The Discovery Of The Scientist s The Technologists, Along...

Before MIT was founded in 1861, the common take on knowledge was quite different than that of our modern day. Education was primarily for a wealthy upper class, who regardless of work ethic or true intelligence, had safety nets of incredibly well off families often with money to spare. As noted in Matthew Pearl’s The Technologists, along with Bruce Sinclair and Merritt Roe Smiths articles on MIT’s foundation, Harvard and other schools for this elite class focused on a purely knowledge based learning system; while MIT attempted to introduce a more technical education combining pure science along with practical applications of technology, thus ushering in a new style of technical education. In 1861, founder William Rodgers, chartered one of the first technical schools in MIT. While growing up a geologist, in 1831, Rodgers began â€Å"contemplation the connections between pure science and its applications to engineering† (Smith 16), which little to his knowledge, would be the basis of a new institution. When Rodgers decided to introduce the idea for a technical institute, he had already mapped out a path for the curriculum and its basis. Introduced and now known as the â€Å"New Education†, Rodgers’s idea, set forth by Charles W. Eliot, brought on an entirely new technical education that had almost never been seen before. Rodgers’s idea, along with Eliot’s, changed the way many viewed education of the sciences and applied technologies. With a majority of the wealthy population attending