Technical Education and Mind Training

Abstract

THE proceedings of the annual conference of the Association ot Teachers in Technical Institutions, which was held in the Polytechnic, Regent Street, London, on Whit-Monday, were full of interest. The president, Mr. E. L. Rhead, of Manchester, gave a stimulating address, in the course of which he reviewed unfavourably the attitude of the Workers' Educational Association towards technical education as tending to narrow the workers' educational outlook, and as merely serving to create a human tool better calculated to promote the interests of employers and the sordid aims of industry. He claimed, on the contrary, that, rightly presented, technical education has in it all the elements of mind training and of a wide view of life and its problems. It may, in short, be, properly interpreted, constituted as the pivot of a liberal education. He deprecated the exclusive devotion of much of modern higher education to dead languages, dead history, and ancient philosophy, but that is surely to ignore a prime element in the evolution of mankind—the progress of man in his endeavour to search into and to solve the phenomena of Nature. Mr. Rhead went on to consider the status of the technical teacher as compared with that of the secondary-school teacher, and contended that the former should be at least as liberally considered as the latter, not only by reason of his long and arduous practical training in the processes of industry, but also in respect of the claims of industry itself upon his services. He urged the desirability of transfer from lower to higher schools at different periods in the course of the educational life of the capable pupil, and especially dwelt upon the value of the junior technical school, which he would in no wise desire to convert into a trades school, and pleaded that restrictions on their present aims and curricula should be removed. A far more liberal system of scholarships, including maintenance, should be established in co-operation with widely extended administrative educational areas, which should have regard not only to the pupils in day institutions, but also to the equally urgent requirements of the promising evening students, enabling them to devote themselves to whole-time study in their special vocation. There should likewise be an efficient representation of teachers on all education authorities, so that the present and future problems of technical education should be better considered. Resolutions were passed urging a large increase in salaries for the several grades of technical teachers; that all works continuation schools should ultimately be provided bv the local education authorities and the present schools be open to inspection by the local and central authorities: and that a national Whitley council for teachers should be set up.