TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17126, 22 April 1921, Page 3

TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

VALUE OP APPRENTICESHIP. (radii otra' own cobr-esfondbnt.) .; LONDON, March 12. Lord Burnhani, speaking at conference of Association of Technical Institutions, made these remarks: ! Technical teachers ai'e-a very able body of public servants, who realise, and rightly realise, their moral and intellectual value to the community. I hope .they -will obtain a scale of salaries and an assurance, of. -what, sin thesedays, is coiled status, which will put' them on equal terms with other bodies or teachers and attract to their special department of knowledge the trained ability which it is so essential to our national life that we siiould have .in adequate measu/e. (theeis.) h."ngiand had never suffered from the swelled head.of her,; capita? city. But if there , were one sub-compartment of our national life in wluoh the-country, as a whole had suffered by comparison and to some .extent by centralisation, it was in the held of ai'is and crafts, tue training of artists and craftsmen. Assuiedly .London nas had more Lhan her proportionate share of goods and services. Tiie colleges were not started far. purposes of technology, but rather to carry out what we call training lor citizenship. , William 'Morris had said.: "AVnat many workmen mest v'ant is general education." They had furnished fittings'for the fabric of technical training'which was cverywhero more or less connected with, the old institutes, in the.colleges of art and science and technical institutions. The- system of apprenticeship was the traditional way it training and equipping the jouijieyluen of our staple trades, and uo\viierc else was- the svstem werkeii out on t!iiJ same lines, and to'the same extent, tvs by the Cialts Guilds of the City of London. There could bo no doubt, looking backwards, that we lost much in the finer art of handicraft in our reckless race for production of any kjitd, and at the cheapest rate, when we- allowed apprenticeship to lapse without putting any other form of training ii> its stead. .We owe to it also the indifference and veiled hostility of trade unionism to apprenticeship which rank among the heresies of tho market-place. Seven years was the period of apprenticeship, and it was embedded deep in the statute law, but it was through the city companies in the main that the law operated, ani London, up to tho time of what we call tho industrial revolution, dohtainod a far larger proportion of the manufactures of the country than she did now. London owes much to its guilds, principally, no doubt, to the twelve greater companies, but not a little to the three score of,lessor companies, who are all striving according to their means to associate themselves with some sort of training for the trades with which all of them were asociates in tho days that arc gone. ' Lord Crewe had spoken of the tendency to reconcile 'tcienco and the humanities. There is a movement. It is often said in the universities that scientists have no philosophy and philosophists have no science .in itsclr an abuse of terms because in the. days of the old foundations philosophy contained within • itself the whole range of knowledge. In the new dispensation science and learning are once more to I bo brought into the unity of knowledge. I If we want "to see the sky" aboVe and beyond all the mist and miasma of iho i day, we must nave the eye. propeny trained by science, and the hand proI perly directed by ciaftsmansnip. I (Cheers). •■ •