Engineering Education; B. Moreell

ENGINEERING EDUCA TION t'J Ben moree!! IF all the things that have been said and written in re cent months about scientific and engineering education were assembled in one place, they would constitute the most resplendent "crazy quilt" of diverse views the world has ever seen. At one extreme are those who contend that there are glaring deficiencies in the quality of our educational processes, beginning in the grade school, and that our procedures are such that the least competent are not improved while those with latent talent remain un developed. Others hold that what we are doing is without fault but that we need more of everything, more students, more teachers, more classrooms, more equipment, and that all of these deficiencies can be eliminated by mas sive applications of that traditional American cure-allAdmiral Moreell, formerly Chairman of the Board, Jones & Laugh lin Steel Corporation, was wartime chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks and Chief of Civil Engineers of the Navy. Organizing, recruiting, training, equipping, and directing the activities of the Seabees, an engineering force of some 10,000 officers and 240,000 enlisted men, afforded him a rare opportunity to appraise the rela tive values of their educational equipment as measured by quality of performance.

This article is from an address to the Western Society of Engin eers at Chicago, May 9, 1958. 285 286 BEN MOREELL more money. Many also seem to believe if it is public money, made available by the federal government, it will be even more effective. Between these two extremes are an almost infinite number of gradations of opinion. The educational controversy gains heat from the real ization that the solutions reached might spell, ultimately, the difference between living as a free people and na tional extinction. It seems to me that the first essential is to define our long-range objective. Certainly we need more scientists and engineers; but we are equally in need of superior talents in all other areas of learning. To say that all of our problems, current and prospective, can be solved merely by educating more scientists and engineers is to close our eyes to the lessons of history. "Man shall not live by bread alone," said the Master Teacher; and he asked, "Is not the life more than food and the body than raiment?"

What, then, is the ultimate objective, the long-range target? I would say that it is the enhancement of human values as measured in terms of spiritual and material progress. The real worth of every human action must be appraised in those terms. And, the most important instru ment available to us for achieving progress toward that ultimate objective is education. We must then face this question: What are the basic essentials of an effective total educational structure? It seems to me that they are four in number. First: Good teachers Second: Good raw materials, i.e., a highly selective sysENGINEERING EDUCATION 287 tem for determining those upon whom the educational effort is to be expended Third: Proper curricula Fourth: Bricks and mortor-suitable equipment for use in ins truction An adequate discussion of these four foundation stones would take more time than is available, but I venture to set forth certain brief observations in light of my ex periences and studies.

The education of a scientist or engineer begins when he enters grade school. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the poet's judgment: 'Tis education forms the common mind: Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. In this light, let us examine our current situation, first, with respect to teachers. Without good teachers we are sure to waste our "raw material," the students. The good teacher is not self-designated; he is designated by the student. It is not enough that he be learned; he must have learning that can be drawn upon. If I want to learn something, I look for someone who knows more about the subject than I do. And the more his knowledge ex ceeds mine, the greater his attraction for me. Good teachers always attract those most eager to learn, and they also inspire. Teaching is an art, and every genuine teacher is a special kind of an artist. When one has something of value, it is natural for him to safeguard and protect it. Have we done this with our teachers?

288 BEN MOREELL Teaching Talent Wasted I shall not discuss in detail our profligate waste of teaching talent. It is notorious that we have failed to compensate even our best teachers for their labors. Also, we have failed to accord them the respect and standing in the community to which they are entitled. Coupled with this, we have, in many instances, restricted their freedom to teach by confining them in academic strait jackets, devised by the entrenched educationist hierarchy. Many of our most able teachers abandon the profession each year for more rewarding fields. Many who stay do so only for love of the service, and to our own detriment, we take advantage of that devotion. It is well-known that many of our teachers spend a large part of their energies devising ways and means of making ends nieet, energies which could be better used to increase their knowledge and their service to the community. Unless the Ameri can people are willing to pay a fair price in terms of money, esteem, and academic freedom for the services of our teachers, the quality of education will deteriorate at a time when we can least afford it!

I do not mean to imply that there are no deficiencies in the training and talents of those upon whom we de pend to teach our children. I shall have more to say about this later. But I do feel that the standards of com pensation are set for the least competent rather than on the basis of individual worth. This is indeed profligate waste! The second essential is the raw material, i.e., students ENGINEERING EDUCATION 289 who are able to l,earn, to mature in understanding, and to develop a sensitive appreciation of the true, the good, and the beautifuL Here in America we have as fine a supply of raw material as can be found anywhere. Our children have a cultural heritage equal to that of any others and superior to many. We have the potential if we can but avoid the error of assuming that all men are born with the same talents and the same capacities to learn and to grow in wisdom. The law of human variation is not man-made, it is God-made-a fact of nature. Just as there were never two human beings born with the same fingerprints, so do no two humans have the same mental, physical, or moral capacities.

If we concede that individualities and inequalities in the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of man kind is God's intent (and there is every reason to believe this), it is evident that any effort to repeal this natural law of variation by means of educational procedures is attempting the impossible. We might as well try to repeal the law of gravity. It is clear that no two students have the same capa bility of learning; and if we treat them as though they do, we will waste the talents of one or the other or both. The insistence that every educational system take account of individual differences is not to relegate certain people to an inferior status. Every person has aptitudes which permit him to excel in something. An engineer would probably make a poor metaphysician and vice versa, but it is improper to label one man inferior to the other on this ground.

290 BEN MOREELL Let me quote here from an authority on this subject, Dr. Roger J. Williams, Director of the world-famous Bio chemical Institute of the University of Texas. He said: "It is my confirmed opinion based upon diverse consid erations .and upon prolonged thought, that one of the most constructive and harmony-producing moves that we, as inquiring human beings can make, is to get ac quainted with, in the most scientific manner possible, the inherent differences that exist among members of the human family .... Why choose our own schools, our own amusements, our own books, our own church? Why not have someone tell us what to eat, what to drink, whom to marry, and when we can have children? The fundamen tal reason is that each of us is a different individual-with profound differences-and each of us wants to live his own life.... There is not the slightest danger that hu manity will put up indefinitely with any scheme which involves thoroughgoing regimentation. It is not human nature to tolerate this. There are too many potential Patrick Henrys, and they will continue to reproduce."

Proper Curricula And what of the third essential, the curriculum, with which I include the method of expounding the cur riculum? Specifically, what is our present situation with respect to preparatory processing of the raw material for our schools of higher learning? Even before the hysteria en gendered by the Sputniks, those interested in engineering ENGINEERING EDUCATION 291 and scientific education, many educators, and industrial ists who have to use the products of our high schools gen~ erally conceded that something is amiss in our primary and secondary educational systems. I shall not enter into the details of the hotly contested controversy over the worth, or lack thereof, of so~called "progressive" education. I have been studying this sub~ ject for the past ten years. My conclusion is that many, but fortunately not all, of our preparatory sc~ools are not only failing to improve the raw material which comes to them, but also in many instances they are actually spoiling it.

It is impossible to do justice to such a difficult, com~ plex subject in a short time. Perhaps I would do well merely to summarize my views and those of some others. They are that the preparatory schools have in large part abandoned their emphasis on specific academic disci~ plines designed to develop the capacity of the student for creative thinking, and they have substituted an em~ phasis on social activities with attractive labels, such as group awareness, life adjustment, and something fre~ quently referred to as "togetherness." Commenting on the deterioration of standards of learning in our public schools, Felix Morley, noted edu~ cator, author, and editor, had this to say in a recent article: "There is no lack of demand for competitve edu~ cation in the United States-the failure is in the supply. Several factors have combined to create this anomalous situation. Perhaps the most influential is the extreme to which the plausible theory of progressive education has 292 BEN MOREELL been carried. Starting from the reasonable thesis that schooling should be enjoyable, the trend in public educa tion has gone on to eliminate all coercion, all task-work, and almost all sharply competitive training. Unfortu nately, this misguided kindness has altogether failed to make the lives of teachers, pupils, or parents happier. We do not need psychologists to tell us that the child whose will is never crossed is the one who makes himself and others miserable."

The results are inevitable and might well have been foreseen. The pupils have acquired smatterings of much unrelated information of little value as mental train . ing and, for the most part, they have failed to acquire a capacity for that self-discipline which is essential to learning. As for the teachers, the emphasis has now shifted from proficiency in their subjects and is directed toward ac quiring a handiness with teaching methods) with corre sponding neglect of the substance and content of knowl edge. As Dr. Morley has stated so well: "The whole pub lic· school system is top-heavy with educationists who know how but not what to teach. Talent is no .longer as important as the mere number of credits which teachers achieve in mandatory courses concerned with procedures rather than with content. Undoubtedly techniques are useful, but they do not of themselves make teachers any more than typing ability of itself creates authors .... In the assembly line production of mechanically qualified educationists is found one of the primary reasons for the malaise in our public schools."

ENGINEERING EDUCATION 293 Four years ago, I participated in a seminar on scientific education. An assistant high school principal and teacher of science in one of our largest cities asserted that in his state, one of the most populous, only 10 per cent of the high school teachers of science had received training in the science subjects they taught while all had received extensive training in the methodology of teaching! ((Crowd Culture JJ Canon Bell, the great Episcopal scholar, and my dear friend, in the chapter on "The School" of his book, Crowd Culture~ has this to say: "There is no getting around the fact that while our present teachers, and any we are likely to get, may be fairly competent to work in old-fashioned subject-matter and mind-training schools, they are simply not up to acting as preceptors, fathers and mothers, priests or rabbis or other ministers of religion, skilled counselors, trained nurses and psychiatrists, all these rolled into one. It is not honest, not intelligent, for pro fessional theorists to talk as though this is not the case, thereby leading the general public to suppose. that the public schools ought to do, are doing, what in fact they cannot do; encouraging teachers to neglect what they are able to do in order to dabble about in any· number of tasks at which they are necessarily incompetent."

Father Bell quotes a West Coast high school teacher, one of many hundreds who wrote to him, as follows: "What do we teach here? Scraps of literature and art, some unsystematic applied math, bits of history and geog294 BEN MOREELL raphy, in fact, smatterings of almost all things academic and otherwise. These we try to 'integrate around vital central interests' such as how to date and mate and, if possible, avoid divorce; how to reform the City Hall; how to run the United Nations; how to plan cities; how to provide adequate housing; how to solve economic problems. All of this when the pupils are fifteen years old!" There are a great many similar statements from con scientious and worried teachers. Perhaps I can indicate what appears to be a fair consensus by quoting from a letter recently received from my sister. She is a graduate of the University of Missouri with degrees of B.A. and M.A. Over an elapsed period of fifty years she has had a total of sixteen years of teaching experience in public and private high schools. Her subjects are the now largely discarded or neglected ones-English, Latin, German, Spanish, history, and government. This is what she said: "The high school youngsters of today are anything but the ones we knew in our high school days. The teen-ager of today is so aggravatingly opinionated, irresponsible, uninhibited, and completely devoid of ambition that you feel as though you are talking to the Tin Man of the Wizard of Oz when you try to instruct him. This philoso phy of 'Don't frustrate them, don't give them complexes, and don't hem them in' has bred a gang of uncontroll able and undisciplined brats. I hope the pattern will change before my grandchildren reach the teen age. . . ."

Confirmation of these views indicating a deterioration of moral standards comes to me from two sources. DurENGINEERING EDUCATION 295 ing the entire war period, my Deputy was Rear Admiral L. B. Combs who since 1948 has been head of the De partment of Civil Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Some five years ago he told me that he was deeply disturbed by the attitudes of many of his students who needed financial help. When he suggested that they borrow from the Loan Fund at the Institute, at a nomi nal rate of interest and with long pay-back period, he was told almost invariably, "I don't want a loan. I want a gift." The other incident occurred several years ago during a visit of Dr. Frank Sparks to Pittsburgh. At that time he was president of Wabash College and was promoting the work of the ·Council for Financial Aid to Education. Among other things, he mentioned that the total of the unused loan funds of all American colleges was approxi mately $52 millions and that they had great difficulty placing them because the young folks wanted gifts, not loans!

Finances No Problem for Good Stu.dents We have heard it said by advocates of huge federal government appropriations for scientific and engineering scholarships that too many of our top high school gradp ates fail to. go to college for lack of funds. Let me quote some figures from a recent bulletin of the Engineering Manpower Commission of Engineers Joint Council and the Scientific Manpower Commission (January 13, 1958) : Of the 1,196,500 senior class population of the coun296 BEN MOREELL try in 1956, the top 5 per cent· were selected to take the first competitive examination for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation's awards. Of the 58,158 partici pants, 556 were granted scholarships. An additional 4,226 for whom funds were not available were awarded certif icates of merit in recognition of their abilities. The 4,226 recipients of certificates were surveyed ten months later. Of the 73 percent who replied, only 40, or less than 1 per cent of the total eligibles, reported that they were not then attending college, and of these, 19 expected to attend in the near future!

The bulletin states: "Although we are not in any way suggesting that these statistical findings have direct extra polatable national implications, it is remarkable to note that where a valuable mechanism of talent identification was provided, considerable evidence was accumulated showing the highest possible current rate or utilization of our most talented high school students." Dr. H. S. Turner, our vice-president of Research and Development, commented on this bulletin as follows: "I have always contended that a student who really 'hits the books' in high school and comes up with good marks can find a way to go to college.' ... We don't need a massive U. S. government scholarship program. We do need to build more motivation toward academic excellence and higher education into those students who have the basic mental machinery." And Dr. J. C. Warner, president of Carnegie Institute of Technology and a Director of Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, made this statement: "I have a feeling that ENGINEERING EDUCATION 297 too much is being said about the economic barrier to higher education. In my. opinion, lack of motivation is a much more serious barrier. I believe it is just as possible now as it was when I entered college 42 years ago for an able young man, strongly motivated toward a career in science or engineering, to find a way to obtain an educa tion. Furthermore, there has been a tremendous increase since the war in the scholarship and loan funds available to give financial aid to students. Let me say it this way: A strongly motivated and gifted student can usually find a way to get an education."

Adequate Plant Facilities The fourth essential is adequate plant facilities. It is true that our physical plant is now inadequate to meet the demands made upon it. As our population increases and our industrial operations become more complex technically, the number of technical personnel measured as a percentage of the total working force increases. But I wonder whether we are making efficient use of the edu cational plant we already have. Certainly, we must give our teachers the equipment they need to do their jobs. But we have become so addicted to the "numbers game," i.e., the need for vast numbers of engineers and scientists that in many instances we have lost sight of the impor tance of quality. Let me quote here again from Dr. War ner. In a recent address, he said: "I have spoken of numbers because we obviously need these numbers of ·well-educated engineers and scientists 298 BEN MOREELL to keep going our technology-based economy of ever increasing complexity .... But we need to think about quality, too. An adequate number of truly creative sci entists and engineers educated to highest levels of com petence may be more important to America than num bers. Actually, the great new ideas, the. break-throughs, in both pure and applied science and in other scholarly fields, come from a relatively few individuals. How many ordinary physicists would it take to make a contribution equivalent to that made by Fermi? It simply does not make sense to expect a reply. As I have often said, this is an area in which two half-wits do not make a wit."

Permit me to digress here for a moment to raise a question which has been discussed with far more heat than light, namely, the place of the humanities and social sciences in an engineering curriculum. I have. long be lieved that while a knowledge of things is important, it must fall far short of achieving. its fullest value unless it is accompanied by a knowledge of the meanings of things. Science and engineering are devoted to the pur suit of the knowledge of things while the humanities and social sciences, and especially religion, can be used to learn the meanings of those things. True values are measured in terms of the growth and development of humanity, and to achieve those values we must be aware of the meanings of the facts which science and engineer ing reveal. The Seabees, which I had the honor to head during World War II, were called upon to build, maintain, and operate naval bases of all kinds throughout the world. It ENGINEERING EDUCATION 299 was inevitable that they should have to meet challenges in fields far different from those in which they had re ceived specialized training. It was my experience, often repeated, that those officers, who had a broad training in the humanities and social sciences to supplement special ized engineering training, were far better equipped to grapple successfully with new and unpredictable cir cumstances.

No Need To Panic My considered judgment is that before we yield to the panic engendered by the Sputniks and other claimed advances in Soviet capabilities, we should make a thor ough and unhurried appraisal of the adequacy of our entire educational structure in the four areas I have mentioned, beginning with the grade school and pro ceeding through. the graduate schools. Decisions made under the stress of hysteria are usually wrong. There is no denying the fact that there is room for improvement in the things we are now doing. We might even learn something from Russia. The Soviets, early in their history, adopted the so-called progressive system of education, probably because it is egalitarian and social istic. But when it comes to military matters, at least, they are hardheaded realists. And it did not take them long to learn that the essential characteristics of the American system, as formerly practiced, would yield the best results.

There is no doubt that Russia is using education as an instrument of national policy with emphasis on quality 300 BEN MOREELL as well as quantity. In the curriculum which all must fol low, the courses required during the ten years of elemen tary and secondary schooling between the ages of seven and seventeen place great weight on mathematics, phys ics, chemistry, biology, geography, Russian language and literature, foreign language, history, and physical culture. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no men tion of courses in co-educational cooking, personal groom ing, automobile driving, the social graces, esthetic danc ing, band, and similar diversionary subjects which now infest many of our high school curricula. I do not intend to imply by anything I have said here tofore that we should attempt to imitate the Russian system of education, which cannot be wholly divorced from the brutal authoritarianism of their political and social institutions. Our concept of the nature of the uni verse and of man's place therein is far different from theirs, and therefore our social institutions must neces sarily differ from· theirs. I firmly believe that every social order derives its sanctions from the prevailing concept of the cosmic order.

Our American society is based on individualism. But it is not an undisciplined individualism. The Founding Fathers held that individual freedom must be exercised within the limitations imposed by the moral code which, as a minimum, I would define as the Ten Command ments and the Sermon on the Mount. If we are to charge individuals with the responsibility for voluntary self discipline, we must do our utmost to see that they have sufficient education to achieve understanding in order ENGINEERING EDUCATION 301 that they may grow in wisdom. It is only in this way that each of us can make his maximum contribution to that enhancement of human values which is the ultimate goal of our efforts. Our entire social structure at one time was erected on the concept of the need for individual incentive, com petition, and commensurate reward. Americans have al ways been great competitors; and they have been anxious to see those who excel receive the fruits of their labors.

This was the incentive for extraordinary effort. The Rus sians have now adopted this concept for their educational system in which the competition is intense but the re wards for excelling are very great. We Americans have taken the other road in much of our educational work. We have abandoned the concept of individualism and concentrated on the group. We have largely eliminated incentive; we are educating our youth to be content to live in an egalitarian society like the ants and the bees. That process produces no giants. Rather it produces a race of intellectual pygmies.