Over the last hundred years or so there has been a persistent belief that the relative decline of the British economy has been underlain by defects in our education. The argument that I wish to put forward here is that whatever the defects of technical and scientific education in the 1870s and 1880s, the situation radically improved in the 1890s and 1900s and it is fallacious to regard the whole period 18701914asoneinwhichdefectsofprovisionhinderedindustrialperformance. The more lasting problem was not so much the provision of technical education as the willingness of employers to receive its products. This was compounded by the liberal education values entrenched in the education of the upper classes at the public schools and Oxford. The focussing by historians on the defects of the pre-1914 period has also diverted attention from perhaps the most serious issue of all, namely the failure in the twentieth century to develop a technical education for teenagers of school age.