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manufacturing by training artisans, now they are apparently devoting more energy to the training of officers and managers.

ers.

CONCLUSION.

It has not been the desire to give detailed statements of each year's work of the Society, nor to make long quotations. The Proceedings are available to most of the members and will well repay their examination, especially by the younger teachAs a further constructive criticism, the suggestion may be made that the official, fiscal and statistical year should have a definite time of beginning and ending. This should be sufficiently long enough before the annual meeting for the officers to make their reports complete. Some of the reports are up to August, some to June and some to March. them all, hereafter, begin at a fixed date?

Why not have

In conclusion, it may be stated that the trend of engineering education has been upward. More and more is being demanded of the schools and the schools are responding nobly. They may be given great credit for the present high standing of the profession, and in turn the high standing of the profession has had a very beneficial reaction on the schools. It would be well if more practitioners would attend our meetings and give us the results of their experience, that we might carry practical ideas back to the students we are training.

ADDENDUM.

The above had been rough drafted for the meeting of 1917, which was to have been held at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. But upon April 6, of that year, as is well known, the United States declared war against Germany. The meeting at Evanston was declared off and in lieu thereof a short meeting was held in Washington. The volume of the proceedings for 1917 is one of the smallest of any of the twenty-five so far published. But the work of that meeting was by no means negligible. Secretary of War, N. D. Baker; Chief of Engineers, U. S. Army, General W. M. Black; Di

rector of the Bureau of Standards, S. W. Stratton; U. S. Bureau of Education Specialist, S. P. Capen; members of the Advisory Board and others were the speakers. Practically the entire two days were given to discussing how the engineering schools could help the government win the war. As a result of this meeting and other educational conferences, many of which were participated in by Secretary Bishop and other delegates of the S. P. E. E., the government appointed a committee on Education and Special Training, consisting of representatives of various branches of the war service and several civilian educators to organize and administer all governmental educational war work. This committee first organized the engineering colleges and trade schools along industrial lines. Drafted men were sent to these schools to take up many lines of industrial work needed in the army. The courses given were short and snappy. The methods of teaching and assigning work were much different from those in vogue in the conservative engineering colleges. The work was eminently satisfactory.

At the solicitation of school men the government offered to give deferred classification to students in technical courses upon recommendation of the school authorities. But for keeping up the attendance of the schools this proved to be a failure. The young men, being red-blooded and patriotic, refused to accept exemption; they did not even desire it, they wished to avoid the very appearance of being slackers, and the quicker they could get to pumping cold lead into the Huns the better they would be pleased. On the other hand, there were many educators who would not think of asking exemption for their students. The writer was one who early advocated the enlistment of the college man and the detailing of him back to college for special training. (See last paragraph on p. 18, 1917 Proceedings.)

S. A. T. C. ORGANIZED.

The agitation of the school men kept before the War Department the needs of the schools; meantime the War Depart

ment felt it could not successfully prosecute the war without educated young men for officers. It saw in the organization of the schools the machinery ready at hand for the training of officers and industrial technicians, hence contracts were entered into for the utilization of the organization, plant and equipment of the several schools, also for the housing and subsistence of the soldier students under most rigid sanitary regulations. The instruction, as mentioned above, was largely along industrial lines and later this branch became Section B of the S. A. T. C. It proved to be so satisfactory that the government thought it worth while to expand the scheme so as to take in all university men. There was consequently established in colleges registering 100 or more men units of Section A of the Students' Army Training Corps. Under the regulation selected young men who were physically fit for military service, eighteen years of age or over, and had been accepted as students in a college requiring a high-school preparation or its equivalent for entrance, were to be allowed voluntarily to enlist in the S. A. T. C. and thus to become bona fide soldiers of the United States. Before this went into effect, however, the draft age was lowered to eighteen years; but the War Department wished to continue S. A. T. C. for registrants, because the government, looking ahead to a possible long war, needed trained men to fill important positions in the army, and later, educated men to carry on the work of readjustment after the fighting stopped. The colleges having units of S. A. T. C. were, in other words, to serve as reservoirs from which a constant supply of officer material could be drawn as needed. They furnished splendid places for the trying out of these men. Arrangements were under way for the application on a broad scale of "intelligence tests" to determine the character of the work for which the student soldier was best fitted, and his future training was to be modified accordingly.

Incidentally, it may be noted that intelligence tests were made upon thousands of soldiers in the cantonments with eminent success. Psychologists are strongly of the opinion

that the validity of such tests have been demonstrated. Our Society should by all means raise a committee to study more thoroughly these tests, and if found to be what the psychologists claim for them they should be standardized for engineering students.

In order to popularize the S. A. T. C. movement a publicity campaign under the direction of the American Council on Education, of which the S. P. E. E. is a constituent member, was inaugurated. The estimated probable enrollment in the United States was 111,097; the actual enrollment was in excess of 250,000. While this sudden influx of students more than kept the enrollment of the schools up, nevertheless, on account of the required changes in courses and methods, on account of the necessity of housing and feeding the students, the schools were hard put to it, and considerable dissatisfaction due to these more or less chaotic conditions existed in many schools.

SOME REASONS FOR FAILURE OF S. A. T. C.

The general plan of the S. A. T. C. was excellent. The students were to receive regular military and educational training, a definite number of hours per day of each. Had the plan been carried out in its entirety, it is thought by those who have made a close study of the work, it would have been extremely successful. In addition to the unpreparedness of the colleges the following causes may have been conducive to the feeling of dissatisfaction with S. A. T. C.: First, there was considerable delay at the beginning of the school year because the process of induction was slow; the military blank forms were not forthcoming; the work was new to the young, inexperienced officers in charge; the students had not become accustomed to the new life, and class and study periods were not definitely arranged. Second, about the time these difficulties were overcome the epidemic of influenza struck the camps, thousands of student soldiers had to go to the hospitals, excitement ran high, and matters became disorganized.

Third, just as everything was again beginning to become stabilized the armistice came. Students, though sufficiently patriotic to submit to military supervision and restrictions in time of war when there was real need believed as soon as the war was over they should be restored to their old time freedom of movement and action. They were actually glad when their discharges came.

Some day when time lends perspective the true history of the S. A. T. C. movement will be written by someone capable of setting forth its good and bad points in a systematic, concise manner. We, who had something to do with it, may be proud that we rendered every help possible to make a success of the greatest educational experiment ever attempted. An experiment stopped by a great world blessing, the signing of the armistice. Organization had not been completed; military men inexperienced or not wholly in sympathy with the educational side were in command; and the inflenza epidemic and various other causes prevented a fair try out. Educators, as a rule, were glad to give it up, but some there are who yet believe there is much good in the principle of having students, especially in the lower classes, under rigid discipline; that eventually the dormitory system will take the place of the military barracks and that facilities for supervised study will greatly enhance the efficiency of our educational institutions, that though seemingly put to death by the ending of the war, its good points may still live and influence the world's education for all time to come.

DISCUSSION.

C. J. Tilden: This is one of the most interesting, instructive and valuable papers that has ever been published by this Society. I am sure that I voice the sentiment of the entire membership in expressing the gratitude and appreciation of the Society to Professor Chatburn for preparing it. One needs only to glance through it to see the great amount of work that has been put upon it, and the admirable and valuable shape in which it now stands.

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