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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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Beginning Struggle for Industrial Education 3 eries and inventions and their application to the physical resources of the earth were modifying the occupations and industries. Chemistry was completely changing such arts as iron working and dyeing. Steam had taught men to treat with indifference the intervening miles of sea and land. The miracle of the electric telegraph had shown that there was a force in nature willing to project men's words across the continent if granted only an accomodating wire. Also, war and famine in Europe at the time that steam travel was made practicable brought new people to us. The revolution in Germany, the vine disease in France, the potato disease in Ireland brought men from older countries where the fear of an empty stomach had been an excellent teacher of conservation of the soil. Naturally in an age of quickened life when everything was being questioned, education came in for its share of criticism. Finally arose those bold enough to say that the "old education" based on Latin and Greek in no way filled new needs. Having said this they wondered, a bit uncomfortably, what would happen; and when the sun got up the next morning just as usual they said it again and added a few words about what education ought to be. Educators, journalists, and champions of the working classes began to think seriously upon what education was and what it should be and for them to think was to talk. From 1840 to 1850 a well defined movement for the teaching of agriculture can be traced in several of the states. New York and Massachusetts present typical movements in the east, Michigan and Illinois in the middle-west.2 In New York by 1840 the proposal to educate farmers' sons for the farm was by no means new. The New York agricultural society, reorganized for efficient service by an act of 1841, kept the proposal before the farmers. In 1842 a paper was addressed to the state agricultural society urging upon its members the importance of agricultural education and advocating the establishment of schools or colleges where subjects I n Illinois as in other states, " industrial'' education included mechanical as well as agricultural education; greater attention, however, was given to the latter.
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