Reading Reaction #1: Christina Hernández

With Terry Shin’s article Science, Tocqueville, and the State: The Organization of Knowledge in Modern France, I must admit that before I began reading with the following question in mind: France a forerunner in science and technology? However, what came to mind was another European country that seems to be name-dropped in conjunction cutting-edge science, technology, and engineering: Germany. After reading Lucena’s discussion of dominant cultural images (DN 5), I was able to identify that my aforementioned initial reaction was in response to a dominant cultural image of modern-day Germany as a technological powerhouse to which I feel consistently exposed. This initial assumption was challenged in Shin’s article when he states that “‘les corps savants’ were the envy of France’s neighbors” (50).

To balance out my reaction, however, one can think of a dominant cultural symbol of France: the Eiffel Tower. Placed in historical context, the Eiffel Tower is a symbol of France’s technological savvy, as upon its completion in 1889 it was the tallest structure in the world, and named for its French engineer, Gustave Eiffel. The Eiffel Tower, when built, was meant to represent innovation and engineering mastery on massive display for the rest of an industrializing Europe to gaze upon. While on this path of recollection, the Statue of Liberty, an icon of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi and dedicated in 1886. I would like to comment on the pattern of my thought process, as it went from “France: a technologically advanced country?” to “Yes, I do have some background knowledge that supports the claims in these articles.” I believe that the reason why this information, regardless of its presence in my mind, seems to be on the backburner has to do with my ideological formation as an American. This ideological formation comes back to the dominant cultural image of the United States as a technological superpower.

That France was to be envied was aided by the establishment of the grandes ecoles, the feeder institutions that were created by the state to meet the needs of les corps savants. To my knowledge, this is the first mention I have heard of a curriculum that we can understand nowadays as a “major”. If I think back to our first day of class, it was mentioned that American engineering is a hybrid that takes its elements both from British and French engineering. Speaking to France’s 18^th and 19^th centuries’ effort to be conservative in regards to the social status given to those educated in the grandes ecoles, I feel that a parallel can be drawn to the status we bestow upon engineers in the United States. They are rewarded with higher entry level and capping salaries, coupled with a mysticism surrounding their course subjects, where the language of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is understood and mastered by a privileged few. The importance of this mysticism I believe is not intuitively lost on engineering students, as in my experience they tend to be the only one to proclaim: “I am a 2^nd year Aerospace engineer”, when they have not yet received their B.S. This is an observation, and for fairness’ sake, I realize that I was adhering to a possibly elitist view that an engineer includes only those who have passed their EIT.