SCHOOLING AND EDUCATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 227, 29 October 1943, Page 10

SCHOOLING AND EDUCATION

Dark Thoughts of an Engineer

1 A READER has sent us a copy of the Bulletin of the New Zealand Society of Civil Engineers,

containing a report of a speech made by the Chairman of the Wellington branch (

C. I.

Kidson

from this most interesting document we quote the following passage:

career has left me with nothing that can interest so learned an assembly in a technical way, so though one’s own view of the outside world is rather like that of a fish, who sees mostly a reflection of the bottom of his own pool, with everything else crammed into a limited circular pattern, I give you some views on the Engineering world as the only personal contribution I have to offer. You will not agree with them. . VARIED though insignificant Nowhere is there a more gross confusion between schooling and education than in our attempts to deal with the latter. Education is a training of the character, literally a drawing of it out; while schooling is the charging of the mind with a kind of explosive cartridge

of knowledge guaranteed to go off at the right moment and produce evident practical results. A new fashion might be set by declaring this charging process too expensive and unnecessary, but I believe I would hardly go so far. It acts on the few rugged intellects much like a jeweller’s stone on a rough diamondit polishes but also limits and formalises, and to the eyes of the many less rugged it opens the beaten track, whereon they may proceed for the rest of their lives. Perhaps this is why one of the attributes of success is the power rapidly and completely to forget the technical impedimenta. our careers are encumbered with in their early stages. But in these same early stages we find very fierce technical competition, and the elementary needs of food and shelter can only be met by profitable employment. So you see, I favour schooling if only that the student may live to forget it. Educating the Professors In the older universities true education is not taught by books, or mighty machines or ingenious slide rules. It is got by personal contact between student and tutor. To educate our professor is to educate our profession. No one who has ever worked under the famous professor who was characterised thus can ever forget him: "Engineering potentate, bulging at the waistcoat, Stumping down the corridors with firm, proud tread, Yelling for his lecturers, Morrison and Bamford, Filling all his greasers with stark, cold dread." Nor can they doubt that his personality and experience had more effect than his weighty lectures on workshop practice or his able mathematical exposition of the reason why a‘cork is removed with less effort if gently rotated. Chaucer said of his Country Parson: "That Christie’s law and his apostles 12, he taught but first he followed it himselve." No one can teach the profession of engineering to the best advantage until he, too, "has followed it himselve," Choosing in the Dark The public also walks in the dark, and for want of better standards, the selection of candidates for positions, especially with local bodies, rests upon the most trivial circumstances. In some Republics the best qualification for cffice is to have been in gaol with the President. In many cases it is merely a case of the devil you know being better than the devil you don’t know. County and City Fathers cannot be congregated in classes and schooled in the value of engineering qualifications. Those of us who ‘have been amazed at our alphabetical fecundity will be disappointed to learn that at least 11 letters are removed from the reach of the engineer. A cynic once told me that

the letters C.E. were cheap to get, effective to use, and beyond the reach of the law. Perhaps some such simplification legitimised by the seal of officialdom, may be the first step forward in the profitable education of our masters. Perhaps it would help if the profession made up its minds to adopt the Engineering Colleges as part of its corporate life, and use their resources for research for the solution of general and specific problems. The colleges, too, might cease to regard the profession as a kind of cold outer space, into which they shoot their quanta of graduates in the course of their yearly revolution. A more natural growth of engineering thought would result, and a more closely knit pattern of achievement be possible. During the periodic wailing and gnashing of teeth over the lack of status of the profession, too much emphasis is laid on the comparatively low salaries our members can command. There are other professions, the very richness of whose rewards are gradually causing them to lose face even with the most credulous, despite intricate systems of trade unionism, professional jargon, and general hocus-pocus. The most honourable positions are also often the most honorary, and although I shudder to utter such pious sehtiments, I believe that improved status will result from increasing professional skill and honesty of purpose. The Advance of Socialism With the rapid advance of some form of Socialism in all States, except the Far East, it seems likely we may closely approximate to the ideal so eloquently justified by Shaw in his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism; that isequal for all. No company usually pays more to its employees than to its directors, and we may logically assume that the employees of New Zealand Ltd., Upward and Onward, may some day regard the salary of a Member of Parliament as the maximum, and by a wellknown process, the minimum also attainable. The writing is already on the wall. Until that divine far-off event, it is the young engineer who needs money most. He needs expensive equipment when a costly university career has left him penniless. He wants to buy a car, a house, and to marry. He wants to travel. As he grows older, the needs vanish and the wanderlust wanes, so I would solemnly propose that upon appointment each young engineer receive a salary of £1000 per annum, decreasing with advancing age and incompetence, to tail off gracefully into his old age benefit upon retirement. Engineers And Small Boys I do wish that members of our profession would not arise upon solemn occasions and, beating gorilla-like upon their chests, cry that the engineer is (continued on next page) . r}

(continued from previous page) responsible for most that is good in the modern world. The engineer in the modern world is like a small boy lost in a maze of his own making, sublimely unconscious that he is lost, and intent only on the insignificant matter that is attracting his attention at the moment, His ingenuity in the past century has changed the way of life of some 1,000,000,000 people; made possible wholesale comings and goings at incredible speed by air, land or water;. and provided the wherewithal for peace and plenty-or death and destruction for all mankind. Yet all this power is still in the hands of the few unscrupulous or the many irresponsible. The engineer is not interested in the results of his work. He, as it were, fires a machine-gun in a crowded street, much absorbed at the way the bullets go in one end and out the other, but utterly careless of their ultimate destination. All his mechanical advance has not made men one whit more wise, less cruel, or more happy than they were in the time of Marcus Aurelius. Moses, who built nothing, achieved more by human standards than the Pharaohs who built the Pyramids. What Are Our Monuments? Posterity may have little to remember us by, except a few holes beneath the

ground or mounds above it. Our fecklessness may have lost us our monuments more lasting than bronze, and earned us something less substantial. Carlyle, in his Sartor Resartus, gives us something of the sort I mean: "By request of that worthy nobleman’s (Philip Zahdarm’s) survivors," says Teufelsdroch, "I undertook to compose his epitaph; and not unmindful of my own (that lapidary inscriptions should be Historical rather than Lyrical), produced the foliowi which, however, for an alleged defect o' Latinity, a defect not fully visible to myself, still remains ungraven." Wherein we may predict there is more than Latinity that will surprise an English reader: ‘(The following is a free translation, but I assure you that the main point is not missed): HERE LIES Philip Zahdarm the Great gs © eae of the Zahdarms Emper Councillor ts Knight Fair of hair, clear of skin, nor black of face Who While he wrought Beneath the moon Killed with lead 15,000 Partridges and By his own efforts and with the help of his two and four-legged servants, not in utter silence, converted five million tons of various Foods into Dung Now his works follow him as he rests in peace. If you seek a monument, observe the after-growth,