Edward Schroeder Prior - Education

Education

Prior first became involved in architectural education during the debate over the professionalisation of architectural practice in the 1890s. The protest against examination and registration was launched by the Art Workers Guild, whose members believed, quite correctly, that RIBA wished to establish itself as the sole arbiter of the profession culminating in the publication of a collection of essays Architecture: A Profession or an Art in 1892, to which Prior contributed a chapter criticising the common use of "hirelings" to do the architect's work. In the same year Prior, amongst others resigned from the RIBA.

As a result of the controversy members of the Guild became very interested in architectural education. The Architectural Association established a School of Handicraft and Design to extend its training scheme. It had been criticised for being to geared to the RIBA’s examination system. Prior was one of the architect-visitors who drew up projects and gave the "crits".

He became increasingly interested in education, giving lectures at various conferences, to the RIBA and schools of design. Moves were instigated to establish a School of Architecture at Cambridge in 1907. The syndicate seeking the establishment of the school included Prior's old headmaster Dr H.M. Butler, who was by then Dean of Trinity College, Dr Charles Waldstein, Slade Professor of Fine Art and William Ridgway the Disney Professor of Archaeology. The establishment of examinations were approved in 1908. Waldstein favoured Prior as his successor. Prior was elected Slade Professor on 20 February 1912 with the role of developing the new School of Architecture. In 1915 the tenure of the Professorship was extended to life.

Prior established the syllabus for the School, oversaw the establishment of the Department and instigated a research programme. The latter included experimental studies into the performance of limes and cements.

Read more about this topic:  Edward Schroeder Prior

Famous quotes containing the word education:

    Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
    June Jordan (b. 1939)

    In the years of the Roman Republic, before the Christian era, Roman education was meant to produce those character traits that would make the ideal family man. Children were taught primarily to be good to their families. To revere gods, one’s parents, and the laws of the state were the primary lessons for Roman boys. Cicero described the goal of their child rearing as “self- control, combined with dutiful affection to parents, and kindliness to kindred.”
    C. John Sommerville (20th century)

    ... all education must be unsound which does not propose for itself some object; and the highest of all objects must be that of living a life in accordance with God’s Will.
    Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)