TWO KINDS OF EDUCATION FOR

ENGINEERS 1

BY JOHN BUTLER JOHNSON

EDUCATION may be defined as a means of gradual emancipation from the thraldom of incompetence. Since incompetence leads of necessity to failure, and since competence alone leads to certain success, in any line of human endeavor, and since the natural or uneducated man is but incompetence personified, it is of supreme importance that this thraldom, or this enslaved condition in which we are all born, should be removed in some way. While unaided individual effort has worked, and will continue to work, marvels in rare instances in our so-called self-made men, these recognized exceptions acknowledge the rule that mankind in general must be aided in acquiring this complete mastery over the latent powers of head, heart, and hand. These formal aids in this process of emancipation are found in the grades of schools and colleges with which the children of this country are now blessed beyond those of almost any other country or time. The boys or girls who fail to embrace these emancipating opportunities to the fullest extent practicable, are thereby consenting to degrees of incompetence and their corresponding and resulting failures in life, which they have.

1 First given as an Address before the College of Engineering of the University of Wisconsin, and reprinted here by special permission of Mrs. Phoebe E. Johnson.

had it in their power to prevent. This they will ultimately discover to their chagrin and even grief, when it is too late to regain the lost opportunities.

There are, however, two general classes of competency which I wish to discuss today, and which are generated in the schools. These are, competency to serve, and competency to appreciate and enjoy.

By competency to serve is meant that ability to perform one's due proportion of the world's work which brings to society a common benefit, and which makes of this world a continually better home for the race, and which tends to fit the race for that immortal life in which it puts its trust.

By competency to appreciate and enjoy is meant that ability to understand, to appropriate, and to assimilate those great personal achievements of the past and present in the fields of the true, the beautiful, and the good, which brings into our lives a kind of peace, and joy, and gratitude which can be found in no other way.

It is true that all kinds of elementary education contribute alike to both of these ends, but in the so-called higher education it is too common to choose between them rather than to include them both. Since it is only service which the world is willing to pay for, it is only those competent and willing to serve a public or private utility who are compensated in a financial way. It is the education which brings a competency to serve, therefore, which is often called the utilitarian, and sometimes spoken of contemptuously as the bread-and-butter education. On the other hand, the education which gives a competency to appreciate and to enjoy is commonly spoken of as a cultural education. As to which kind of education is the higher and nobler, if they must be contrasted, it all depends on the point of view. If

personal pleasure and happiness is the chief end and aim of life, then for that class of persons who have no disposition to serve, the cultural education is the more worthy of admiration and selection (conditioned of course on the bodily comforts being so far provided for as to make all financial compensations of no object to the individual). If, however, service to others is the most worthy purpose in life, and if in addition such service brings the greatest happiness, then that education which develops the ability to serve, in some capacity, should be regarded as the higher and more worthy. This kind of education has the further advantage that the money consideration it brings makes its possessor a selfsupporting member of society instead of a drone or parasite, which those people must be who cannot serve. I never could see the force of the statement that "they also serve who only stand and wait." It is possible they may serve their own pleasures, but if this is all, the statement should be so qualified.

The higher education which leads to a life of service has been known as a professional education, as law, medicine, the ministry, teaching, and the like. These have long been known as the learned professions. A learned profession may be defined as a vocation in which scholarly accomplishments are used in the service of society or of other individuals for a valuable consideration. Under such a definition every new vocation in which a very considerable amount of scholarship is required for its successful prosecution, and which is placed in the service of others, must be held as a learned profession. And as engineering now demands fully as great an amount of learning, or scholarship, as any other, it has already taken a high rank among these professions, although as a learned

profession it is scarcely half a century old. Engineering differs from all other learned professions, however, in this, that its learning has to do only with the inanimate world, the world of dead matter and force. The materials, the laws, and the forces of nature, and scarcely to any extent its life, is the peculiar field of the engineer. Not only is engineering pretty thoroughly divorced from life in general, but even with that society of which the engineer is a part his professional life has little in common. His profession is so new it practically has no past, either of history or of literature, which merits his consideration, must less his laborious study. Neither do the ordinary social or political problems enter in any way into his sphere of operations. Natural law, dead matter, and lifeless force make up his working world, and in these he lives and moves and has his professional being. Professionally regarded, what to him is the history of his own or of other races? What have the languages and the literatures of the world of value to him? What interest has he in domestic or foreign politics, or in the various social and religious problems of the day? In short, what interest is there for him in what we now commonly include in the term "the humanities"? It must be confessed that in a professional way they have little or none. Except perhaps two other modern languages by which he obtains access to the current progress in applied science, he has practically no professional interest in any of these things. His structures are made no safer or more economical; his prime-movers are no more powerful or efficient; his electrical wonders no more occult or useful; his tools no more ingenious or effective because of a knowledge of all these humanistic affairs. As a mere server of society, therefore, an engineer is about as good a tool without all this cultural knowledge

as with it. But as a citizen, as a husband and father, as a companion, and more than all, as one's own constant, perpetual, unavoidable personality, the taking into one's life of a large knowledge of the life and thought of the world, both past and present, is a very important matter indeed, and of these two kinds of education, as they affect the lifework, the professional success, and the personal happiness of the engineer, I will speak more in detail.

I am here using the term, engineer, as including that large class of modern industrial workers who make the new application of science to the needs of modern life their peculiar business and profession. A man of this class may also be called an applied scientist. Evidently he must have a large acquaintance with such practical sciences as surveying, physics, chemistry, geology, metallurgy, electricity, applied mechanics, kinematics, machine design, power generation and transmission, structural designing, land and water transportation, etc. And as a common solvent of all the problems arising in these various subjects he must have acquired an extended knowledge of mathematics, without which he would be like a sailor with neither compass nor rudder. To the engineer mathematics is a tool of investigation, a means to an end, and not the end itself. The same may be said of his physics, his chemistry, and of all his other scientific studies. They are all to be made tributary to the solution of problems which may arise in his professional career. His entire technical education, in fact, is presumably of the useful character, and acquired for specific useful ends. Similarly he needs a free and correct use of his mother tongue, that he may express himself clearly and forcibly both in speech and composition, and an ability to read both French and German, that he may read the current technical literature