The Role of International Exhibitions in Britain, 1850–1910: Perceptions of Economic Decline and the Technical Education Issue By Anthony Edwards

The Role of International Exhibitions in Britain, 1850–1910: Perc ...

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the increased means offered by science for the extraction, pre-paration or culture of the raw materials have lessened the peculiar local advantage of certain nations, and thus have depressed the relative value of certain raw materials as an element in manufacture: while they have immensely increased the value of skill and intelligence as the other great element in manufacture.⁴¹

Rather than analyze and refine the skills (industrial and commercial) that made Britain the workshop of the world (the English tradition), he concluded that the future well-being of industry could not be left to the practical man without technical education (i.e., the German tradition).⁴² He determined that educating the working populace would help to compensate for any potential loss of “local advantage” that Great Britain was likely to experience. He believed that general cultural elevation and an improved attitude toward business were also necessary.

Despite what Albert believed, it was Lyon Playfair who publicly expressed his anxiety about the dearth of technical education in Great Britain. He predicted that Europe would overtake England if it failed to adapt to the new industrial reality by altering her outlook and methods.⁴³ He articulated the feelings of some of his colleagues when, in a lecture to the School of Mines, he stated that the extension of scientific and technical education was

the want of the age. The old and yet widely existing scholastic system of education, introduced by the revival of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is ill adapted to the necessities of The Times. Erasmus would not now aid Cambridge in advancing the progress of England, nor would Vitelli make Oxford useful to the mass of its population…Euripides and Thucydides cannot make power-looms and spinning-jennies; for these Watts and Arkwrights are required. A Poggio may discover copies of Lucretius and Quintilian without thereby producing a result equal to that of the smallest discoveries of a Stephenson or a Wheatstone. When will our schools learn that dead literature cannot be the parent of living science or active industry?⁴⁴