NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: No Lunars Era
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Dec 6, 15:05 -0400
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Dec 6, 15:05 -0400
Alex wrote: > P.S. 1828 Norie is especially interesting to me, not only because of > navigation, but also from the point of view of my main profession: > mathematical education. It tells me a lot about the general state > of mathematical education in England in the beginning of XIX century... I suspect that it gives a very misleading impression of education there at that time. Unlike New England, where some successful merchants seem to have sent their sons to sea to learn one end of the business, the masters and mates of British merchant ships pre-1850 were not drawn from the middle class (captains of East Indiamen excepted) and of course not from the upper class. Meanwhile, until the 1870s (or was that the 1860s?), there was no general expectation that working-class boys would receive any formal education at all. Norie had to write for readers whose only exposure to mathematics, beyond basic arithmetic, was as part of their instruction in navigation. (Some of his readers will have known more but he had to provide for those who did not.) The more frightening thing would be to examine the sad state of mathematical education in England's public schools (which any other nation would regard as private schools) at the time. It is no accident that Germany rapidly surpassed Britain in most technical matters during the 19th century and much of the cause lies in the refusal of England's public schools to provide early education in math or the sciences. It might be interesting to look at the textbooks that young Royal Navy officers used when studying navigation. They were products of the middle and upper classes, who should have had the benefits of public school educations when they were not taught at home by private tutors. Then again, they were sent to sea at an age when few modern school children would yet have much comprehension of trigonometry or even logarithms. Trevor Kenchington -- Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250 R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251 Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555 Science Serving the Fisheries http://home.istar.ca/~gadus