La formation des ingenieurs en perspective: Modeles de reference et reseaus de mediation, XVIIIe-XXe siecles (review)

During the 1990s, historians such as Bruno Belhoste, Amy Dahan Dalmedico, and Antoine Picon published many books on the history of educational institutions in France, the impetus being the bicentennials of the École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure, and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. This 2004 book edited by Irina Gouzévitch, André Grelon, and Anousheh Karvar sounds like an echo of this golden age: most of the essays derive from papers presented at a conference held in Liège in 1997, and, except for a few footnotes, the texts seem untouched since then. They are uneven and are rendered in the native language of the contributors, French or English.

The book deals with the education of engineers in ten European countries and the United States, Japan, Persia, and Algeria. Contributors address the passage of educational models from one country to another, and especially the manner in which the so-called exemplary models of England, France, and Germany were adopted or hybridized. The first part is about the creation of institutions, schools, and technical universities; the second concerns the effective agents of the transfer of knowledge and practice. In the last part of the book, the concept of "national models of education" is seriously challenged.

The overall aim is to denationalize the history of engineering, which is often based on "informative but uncritical volumes destined primarily to celebrate a school, university, society, and engineering corps" (p. 9), as Robert Fox reminds us in his preface. For instance, Irina Gouzévitch questions the "universal" model of the École Polytechnique in her essay about the creation of the Institute of the Corps of Engineers of St. Petersburg. She suggests re-evaluating the eclectic contributions of the Dutchman Franz Dewollant and the Spaniard Agustin de Betancourt, the latter having been trained at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris before he founded in 1802 the Escuela de Caminos, Canales y Puertos in Madrid. Gouzévitch relates such multiple influences in order to provide us with a more complex narrative of the Russian institution.

The histories of educational institutions must always take into account their diplomatic and economic contexts. This is made clear in the essay by Anousheh Karvar on the development of modern states in Romania, Persia, and Japan, and the training of their military elites. In a peaceful country like Switzerland, as Serge Paquier indicates, economic activities influenced the choices made in the field of education.

From Sweden to Japan to the United States and the Ottoman Empire, French engineers exerted a great influence in the arts of war and fortification. Many institutions, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1802, followed the so-called French model, and yet the École Centrale claimed to be based on the training of English civil engineers. André Grelon assumes that this claim was no more than a rhetorical resource in the French debate about education. Even inside the system of the École Polytechnique, however, important differences remained. At the École des Ponts et Chaussées, created during the old regime, practical training and travels in France and elsewhere represented a substantial part of the curriculum. Gouzévitch believes that the fame of the French model declined during the 1830s, as did its influence.

Many of the essays show that there is no instance of a pure and simple adoption of a foreign model. But only a few contributors dare to present an overall view of the issue, notably Bruce Seely in his exciting history of foreign models employed in the education of American engineers. His chronological approach emphasizes the strong and weak periods of these relationships, with its crucial years being 1920 to 1960, when many brilliant professors such as Stephen Timoshenko, Karl Terzaghi, and Ludwig...