EDUCATION

Any regular practice, for example, agriculture, craft production, navigation, or scholarship, requires learning opportunities for novice practitioners, which have often been provided in workplaces, or through informal instruction and self-directed study. This survey, however, will be limited to formal education, that is, to teaching and learning in institutions such as colleges and universities established exclusively for these purposes.

A broad historical account (to be elaborated below) of scientific and technical education in relation to ethics runs as follows.

Science and ethics initially were intimately related in ancient education, while technology was explicitly excluded. Medieval Christians were ambivalent about ancient pagan science, because they held an opposing notion of moral perfection. Greek science nonetheless retained a minor place in medieval education, though its intimate association with ethics was weakened insofar as morality was religiously based. When classical learning was recovered in Western Europe by the mid-thirteenth century, and the scholastics sought to render it consistent with church teachings, natural philosophy (science) and moral philosophy were added to the curriculum as standard, but distinct, university subjects.

Renaissance scholarship facilitated the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the start of the eighteenth century, however, modern science had become divorced from teaching in the English universities, and had forged new institutional links with technology and commerce. Ethics, however, was revitalized as a university subject by the contributions of Renaissance humanists. Natural science was reestablished as a teaching field in the early-nineteenth century. Technology remained excluded from North American colleges, and moral philosophers attempted to harmonize the new science with the prevailing Protestant worldview and morality. New German universities, however, rejected all association with religious creeds and devoted themselves to the free study and teaching of science.

Engineering, agriculture, and other technical and professional fields became university degree subjects late in the nineteenth century in both England and the United States. Politics, economics, and sociology became separated from moral philosophy as positive sciences, and ethics attained autonomy from moral theology, becoming merely one academic discipline among others in the secular multiversity. The resulting civilization of science, technology, business enterprise, and the nation-state gained unprecedented control of nature and social life in the twentieth century.

The technoscientific civilization has nevertheless experienced a profound ethical crisis as a result of the atomic bomb, environmental pollution, resource depletion, nuclear accidents, and other techno-shocks. Many scholars and social leaders came to fear that technoscience had outstripped social capacities for its ethical control, and that it even threatened human survival. Some science, technology, and ethics professors, therefore, collaborated in forging closer relationships between their fields, in an attempt to bring ethical judgment to bear on further developments in science and technology.

From Greek Paedeia to Medieval Scholasticism

Systems of education in science and technology that have taken on worldwide influence have their root influences in classical school experiences. It is thus appropriate that the present survey should highlight this historical background.

SCIENCE AND ETHICS CONJOINED. Formal elementary education was established for free males in several Greek city-states by the fifth century b.c.e., taking place in the didaskaleion, the area set aside for teaching. After learning to read and write, older children learned classic literature and music. Youths attended public gymnasiums for physical and character training and military preparation. Beyond this level, education in the fifth century was not standardized. The gymnasiums, however, became sites for discussion groups and lectures given by sophists. Science and ethics were esoteric subjects taught informally by masters to a few chosen disciples.

Science and ethics, however, were not distinct subjects. Pythagoras of Samos (ca. 580–500 b.c.e.), and Democritus of Abdera (460–370 b.c.e.), are important examples. Pythagoras of Samos studied arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music at Miletus, and possibly also at Babylon and Egypt. Pythagorean ethics held that virtue was a harmony of the soul that mirrored the harmony of the spheres, and that mathematics is the pathway to moral perfection. In contrast Democritus conceived the natural world, including the soul, as a machine behaving in accordance with laws of matter, so that freedom of action is an illusion to be overcome by reflection on the determinism in nature. A state of tranquil acceptance of mechanistic reality is thus the ethical good.

By the fourth century b.c.e., more formal philosophical schools evolved from the informal learning at the gymnasiums, and Athens became the recognized center of learning. The school of Isocrates, based on the rhetorical teachings of the sophists, opened in 390 b.c.e.. In 387 b.c.e., Plato (428–347 b.c.e.) established a school with a program of study similar to that of Pythagoras. It came to be called the Academy because of its location near the Groves of Academus. Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) gave lectures after 335 b.c.e. at the gymnasium dedicated to Apollo Lyceios; his school became known as the Lyceum. Aristotle distinguished between theoretical and practical studies; science and ethics were taught as distinct subjects. Aristotle nonetheless agreed with Pythagoras and Plato that the highest good is contemplative knowledge, and thus he taught that the highest ethical life is not practical action in the polis, but theoretical contemplation.

Both Plato and Aristotle distinguished technical arts from those suitable for liberal education. In the Philebus (55e–56a) Plato argued that when the mathematics was abstracted from technical arts such as navigation and architecture, what remained was intellectually trivial. The educational program Plato laid out for the Guardians in Book 7 of the Republic (380 b.c.e.) was based on the four Pythagorean mathematical arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. All of these he conceived entirely in abstract terms, with sensory observations and utilitarian applications removed. (Real astronomy, for example, had no concern for the sun, moon, or stars, but only with solids in revolution.) Aristotle considered technical arts degrading and slavish. (Politics Bk 3, 1277a5-a12, 1277b34-1278a14). As handcrafts workers engage in repetitive acts, they "are like certain lifeless things that act ... without knowing what they do, as fire burns"(Metaphysics Bk 1, 981a13–b9).

The Athenian schools continued under new leaders (or scholarchs) after the death of the masters. While Aristotle's school devoted itself almost exclusively to natural science, the other schools continued to offer a program in which science and ethics were intertwined, but ethics soon became predominant. In 306 Epicurus (341–270 b.c.e.) established a school that followed the teachings of Democritus. Zeno of Citium in Cyprus (c. 335–263 b.c.e.), teaching at the painted column or stoa, taught a stoic ethic of rational preferences ordered according to nature, mastery of passions, and indifference to fate.

The theory of the liberal arts attained a definite form by the first century b.c.e. By that time the circle of learning, the enkyklos paedeia, had come to include logic, rhetoric, grammar (literature), and the four Pythagorean mathematical sciences. In the Roman Latin schools, however, the literary arts dominated. Mathematical subjects were recognized, but taught cursorily, if at all.

ROMAN AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLING. The educated classes during both the Roman and medieval periods admired but exhibited a certain ambivalence regarding classical learning. Neoplatonic philosophers of the Roman period, for instance, preserved the Pythagorean and Platonic program—mathematical study for ethical perfection—but were more oriented toward education that would serve overt political ends, as with oratory. More than their pagan peers, perhaps, early Roman Christians admired Neoplatonism because of its unworldly and ascetic emphases. It made a deep impression on Augustine of Hippo (354–430 c.e.), and inspired the grand educational project of Boethius (480–525 c.e.).

Boethius, noting that prevailing Latin textbooks in grammar and rhetoric were adequate, sought to revitalize the enkyklopaideia by preparing Latin handbooks on logic and the four mathematical disciplines, for which he invented the name the quadrivium. Following the Neoplatonists, Boethius conceived these studies as pathways from the sensible world to supersensible reality as a means of ethical perfection. Boethius's manuals (on arithmetic, logic, and music) became standard school and university textbooks for almost 1,000 years.

The death of Boethius in 525 c.e. and the closing of the Platonic Academy of Athens, by the Eastern Emperor Justinian in 529 c.e., mark the end of Greek learning in the West. Barbarians gradually also destroyed the Latin schools, and eventually even Latin classics were unavailable in Western Europe. Greek classics were preserved at Byzantium and then entered the stream of Islamic learning. Latin classics were preserved in Ireland.

LATIN SCHOOLS REVIVED AND UNIVERSITIES BORN. Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, sought to revive learning in order to provide educated clergy and administrators for his realm, and ordered his cathedrals to establish schools. An organized program of teaching, however, requires textbooks, and in logic and the sciences only those of Boethius, preserved in Ireland, were available. The Church retained a deep ambivalence about pagan learning, which contained a view of moral perfection at odds with its own as best expressed in Tertullian's famous question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"

Nonetheless the cathedral schools were, in theory, organized along classical lines: a grammar school for logic, rhetoric and grammar (for the first time called the trivium), followed by a higher school for the quadrivium. In practice, while the trivium provided useful training for clergy and administrators, the quadrivium was often neglected. Most schools could manage only practical arithmetic for calculation, geometry for architecture and surveying, and astronomy to calculate Easter. Science education improved in some cathedral schools in the eleventh century. At Reims Gerbert of Auillac (955–1003), acquainted with Arabic scholarship in Spain, refreshed the quadrivium by using Arabic numerals, the abacus for calculation, and the astrolobe for astronomical observation.

In 1079 Pope Gregory VII issued a papal decree ordering all cathedrals and monasteries to open schools for the training of clergy. As schooling expanded it became necessary to regulate teacher preparation and licensure. The church claimed a monopoly over teaching licenses (licencia docendi). Municipal chancellors offered these licenses only to those intending to teach in their districts.

Some municipalities, however, attracted students from many regions, and gained recognition as studia generale, whose degrees (licenses) were recognized throughout Europe. These universities were divided into lower schools for the seven liberal arts plus schools for law, theology, and medicine. Two models for the university emerged: one at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, where the arts course predominated; the other at Bologna and Salerno, where, contrary to the dictates of Plato and Aristotle, the arts course became merely a minor preliminary to technical education in the professions.

Science education in the arts course remained grossly inadequate. By papal decree, lectures on the quadrivium could be offered only on public holidays. By the last third of the twelfth century, however, the importation of classical texts from Muslim Spain reached its peak. Adelade of Bath had translated Euclid's Elements, and the Aristotelian corpus was made available in Latin translation.

SCHOLASTICISM: SCIENCE, ETHICS, AND RELIGION. In the thirteenth century the challenging task of assimilating the classical inheritance began. In geometry, for example, the study of Euclid prompted new discoveries in optics by Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170–1253) and his student Roger Bacon (c. 1220–1292). Grosseteste, chancellor of Oxford (1215–1221), made optical studies, wrote a commentary on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, and championed empirical inquiry. Bacon, who said he had learned more from simple craftsmen than from famous professors, carried on Grosseteste's empirical studies of lenses as aides to natural vision.

Assimilation of Aristotle's writings in natural and moral philosophy was among the greatest challenges faced by the thirteenth century universities. Pope Innocent III banned the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy in 1210. A committee was formed in 1231 to expunge all heretical ideas from his texts so they might be suitable for teaching, and by 1255, Aristotle's works returned to the syllabus. Scholasticism, the project of rendering the classical inheritance compatible with church teachings, came to dominate university studies. Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274), the greatest of the scholastics, saw that with the recovery of ancient learning, the seven liberal arts had become inadequate as a pattern of study, and the arts course was expanded to include the three philosophies: metaphysics, natural philosophy (empirical science), and moral philosophy.

The scholastic method of education stressed formal definition and logical argument. The scarcity of books dictated its primary tools: lectures (where books were publicly read and interpreted), recitations (where students demonstrated their familiarity with the books), and public disputations (where students presented public arguments in syllogistic form). Scholastic natural philosophy thus remained confined to theory, logical argument, and thought experiment. Controlled observations and technical applications were rare. The old textbooks dominated the syllabus for centuries. Scholasticism, while useful as a method of organizing official knowledge and conveying it in a standard form as preparation for professional studies, failed to encourage systematic and creative scientific studies, and eventually became bogged down in fruitless verbal controversies.

Early Modernity: Science, Technology, Humanism, and the Reformation

By the fifteenth century medieval institutions no longer provided Europe with either social order or a rational world picture. Renaissance humanists, working outside the universities and in opposition to scholasticism, sought inspiration in the pagan classics for reshaping learning and civic life. They praised Aristotle's ethics, and placed moral philosophy at the center of their curriculum. Claiming that moral virtue grew from emulation of classical authors and orators, they tied ethics closely with rhetoric, history, literature, and classical languages in a complex that became the humanities.

The humanists, however, rejected Aristotelian logic as artificially formal. They promoted a practical, natural logic based on study of the arguments of the great orators, thereby incorporating logic within rhetoric. They also rejected Aristotle's qualitative natural philosophy in favor of Plato's quantitative approach, thus easing the path for Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. The latter's aphorism that the book of nature is written in mathematical characters might have been taken directly from Plato. Humanists made few direct contributions to scientific scholarship, as the recovery of pagan scientific classics had been completed, but their intellectual independence and daring established a new spirit of learning congenial to later modern scientific inquiry.

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, were themselves humanist scholars. Their encouragement of the close reading of scriptural texts stimulated close reading of the book of nature. Protestantism directly undermined scholasticism, as it eliminated the need to square classical authorities, including Aristotle, with Catholic Church teachings. The new Protestant universities of Northern Europe could start afresh, and thereby became leaders in incorporating modern science into their curricula.

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND ITS SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were periods of rapid developments in commerce, navigation and ship construction, instrument making, mining, and mechanics. These new conditions, when conjoined with the mathematical knowledge brought to the Christian West from Byzantium and Muslim Spain, illuminated new pathways for the growth of scientific knowledge.

Until the seventeenth century Europe possessed no scientific societies or journals to stimulate or publish reports of new investigations. To develop an infrastructure for science required a vision, a site for meetings of scientists and technical experts, a critical mass of expert scientific workers, and an organization to stimulate and assess significant scientific achievements and make them widely known through its publications. The coordination of these factors in England led to the establishment of the Royal Society in 1660.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) framed the vision. He maintained, against both classical authorities and the scholastics, that the only useful knowledge was based on empirical study of nature, and that a clear method for scientific work would provide human mastery over the natural world. Under such conditions, knowledge is power. His inductive method, though a technical failure, shaped an agenda for practically useful science that included close study of mechanical crafts.

Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), a wealthy London merchant, provided the site, by endowing a college for merchants and craftsmen that opened in 1598. Gresham College offered no degrees, but provided free public lecture courses in rhetoric, astronomy, geometry, music, divinity, medicine (physic), and law. The Gresham professors were selected from among the most eminent scholars of their time. The first Gresham Professor of Geometry, Henry Briggs, developed logarithmic tables and popularized their use. The college's central location in London provided the ideal meeting place for scientists and technicians. Briggs also made it the central clearing house for scientific and technical information.

Oxford provided the critical mass of scientific experts. When Briggs was appointed the first Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford in 1619, he strengthened ties between Gresham College and the university. In the 1640s a group of distinguished natural philosophers including John Wilkins (of Wadham College), Seth Ward (later the Savilian Professor of Astronomy), Robert Boyle, William Petty (later professor of anatomy), and Jonathan Goddard (of Merton College) frequently attended Christopher Wren's lectures at Gresham College and then met with coworkers, including navigators and instrument makers. Boyle called this group the invisible college.

In 1651 the Oxford Philosophical Society was formed and began publishing transactions. A similar organization failed at Cambridge because no scholars were willing to perform experiments. In 1660 members of the invisible college formed a national society, which was incorporated by royal charter as the Royal Society in 1662. It soon established its offices and meetings at Gresham College, and published its own transactions. Other nations established parallel societies. In France, Jean-Baptiste Colbert founded the Academie des Sciences in 1666, which was reorganized with royal approval in 1699. In Germany Frederick the Great founded the Academie der Wissenschafften in 1700, with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as the first president. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the infrastructure for European science was in place.

SCIENCE EDUCATION. While English university scholars were central in the scientific revolution, science teaching retained its medieval character. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge were at first mere residence halls, whose tutors were simply older men taking responsibility for the conduct and finances of younger students. By tradition recent graduates (regents masters) of the colleges were required to lecture. By the sixteenth century, however, the regents lecture system had broken down, and the universities recognized the need for a new organization of teaching, including appointment of permanent lecturers.

Lady Margaret, mother of Henry VII, endowed professorships of theology at both Oxford and Cambridge (1497–1502). Sir Robert Rede provided in his will for lectureships at Cambridge in philosophy, logic, and rhetoric. Henry VIII added royal patronage to this trend after conducting visits to the universities in 1535, following his break from the Roman church. Henry's reforms, reflecting the humanist spirit of the sixteenth century; replaced scholastic textbooks with humanist commentaries on Aristotle's natural and moral philosophy. Henry also endowed Regius professorships in classical Greek and Hebrew, as well as divinity, medicine, and civil law. A series of similar endowments and appointments include, for example, the Henry Lucas Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, which Isaac Newton held from 1669 to 1701.

These distinguished professorships had almost no impact on teaching, however, because the colleges, which were wealthier and more powerful than the universities, completely dominated teaching. Students were required to live in colleges, where tutors were assigned to lecture and conduct recitations on authorized texts. The tutors were generalists offering instruction on the ordinary subjects required for disputations and exams. Professors lectured only on extraordinary subjects outside the mandated curriculum. Since colleges prevented universities from examining students on extraordinary subjects for several centuries, few students attended the professorial lectures, and eventually few professors even bothered to deliver them. Not one of the three Regius professors of physic (medicine) at Cambridge from 1700 to 1817 gave a single lecture.

The situation was different in Germany. The first modern university opened at Halle in 1694. Gottingen rivaled Halle as a center of learning after its opening in 1736. The University of Berlin was established in 1800, under the direction of William von Humboldt. Berlin adopted the Platonic ideal, training leaders as philosophers. Professors combined original research with teaching, and students worked closely with professors on research projects. Students thus acquired the cultural and scientific heritage in the very process of working alongside those who knew it best. Berlin rejected attachments to religious creeds and schools of thought, accepting subservience only to science and learning. It thus added to the arts and professional universities of the middle ages a third model, the research university, which soon dominated Protestant Europe.

Science and Ethics in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century American Colleges

The first colleges in the New World, Harvard (1636) and William and Mary (1693) based their statutes on those of the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. As in England, while mathematics and science were given lip service, the seventeenth-century teachers lacked knowledge of current developments. In 1700 in North America the modern scientific subjects were still associated with navigation and mechanical arts, not with college education. The lack of constraint by an entrenched teaching elite, however, eased the way for their introduction into colleges.

ACADEMIC SCIENCE AND ETHICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. In the mid-eighteenth century Yale acquired some scientific apparatus, and introduced Newton's fluxions to the math curriculum. John Winthrop, the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard (1738–1779), removed the last traces of Aristotle from the course in natural philosophy and introduced the new science of Galileo and Newton. When the American Philosophical Society for Promotion of Useful Knowledge was established in Philadelphia in 1769, with Benjamin Franklin serving as president, however, the founding members were amateur investigators rather than teachers. The society had 650 members by 1800, but only fifteen of 124 noted college teachers of the period ever became members.

Moral philosophy underwent a more profound revolution. John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690), with its consideration of the foundations of moral knowledge, was in the curriculum by 1720. By mid-century moral philosophy was central to both the college curriculum and public discourse, attracting the attention of such Enlightenment leaders as Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush. The American Revolution further invigorated the Enlightenment spirit. William Paley's widely adopted textbook Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) presented Christian utilitarianism as a natural science based on empirical observations and first principles, which included the natural rights of man as expressed by Locke. Paley, in his Natural Theology (1802), based the existence of God, as the divine intelligence governing the universe, on the argument from design. A course on natural theology was added to the curriculum.

ACADEMIC SCIENCE AND ETHICS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By 1820, as rapid advances took place in U.S. commerce and industry, leaders demanded that mathematics and science in the colleges be improved and made more practical. Mark Hopkins of Amherst called Francis Bacon's notion of knowledge as power the single most influential idea in the popular mind in the early-nineteenth-century. Science teaching, as a result, got a large boost between 1820 and 1850, though reformers had to contend with inadequate textbooks, untrained teachers, and lack of apparatus.

By 1836 adequate textbooks were available in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, analytical geometry, and calculus, and by 1840 calculus was a standard part of the liberal arts course. By 1850 natural philosophy had been reorganized as physics, chemistry, and natural history (biology and geology, formally subjects for amateur naturalists). Physics had been further divided into mechanics, hydrostatics, electricity and magnetism, and chromatics, and textbooks treating these topics in sufficient mathematical detail were widely available. By 1860 five clearly defined courses in natural science—astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (including mineralogy)—were part of the liberal arts curriculum.

Prospective teachers began to study in the Protestant universities of Northern Europe. In 1802 President Timothy Dwight of Yale urged Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), a distinguished graduate, to prepare himself for a professorship in chemistry by studying at the University of Edinburgh. He emerged in 1805 with current knowledge in theoretical and experimental chemistry, as well as practical knowledge of geology, mineralogy, and zoology. George Tinknor (1791–1871) was among the first Americans to prepare for a professorship at a German university; on his return from the University of Gottingen in 1817, he became a professor at Harvard and introduced German methods of study and research. Foreign preparation of college teachers remained the norm until U.S. research universities were established late in the nineteenth century.

The value of laboratory apparatus expanded twenty fold between 1820 and 1850. The introduction of the blackboard transformed mathematics teaching; professors were for the first time able to exhibit spontaneous thoughts and invite groups of students to the board, where the former could watch assigned problems worked out and probe methods of reasoning. Laboratories introduced similar changes in science teaching.

By 1850 the revolution in the liberal arts college was complete. The question of technology—mechanical, agricultural, and mercantile arts—now had to be faced due to popular demand for practical training. In 1828 a famous Yale Report maintained that mathematics and science belonged in the college, but not technology. Amherst issued an almost identical report. Despite public pressures, these sentiments prevailed among college leaders until the Civil War, although their marketing efforts emphasized the practical value of college education as early as 1850.

The college curriculum, however, had by then become seriously overcrowded due to the expansion of science and mathematics. Indeed demands for new scientific courses continued to proliferate. National surveys and requirements of the mineral industries created demands for separate mineralogy courses; developments in medical education led to demands for courses in organic chemistry and physiology. The colleges attempted to resolve these conflicts by introducing practical partial scientific courses outside the required curriculum, and diploma programs in parallel scientific schools such as the Lawrence School of Science at Harvard (1847) and the Sheffield School at Yale (1854). These efforts, though marketed as practical alternatives to the college course, failed because the programs lacked the prestige of a college education and provided no specific qualification for any position in the U.S. economy of that era.

Moral philosophers writing under the influence of New School Calvinism, a doctrine emphasizing that theology was completely compatible with human standards of reason and morality, did not resist the expansion of science. Instead they discarded the enlightenment empiricism of Locke and Paley, which they saw as undermining religion by making human reason self-sufficient. In its place they adopted the Scottish common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, which held that sense experience must always be actively assimilated by active powers instilled by God in the human mind, and that moral duties were presented immediately as intuitions.

The typical class in moral philosophy was taught as a capstone course by the college president, who deployed common sense principles as bases for conclusions on the ethical issues of the day. The Elements of Moral Science (1835) by Francis Wayland, president of Brown, was based on common sense realism, and became the most widely adopted textbook of its era. While the presidents did not even wish to dictate the results of science, they could strive to contain them within the consensus Protestant worldview and framework for moral action. This period in moral philosophy has thus been perceptively labeled as the era of Protestant scholasticism.

The Birth of the Multiversity

In the 1860s U.S. colleges faced three main criticisms: The curriculum was overcrowded with science and mathematics, which most students found daunting and unrelated to career plans, and threatened to marginalize the traditional humanities; the college was seen as elitist in neglecting technical and professional subjects; and due to the absence of research, colleges were failing to advance knowledge in the sciences and useful arts. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) founder and first president, William Barton Rogers, was among those who argued that practical studies and research would require a new kind of institution beyond the traditional network of liberal arts colleges.

Union College introduced a bachelor of science degree, parallel to its bachelor of arts degree, by 1828. Wayland, at Brown, proposed an elective system to alleviate the crowding of the prescribed curriculum as early as 1850. Charles Elliot made free election of courses central to his reform of Harvard after assuming the presidency in 1869, and other colleges soon followed Harvard's lead.

Technical and professional studies gained a foothold when Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) opened in 1824 to provide engineering education. RPI was reorganized in 1849 and established the template for the engineering curriculum: humanities, physical science, mathematics, and hands-on shop training. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1861 provided federal funding for colleges in the agricultural and mechanical arts. MIT, founded in 1861, was reorganized in 1865 under the provisions of the act, while Cornell, chartered in 1862, used funds from both the act and private sources for programs primarily in the agricultural and mechanical arts. Cornell soon became a model institution for maintaining harmony among its humanities, sciences, and technical-professional curricula.

The reorganization of industry into a national mass-production system created a vast demand for engineers, and universities reorganized engineering education to meet the need. In the early 1870s Victor Della Vos of the Moscow Imperial Technical School developed a new approach to practical training based on a careful sequencing of skills in shop-like classrooms. His method became widely adopted for practical elements of engineering education after John Runkle of MIT saw it exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. Engineering science, however, became increasingly dominant in the engineering curriculum. Universities soon added similar science-based degree programs in architecture, forestry, and veterinary medicine.

Because of the lack of opportunities for research training in the United States, many scholars before the 1870s traveled to Scotland or Germany for advanced degrees. Yale awarded the first Ph.D. in the United States in 1861, but graduate education was only institutionalized with the establishment of new research universities: Johns Hopkins (1876), Clark (1889), Stanford (1891), and the University of Chicago (1892).

At Oxford and Cambridge, from 1820 to 1850, the colleges felt the same pressures as their U.S. counterparts, and made modest accommodations. At Cambridge earning distinction in both classics and mathematics was dropped as a requirement for an honors degree in 1850. The moral science tripos and natural science tripos were introduced in 1851, providing students with two distinct areas of concentration. In the 1850s, and again in the 1880s, however, royal commissions were appointed to suggest education reforms to parliament. By 1890 the established colleges had lost their control over teaching. Instead the colleges provided lecturers for courses open to all university students, and cooperated in funding university-wide professorships. Early in the twentieth century the teaching staffs were reorganized, on an all-university basis, into branches corresponding to the main divisions of study. Civic university colleges opening in Leeds Manchester and Liverpool in the 1880s, like their Morrill Land Grant Act counterparts, introduced technical and professional studies.

ETHICS IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLLEGE. Prior to the 1850s zoology, botany, and geology were offered primarily as bases for natural theology, by providing evidence of intelligent design in the universe. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) found natural theology, based on Paley's intricate demonstrations of the perfect adjustment of organisms and their environments, the most valuable course he attended at Cambridge. But like many others, he found it implausible that predesigned organisms would be dropped, ready-made, into preexisting niches. His theory of natural selection, as a mechanical explanation of organism-environment compatibility, helped to undermine the harmony between biological science and belief in divine intelligence.

Moral philosophy, or moral science as it was frequently called, was by 1900 becoming subdivided, as natural philosophy had been a half century earlier, into its component sciences: ethics, politics, sociology, and economics. Some college presidents continued to teach ethics as a senior course, though theological foundations were now downplayed in favor of exhortations to moral leadership in society. Gradually, however, ethics became merely one of the many specialist subjects students could elect to study.

By the turn of the twentieth century scientific rationality was the one core value of higher education. The Protestant worldview, with its religious constitution for moral action, had lost its intellectual and social authority. Free from all authoritative constraints, university-trained professionals began the march of progress through an allegedly 'value-free' technoscience that by the end of the century had transformed the way humans lived.

TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CIVILIZATION IN CRISIS As early as 1923, however, Henry Churchill King of Oberlin, one of the few clergyman-presidents still teaching moral philosophy, noted a "strange contradiction" between the arrogance of the new scientists with their acclaimed alliance with the forces of nature, and the pervasive sense that modern civilization is unleashing forces that are irresistible and inevitable. By the mid-twentieth century this contradiction was sharpened, as seductive new technologies pushed many areas of human activity beyond effective control. Medical technology gave us wonder drugs that cured age-old diseases, but drug resistant strains appeared and some diseases returned. Nuclear scientists created power plants that used atoms for peace, but nuclear power programs contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Humans conquered space, but created a race for space-based weapons. Computers dramatically increased human productivity, and also led to increased surveillance of all human activities.

Dramatic events—the atom bomb, DDT and asbestos, thalidomide babies, environmental pollution, napalm in Vietnam, the 1970s oil shocks, urban smog, electricity blackouts, Bhopal, the Challenger disaster, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, Exxon-Valdez, global warming, the ozone hole, cloning, job outsourcing through network technologies, and child addictions to violent computer games—keep forcing this contradiction upon public consciousness. Science and technology can contribute to human life, but also create problems that challenge ethical guidelines and problem-solving capabilities.

The idea of continuous progress through science and technology is no more plausible in the early-twenty-first century than the idea of a fixed universe designed by divine intelligence was after Darwin. Scholars and public leaders are thus called upon to shape a new postmodern ethical vision for technological civilization.

Since the 1970s some science, technology, and ethics scholars have initiated collaborative efforts to forge a closer relationship among their fields. Applied ethical studies of agriculture, engineering, biomedical science, and computer technology have provided a knowledge base for mandated courses in professional ethics. Science and technology courses explicitly tied to social issues have been introduced in general education at universities and secondary schools to enable graduates to participate as democratic citizens in the ethical modulation of science and technology.

A significant problem is that contemporary moral philosophers, unlike those of Catholic or Protestant scholasticism, have neither a specific moral authority of their own, nor the backing of institutions with broad-based social authority. Their authority rests upon their positions in the multiversity, whose core value of unconstrained technoscientific rationality is precisely what is now in question.

At the start of the twenty-first century, therefore, significant questions remain about both the capacity of the human community to constrain scientific and technological developments within ethical bounds, and the role of institutions of formal education in fostering and maintaining that capacity.

LEONARD J. WAKS

SEE ALSO Digital Libraries;Museums of Science and Technology;Robot Toys;Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fiering, Norman. (1981). Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. A detailed description of moral philosophy in the early colonial college, valuable in presenting the background for the development of moral philosophy as a modern discipline in the eighteenth century.

Frank, Thomas Edward. (1993). Theology, Ethics and the Nineteenth-Century American College Ideal: Conserving a Rational World. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press. The essential study of moral philosophy in the nineteenth century liberal arts college curriculum, valuable for tracing the rise and fall of 'protestant scholasticism', the attempt to preserve the harmony of protestant Christian ethics and modern science.

Geiger, Roger. (1986). To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940. New York: Oxford University Press.

Guralnick, Stanley M. (1975). Science and the Ante-Bellum American College. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society. An essential, highly detailed study of the evolution of science education in the American college in the period from 1820 to 1850, during which modern science gained a central place in the liberal arts curriculum.

Kimball, Bruce A. (1995). Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education, 2nd edition. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. A useful history of the concept of liberal arts education, particularly useful in clarifying the shifting relationships between logic and rhetoric.

Kintzinger, Martin. (2000). "A Profession But Not a Career? Schoolmasters and the Artes in Late Medieval Europe." In Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, ed. William Courtenay and Jürgen Miethke. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

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Lyons, Henry. (1968). The Royal Society 1660–1940: A History of its Administration Under its Charters. New York: Greenwood Press. Originally published in 1944.

Mallet, Charles Edward. (1968a). A History of the University of Oxford Vol II: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Barnes and Noble. Originally published in 1924.

Mallet, Charles Edward. (1968b). A History of the University of Oxford Vol III: Modern Oxford (1688–1887). New York.: Barnes and Noble. Originally published in 1924.

Marenbon, John. (2003). Boethius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mourelatos, Alexander. (1991). "Plato's Science: His View and Ours of His." In Science and Philosophy in Ancient Greece, ed. Alan Bowen. New York: Garland.

North, John. (1992). "The Quadrivium." In A History of the University in Europe, Vol. I: Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde De Ridder-Symoens. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Porter, Roy. (1996). "The Scientific Revolution and the Universities." In A History of the University in Europe, Vol. II: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. Hilde De Ridder-Symoens. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press

Smith, Wilson. (1956). Professors and Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers before the Civil War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Tuplin, Christopher, and Tracey Elizabeth Rihill, eds. (2002). Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Winstanley, Denys. (1935). Unreformed Cambridge. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Winstanley, Denys. (1947). Later Victorian Cambridge. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.