Crowding the Learned Professions.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 444, 8 February 1890, Page 3

Crowding the Learned Professions.

The rush to the learned professions began, it is sometimes affirmed, after the depression in agriculture and the corresponding rebound from the commercial prosperity of fifteen or twenty years ago. This may, no doubt, be partially true. But as the same phenomenon has been noticed in every other country, the explanation must be sohght a little deeper. The real cause will, we venture to think, be found in the everincreasing tendency on the part of the parents and their sons to look to the ‘gentlemanly professions ’ instead of_ the more lucrative and mbre certain callings of a less ‘genteel’ description. In Germany and America this trait is perhaps exhibited in its most exaggerated form, simply because in those countries professional training is cheap and the preliminary education abundant or easy to attain. But we see it everywhere else. Since the School Board brought the three R’s within the reach of every child it is notorious that these youthful graduates have displayed a repugnance to the useful lives in which they have been born. They want to ‘better themselves’ by becoming city clerks or nursery governesses. It is the first result produced by an unwonted state of affairs. By-and-by education will get too common to be marketable. It will then be regarded simply as a preliminary to any calling, and not as a necessary antecedent of what the Germans call ‘ bread studies.’ A carpenter, or a blacksmith, or a machinist, or a shopkeeper will discover that he is none the worse for being a-good scholar, and will even find that in the enhanced esteem, the greater pleasure' and the enlarged chances in life which it gives him, be is quite as much benefited by his education as if he had sought to earn his living by means of it directly.— 4 London Standard.’