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technology, history of
Technology and education
A third theme to emerge from this review of the history of technology
is the growing importance of education. In the early millennia of human
existence, a craft was acquired in a lengthy and laborious manner by
serving with a master who gradually trained the initiate in the arcane
mysteries of the skill. Such instruction, set in a matrix of oral
tradition and practical experience, was frequently more closely related to
religious ritual than to the application of rational scientific
principles. Thus the artisan in ceramics or sword making protected the
skill while ensuring that it would be perpetuated. Craft training was
institutionalized in Western civilization in the form of apprenticeship,
which has survived into the 20th century as a framework for instruction in
technical skills. Increasingly, however, instruction in new techniques has
required access both to general theoretical knowledge and to realms of
practical experience that, on account of their novelty, were not available
through traditional apprenticeship. Thus the requirement for a significant
proportion of academic instruction has become an important feature of most
aspects of modern technology. This has accelerated the convergence between
science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries and has created a
complex system of educational awards representing the level of
accomplishment from simple instruction in schools to advanced research in
universities. French and German academies led in the provision of such
theoretical instruction, while Britain lagged somewhat in the 19th
century, owing to its long and highly successful tradition of
apprenticeship in engineering and related skills. But by the 20th century
all the advanced industrial countries, including newcomers like Japan, had
recognized the crucial role of a theoretical technological education in
achieving commercial and industrial competence.
The recognition of the importance of technological education, however, has never been complete in Western civilization, and the continued coexistence of other traditions has caused problems of assimilation and adjustment. The British author C.P. Snow drew attention to one of the most persistent problems in his perceptive essay The Two Cultures (1959), in which he identified the dichotomy between scientists and technologists on the one hand and humanists and artists on the other as one between those who did understand the second law of thermodynamics and those who did not, causing a sharp disjunction of comprehension and sympathy. Arthur Koestler put the same point in another way by observing that the traditionally humanities-educated Western man is reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond his comprehension, but will cheerfully confess that he does not understand how his radio or heating system works. Koestler characterized such a modern man, isolated from a technological environment that he possesses without understanding, as an "urban barbarian." Yet the growing prevalence of "black-box" technology, in which only the rarefied expert is able to understand the enormously complex operations that go on inside the electronic equipment, makes it more and more difficult to avoid becoming such a "barbarian." The most helpful development would seem to be not so much seeking to master the expertise of others in our increasingly specialized society, as encouraging those disciplines that provide bridges between the two cultures, and here there is a valuable role for the history of technology.
(See Snow, C. P., "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, The", Koestler, Arthur.) |
technology, history of
- Introduction
- General considerations
- Technology in the ancient world
- From the Middle Ages to 1750
- The Industrial Revolution (1750-1900)
- The 20th century
- Perceptions of technology
- Bibliography
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