a successful civil engineer, electrical, mechanical, executive, selling, or research engineer, or has he that of a lawyer, physician, artist, or what not? Is any attempt made to determine?

How many students start on their college work who are both mentally and temperamentally unfit for the course they are trying? The writer has seen numerous cases where a very cursory examination would have shown that the boy could do better at almost anything else than what he was attempting, and in many a case has sent civil engineers into medicine or law, or mechanical engineers into agriculture or business, or men who were delving hard towards the domain of pure science into executive work, and had them come back afterwards and thank him from the bottom of their hearts. How often are we attempting to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or use a razor wherewith to open oysters?

The writer sent to a warm personal friend, to do rather fine engineering work, a student who afterwards made a success on a small farm and lumber proposition. The friend was polite enough not to express himself audibly, but he would never take any more students on the same recommendation.

With the modern development of psychology and character reading, such blunders are inexcusable, for the students in a technical school can be differentiated according to their mental qualifications with quite a great deal of accuracy, and the mental qualities needed in the different lines can be quite definitely determined.

That sixty-five to seventy-five per cent of the students leave college before graduation is a well-known fact, but just why this happens is not known. Frequently lack of funds is given where some other reason is the real one.

What is known as the sophomore lag, or the drop in grades of the sophomore class, can be explained in part at least by a feeling of being a misfit, or a partial failure not sufficiently strong to prevent a return to the institution.

Within the last twenty-four hours two cases have come to the writer's attention, where timidity was driving the men away from college. One had failed on an examination and admitted that he had gone home and worked out correctly in an hour three of the four problems on which he had failed. He admitted that he was rattled. It took three hours of the stiffest sort of arguing to keep that man from quitting and going as a rodman on an engineer corps.

Investigation of similar cases has shown similar difficulties which could have been readily overcome.

The financial reason for leaving college has been proved untenable by numerous cases of students completing their courses who were possest of nothing but an unconquerable desire to obtain an education. This unconquerable desire may be implanted in anyone who has the moral courage for facing the subjects before him and this moral courage may be instilled.

If the shop handles its raw material by forming the cast iron under a steam hammer, its tool steel in the planing mill, or the lumber by running it thru a cupola, it will be readily admitted that there is a probability of sixty-five to seventyfive per cent of the material being spoiled in process of manufacture, for it can be seen that the operation is neither pleasant, interesting, nor profitable to either the material or the machine.

We have all many times seen the strong vigorous personality of a student coming in contact with the delicate razorlike-edged professor, with results comparable only to those obtained by running a piece of tool steel thru a buzz saw; vastly to the detriment of its nervous system.

The measure of the work of an educational institution is usually the number of completed units it turns out, or in other words the number of graduates.

Imagine the feelings of the shop manager who sees the work represented by the shaded area in the diagram, or seventyfive per cent of his work thrown away; in other words, there are three times the necessary workmen employed.

It may be claimed that the work on those men who do not complete their courses is not wasted, but on the principle that “a little learning is a dangerous thing," it seems to be worse than wasted, certainly as far as the good of the country at large is concerned, for half-baked opinions of partially educated men are the curse of a democratic country.

The remedy for all of this lies in three directions:

First. Many men should not be allowed to enter an institution at all, that is, those who have not the mental qualifications to handle the work for which the course is a preparation. It is proposed to do this by the ordinary academic examinations, but many a man with a good memory who is almost an arrant fool may pass such examinations.

The writer saw a man who just missed being an inmate of a home for imbeciles, with the Bible, Shakespeare, and some other similar works at his fingers' ends.

In schools of engineering or technical schools, this distinction should be more closely drawn. An embryo physician or lawyer should not be allowed to attempt to make a civil engineer of himself and a misfit at the same time. Potential dry goods clerks and preachers should not be made into pseudo-engineers, no matter how rich a father or how good a football record he may have.

Second. Special training should be given so as to strengthen the mental weak points. In the lower classes sections should be arranged on a psychological rather than on an alphabetical basis, and instruction governed accordingly. Read the account of Kim's training at Simla (see Kipling's Kim). The self-reliant and timid should be in a different section. Those with good minds for the abstract should not be in the same section with those whose minds grasp the concrete, each