New scheme for technical education

New scheme for technical education
04/10/1861 AD founded

In 1853 Rogers resigned from the University of Virginia, moving to Boston for two principal reasons

• First, he wanted to increase his participation in scientific circles under the auspices of the Boston Society of Natural History and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in whose proceedings and in the American Journal of Science his papers had been published while at UVa.
• Second, and more importantly, Rogers wanted to implement his innovative scheme for technical education (which could not be achieved within the structure and institutional focuses of UVa), in which he desired to have associated, on one side, scientific research and investigation on the largest scale and, on the other side, agencies for the popular diffusion of useful knowledge. This project continued to occupy his attention until it culminated in the chartering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1861), of which he became first president.

He said:

The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.

Cambridge, MA

Lattitude: 42.3736° N
Longitude: 71.1097° W
Region: North America

Modern Day United States

Events in 1861 MORE