Technology, Industrial Conflict and the Development of Technical Education in 19th-Century England (review)

Britain's sense of national pride in its role as the "workshop of the world" was severely shaken by the results of the Paris Exhibition of 1867. Not two decades after the success of the Crystal Palace, the jurors concurred that the British entries were now notably inferior to those of their continental counterparts. "It was not," as John Scott-Russell reported, "that we were equalled, but that we were beaten, not on some points, but by some nation or another at nearly all those points on which we had prided ourselves" (qtd. in D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England [1972] 111–12). The popular press and, in short order, the government set about demanding answers as to how the quality of the nation's manufactured goods could have declined so rapidly, and how the competition had caught up so quickly. T. H. Huxley, Matthew Arnold, and a host of others weighed in on the debate, during the course of which fingers came to point repeatedly to the sorry state of British technical education. As Lyon Playfair observed, success in the increasingly competitive marketplace for industrial products was dependent on training new generations of engineers, mechanics, and machinists in the latest advances in their fast-growing fields. Oxford and Cambridge, of course, had little interest in mechanical engineering, and the British government had largely left it to industry to provide technical education, trusting the law of supply and demand to create the necessary incentives for manufacturers to train their employees. But with Germany and other countries establishing national polytechnical colleges and making the physical sciences a core part of elementary and secondary curricula, the British faith in the self-made man, one who was in equal parts engineer and entrepreneur, seemed no longer to suffice.

Bernard Cronin's Technology, Industrial Conflict and the Development of Technical Education in 19th-Century England reexamines the transformation of craft training during this period, from the apprentice model in which education was integrated into the workplace—and seen as a primary responsibility of employers—to one in which such opportunities for learning were available only outside of the workplace in the form of part- time or evening classes offered through a patchwork of state-supported institutions. Cronin persuasively argues that the emergent technical education "movement" that followed the Paris Exhibition was not a natural evolution of the British education system, as has often been claimed. It had roots much deeper in the century, in the effort of employers to exert greater control over the production relations of the workplace, over who worked at what task and for what pay. Demanding their "right to manage," manufacturers increasingly deployed an effective combination of new technologies and a profit-oriented ideology of production to redefine the concept of skill. The result of such efforts was more than the steep decline in the numbers of skilled artisans employed in British manufacturing and the concomitant increase in unskilled labour, chiefly that of underpaid boys and girls; it was also, as Cronin observes, an extension of the range of the employers' influence, stretching it beyond the workplace to the private lives of their employees, and thus determining the very shape and form of their educational opportunities outside the factory gates.

Cronin's focus is mechanical engineering, a field which provides ample evidence for his argument that the many technical innovations of the period were driven by, and in turn drove, the antagonistic relations between manufacturers and the craft unions. The effects of James Nasmyth's turret lathe and Frederick W. Taylor's innovations in high speed metal are each discussed in detail, but it is the chapter concerning Joseph Whitworth's contributions to metrology that best illustrates his claims. Traditionally, skilled artisans had a large degree of autonomy in the planning and execution of production processes; even the size and shape of screws and bolts followed no...