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INSTRUCTION IN SCIENCE AND ART.

INTRODUCTION.

A prominent defect, second only to the absence of all provision for the professional training of teachers, in our systems and institutions of public instruction in 1836, as compared with those of France, Switzerland, and the leading German States, as they were found after personal inquiry and observation, was the absence of special schools and classes for teaching drawing, geometry, physics, mechanics, chemistry, and the natural sciences generally, with special reference to the great national industries, to commerce, locomotion, machinery, manufactures, mining, engineering and civil constructions of all kinds. The demand for engineers, and practical chemists and geologists, was very inadequately met by the Rensselaer School at Troy, by graduates (resigned, or detached from the public service) of the Military School at West Point, and by ingenious men, who educated themselves in practice (involving much cost and many failures), and from books, for their work.

Public attention in Connecticut was called to this omission in an address prepared in 1837, after my return from Europe, and delivered in 1838, and subsequently in connection with other topics of educational reform, in different parts of the country. Information in detail, on institutions referred to in this address, viz: the Polytechnic School of France, with the Special Schools of Applications in machinery, engineering and mines; the Conservatory of Arts and Manufactures, with its museums of machines and implements, and popular but systematic lectures; the Agricultural Course and industrial teaching of Fellenberg at Hofwyl; the Agricultural Institute in Wurtemburg; the Mining School in Saxony; the commercial and technical classes in the Institute at Vienna; the architectural lectures of the School of Arts in Berlin, and various incipient steps in the same direction in the Mechanic Institutes of England,—in a document first issued in 1839, and made part of my Annual Report as Secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools for Connecticut for 1839-40; re-issued with additions in 1847, as Commissioner of Public Schools in Rhode Island, and again in 1853-54 in the volume entitled National Education in Europe in the series of educational treatises issued as Superintendent of Common Schools in Connecticut.

In 1852, Samuel Colt of Hartford, the inventor and manufacturer of the Colt Revolving Fire-arm, contemplated the early establishment of

Evening Classes of elementary instruction for young persons in his employment whose school education had been neglected, and of instruction in drawing, chemistry and mechanics for such of his adult workmen as chose to avail themselves of it. In 1854, his plan was expanded into a regularly organized School of Mechanics and Engineering. As the resources from which he intended to endow it accumulated, he included courses of practical agriculture, horticulture and landscape gardening; and finally, on the breaking out of the war, he signified his purpose to alternate the practical work of the shop and the field with military drill. The institution thus projected and expanded was a comprehensive Polytechnic School-which would at once supply through its evening classes the deficient elementary schooling of his own workmen, meet the wants of technical instruction in any occupation in the community in which he lived, and offer a thorough scientific basis for the practical training of the agriculturist, the architect, the engineer, the machinist, the designer, the manufacturer, the miner and metallurgist, as well as of the candidate for any other of the leading industries of the country.

In the inception and development of his plan, he was pleased to consult me; and in 1854 signified his desire to name me in the instrument by which he should create and endow the trust, with a request that I'

would obtain full and reliable accounts of all establishments at home or abroad, which had any feature in common with the school which he contemplated, and which it was his purpose to endow by will beyond any literary institution in New England; and to be prepared to report a plan, when called on.

In pursuance of this request, and of studies already widely extended in the field of scientific and technical instruction, a large portion of the material for the chapters and special sections which compose this volume, were collected, and to some extent prepared for publication and printed in the American Journal of Education, at the time of Col. Colt's death in 1862, when it was found that his original purpose to endow by will such an institution had been revoked by a later codicil.

In 1863, at the request of Mrs. Colt, the work of collection and preparation was resumed, and a portion relating to Military Schools and Education was published in advance of the completion of the Report, which was intended to be a complete survey of Institutions for Special Instruction in the Sciences and Arts in different countries, to aid in the development of a Plan for a Polytechnic School, in the city of Hartford, Conn. Her object was simply to enable me to complete my survey of the whole field of Special Instruction; and was abandoned by her on the partial destruction of the Armory Buildings by fire in 1865. Since that date the work has been prosecuted to its present state of completion as rapidly as was consistent with other engagements.

HENRY BARNARD

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