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- Convenors:
-
Flavio Heinz
(UFPR - Universidade Federal do Paraná)
Ana Cardoso de Matos (University of Évora)
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- Location:
- Sala 1.06, Edifício I&D, Piso 1
- Start time:
- 17 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
The panel deals with the circulation of engineering teaching models in Latin America and in countries on Europe's margins, and its impact on the making of engineering schools. The choice between models reflects the growing importance of engineering in the administrative shaping of modern states.
Long Abstract:
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the dissemination of engineering training institutions in Latin America and in countries on Europe's margins reveals the existence of different competing teaching models. From the French polytechnicien to the German Technische Hochschule model, from the British to the Land-grant College North-American system, teaching models available since the 19th century offer different concepts about the training and the desired Engineer profile. National elites choice between these competing models disclose different perceptions on Engineering and its place in local societies, on the nature of the ambitioned technological modernization. Finally, it highlights the strategic importance of the establishment of engineering schools to the administrative and political shaping of modern states.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nele-Hendrikje Lehmann (TU Bergakademie Freiberg)
Paper short abstract:
Throughout the 19th century, the Bergakademie Freiberg served as a model for the establishment of mining education in and outside Europe. While previous studies focused on the dissemination and adaption of the model, this paper examines the backlashes of the transfer process.
Paper long abstract:
The Bergakademie Freiberg was founded in 1765 due to economic and political considerations of the Saxon State after the Seven Years War. As its purpose was the formation of mining officials for the state's mining administration, the teaching concept combined theoretical and practical knowledge in accordance with the fiscal interests of the state. During the late 18th and 19th century, the Bergakademie attracted Spanish and American students, who used the acquired knowledge to establish new mining academies like the "Real Seminario de Minería" in Mexico. Albeit the creation of new institutions of mining education changed the academic landscape significantly, the transfer process has mostly been regarded as a one-way road. Following the approach of an "entangled history", the paper focuses on the interdependencies between the institutions of mining education. It shows that the reform of the Bergakademie Freiberg after the liberalization of the mining sector in the 19th century was as much influenced by the state's policy of resources as by new teaching models established in other countries.
Irina Gouzevitch (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Dmitri Gouzevitch (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Paper short abstract:
The study of the international dimension of the French Ecole polytechnique is closely interrelated with the history of circulation of knowledge. However its adequate interpretation depends on the way in which this common reference was understood and applied (or not) in concrete national contexts
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to analyze the confusions that creates the uncontrolled and abusive use of the expression the "model of the Ecole polytechnique" in connexion with the study of the history of national systems of higher technical education in the 19th century Europe and beyond its limits. If the reference to the famous French model is formally claimed by many national engineering schools (in Spain and in Russia, in Italy and in Belgium, in Germany and in the United States), a more detailed study reveals a great deal of rhetoric and semantic nuances in the concrete use of this common reference. The evidence is also given of the very different ways in which "the model of Ecole polytechnique" could be understood and implemented in each of the local contexts. The polysemy of the term is even so important, that some historians manage to conclude about its lack of pertinence for the historical analyze of the process of circulation of knowledge. Our approach is more flexible: it aims to define a "semantic field" covered by this term and to establish a kind of hierarchy in the way it could be used. Different semantic levels could be then established: nominative, correlative, structural, pedagogic/didactic and discursive - each of them illustrated by one or more national examples. That of the Russian Empire, with its global reform of the higher technical education based upon the declared "polytechnical" model is particularly explicite of the variety and plurality of possible approaches
Ana Cardoso de Matos (University of Évora)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the paper is to analyze the influence of French and German schools as models for the creation of the Portuguese engineering schools. The schools created during the 19th century reflect the influence of the French models, the creation of the IST in 1911 was influenced by the German model.
Paper long abstract:
The dissemination of engineering training institutions in Europe's margins during the 19th century was mostly influenced by the models of French engineering schools and Portugal was no exception. The diffusion of the French model was favored not only by the fact that the political administration of the country was influenced by the French model, but also by the fact that many of the men that were in charge of creating the engineering schools in Portugal completed their studies in France. Also the teaching deliver in the French schools, namely in the Ecole des ponts et chausses or in the Ecole Central, provided to the engineers the knowledge and the competences to materialize the great infrastructural works needed in the country. However, in certain engineering branches, as it was the case of the mines, although the French model was important, the Germany one had also manifested. By the end of the 19th century the German model became more important and the creation of the Instituto Superior Técnico in 1911 was clearly an example of this influence.
Antoni Roca-Rosell (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
Paper short abstract:
In Spain, industrial engineering, covering a wide range of engineering specialities was originated in a state initiative in 1850. The system was established taking the Centrale of Paris as part of the model.
Paper long abstract:
In Spain, industrial engineering, covering a wide range of engineering specialities was originated in a state initiative in 1850. During the 1830s and 1840s, in Spain there was a process of intensive reformism in the world of education. The context was the bases of the "liberal" state, promoted after the death of Fernando VII in 1833, who had reintroduced the Ancien Régime after the Peninsular War (1808-1814) against the Napoleonic troops. The reform included the set-up of a state secondary education (the Institutos, created after 1835) and the University reform, with the sciences incorporated in the syllabus of the new Faculty of Philosophy. The engineering schools, such as Mines or Civil engineering, were centres to provide members for the Corps of the State. Their schools were not included in the universities. At that time, industrial technologies (mechanics, chemistry) were trained in a multiplicity of schools, without a higher engineering. In 1850, the Spanish State ordered industrial engineering with a decree in which a complete system of education was forecast, from apprenticeship to higher engineering. The idea for a system of coordinate education of industrial technicians came from the schools created at that time in Berlin. The higher education took its model from the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures of Paris, in which several of the promoters of the Spanish law were trained as early as 1837. The aim of the paper is to analyse this process, discussing the elements shared by the Spanish industrial engineers and the centraliens.
Flavio Heinz (UFPR - Universidade Federal do Paraná)
Paper short abstract:
In the late XIXth century the combination of widespread Comtean positivist thought and German Technische Hochschule’s teaching model were among the main cultural and educational aspects that inspired the creation of the Porto Alegre School of Engineering, in the south of Brazilian.
Paper long abstract:
In the late XIXth century the combination of widespread Comtean positivist thought and German Technische Hochschule's teaching model were among the main cultural and educational aspects that inspired the creation of the Porto Alegre School of Engineering, situated in Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul.
The School of Engineering had been founded in 1896 by military engineers who had been politically active in the Abolitionist and Republican movement, and who shared the political and religious orientation of Comtean Positivism. Many among them were admirers of the technical and practical learning, and extremely critical of the francophile literary tradition in Brazilian education and saw in the German Technische Hoschule teaching model a way of overcoming the structural difficulties in modernizing not only education, but mostly its economy. The successfull combination of Comtean thought and German technical education inspired the creation the Porto Alegre School of Engineering and its differents institutes and laid the foundation of the modern university system in southtern Brazil. It also provided the State Administraition with the technical corps who were able to modernize the State intervention in fields as different as public works, agriculture assistance and transport infrastructure. In the the early 1930's, many graduate from the School of Engineering were among the reformer elite members that followed and helped Getúlio Vargas to overthrow the oligarchic Republic and to build the modern Brazilian State.
Nelson Arellano (Universidad Andres Bello - Chile)
Paper short abstract:
Case study on the New Zealander engineer Josiah Harding (1842-1917) allows us looking for social structures and mechanisms of education through neogremial organizations (Institution of Civil Engineers), and researching about what was the ideological framework in trade, environment, and colonialism.
Paper long abstract:
Some background have confirmed that engineering has been a colonialist tool. In the case of British Empire we have much information about circulation of engineers in South American countries between 1860 and 1920, that allow assume an ideological spreading carried on with their presence. With a prosopographic tool, we analyzed data from engineers with a transboundary approach, with special attention for Chilean case, focusing on evidence about multiplicity of realities.
It seems proper to conceive the British engineering in XIXth century, in special, and others metropolitan scientific groups from North hemisphere, in general, as a cultural practice of transhumance activity in a community that should be studied more deeply to increase knowledge about evolution of technology.
The case study on the New Zealander engineer Josiah Harding allows us looking for social structures and mechanisms of education through neogremial organizations, i.e., the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), and researching about what was the ideological framework in trade, environment, and colonialism. We can conclude that this cultural analysis collaborates to the theoretical field of evolution of technology and environmental history.
Adalberto da Silva Retto Junior (Unesp - Campus de Bauru - São Paulo)
Paper short abstract:
The professional career of the Portuguese engineer Victor da Silva Freire Jr in Europe and Brazil (São Paulo) is exemplary to reveal the changes in the curriculum the Polytechnic School of São Paulo and the consolidation of a dual education model based on the French and German template.
Paper long abstract:
In order to obtain a better understanding of the urban debate in São Paulo - Brazil - in the early twentieth century, we must build on some ideas and current practices that are related, on one hand, to the urban debate internationalization phenomenon typical of the 1880-1914 period and to the movement of Brazilian and foreign professionals (who came to Brazil) and their performances in the country, and, on the other hand, to the teaching model implemented at the Polytechnic School of São Paulo.
The professional career of the Portuguese engineer Victor da Silva Freire Jr in Europe (Polytechnic School of Lisbon and ENPC) and Brazil (Polytechnic School of São Paulo and Secretary of Public Works of the City of São Paulo) is exemplary to reveal the changes in the curriculum the Polytechnic School of São Paulo and the consolidation of a dual education model based on the French and German template.
Monia Franciele Wazlawoski (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul)
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the Mackenzie College, one of the first educational institutions in Brazil Engineering. The aim is to analyze how religion, technical knowledge and the North American education model influenced the formation of the Brazilian engineers between the years 1896 and 1927.
Paper long abstract:
The 1890s are a remarkable era in Brazil, in regards to the expansion of education Engineering, once several schools were created in the country during that time with the purpose of training engineers. Foremost among these is the Mackenzie College, denominational institution founded in 1896 with the support of the Presbyterian Church in the United States.
Unlike other Brazilian schools of the time, Mackenzie followed the American education model, emphasizing the importance of technical and practical knowledge. Furthermore, an initial study of its history and organization allows us to identify a project of internationalization of knowledge, since the institution was linked to the State University of New York until 1927. This allowed its students to study in the US continuing the course developed in Brazil, and enable them to work as engineers in the country. The sources about the history of the school corroborate this idea, because they reveal the institutional interest in internationalizing the curriculum of their courses, to hire foreign experts to form its faculty and to invest in expertise of its graduates abroad, notably in the United States .
Although research on this school is still in progress, this paper aims to present the Mackenzie College and its proposal for teaching engineering. The aim is to analyze how religion, technical knowledge and the North American education model influenced the training of engineers in Brazil between 1896 and 1927.