The Temuka Leader. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1878.

Temuka Leader, Volume I, Issue 86, 12 October 1878, Page 2

The Temuka Leader. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1878.

Professou Huxley, in an address delivered last December to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union on technical education, or the teaching of “ handicrafts,” laid great stress on the necessity that is so apparent for our mechanics receiving a scientific training in the principles of their trades. He further considered that the mechanic should be acquainted with the elements of a physical science, more especially of physics and chemistry, should be able to read a scientific treatise in Latin, French, or German, and also have some ability to draw. To make a good foreman the mechanic must be active and honest with a knowledge of men, ready mother's wit, supplemented by a good knowledge of the general principles involved in his business. This is the ideal position of the tradesman or artisan, and however much some members of the community may shirk the question the future prosperity of the country depends greatly upon the liberality with which our Government may elect to encourage this form of education. We do not mean to infer that this young country is yet in a position to endow special colleges for the purpose of bestowing the necessary technical training upon the rising generation, but it behoves us to consider whether it is not possible to form a nucleus in two or three of our clfief centres where the principles of some of the leading trades might be taught by the most highly qualified teachers that could be obtained. The minds of the people in British communities are half a century behind those on the Continent of Europe on this subject. In Germany especially nearly every educated man has been qualified to gain his livelihood, if required, at one or other of the trades. Princes of the blood are proud of their achievmtats in shoeing refractory horses or in building up a family chair wherein they may smoke the calumet of peace at their ease. It is a well known fact that a great number of the foremen in leading British factories are not native horn, but hail from the Continent, having received their training in one of the many technical schools, We need not be ashamed of our sons learning trades, when we can point to the following great men as having once represented some of its lower branches. Faraday, the chemist, was a bookbinder; Carey, the first of the missionaries, a cobbler j David Livingstone, the great missionary, and still greater explorer, was a weaver • Hugh Miller, a mason ; Jeremy Taylor, Arkwright, and Tenterden, the great Chief Justice of England, sprang from barber’s shops, These examples show us that it is not the trade that degrades a man. If it were so we are much afraid that the influences springing from making a cart wheel, or a chest of drawers, would be found to be. far higher than those derived from driving a quill behind a pile of gold, or even in concocting leaders in the hallowed editorial sanctum. The man who is a good engine-driver is in our mind a jnnch nobler specimen of humanity than

the legal luminary who succeeds in procuring the acquittal of a guilty client. The question very often arises in the anxious parent’s mind, “ What am 1 to do with my hoys ?” and there is very little consolation in the reply sometimes waggishly given, •' Marry them to someloly’s girls.” Banks, merchants’, and •lawyers’ offices arc supposed to be nice and respectable, but they are completely overdone, the supply is greater than the demand, and we prophecy that in a very few years there will bo such a struggle for existence, amongst the legal fraternity especially, that many will be exclaiming “ I only wish I had learned to makchorse-slu c-'.” Let us throw aside all shame in regard to this matter, and do as onr German cousins arc doing, teaching the useful as well as ornamental, for as the learned professor whom we have already quoted says, “ Nothingconcerns us more as a nation than the putting down the Bashi-Bazouks of ignorance on this subject, and wherever it exists in anv'branch of education.”