Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/71

 to be good engineers. All the young chaps who study engineering are not entitled to be termed "Ingenious," for many are one degree removed from extreme simplicity. Because of the very large number of engineering school graduates there is quite a respectable sprinkling of those who lack ordinary intelligence in practical affairs; enough of them to bring undeserved reproach upon the schools.

The best reply possible to some severe critics is to remind them that they are themselves graduates of the schools they criticise. Many of them who met with trials after graduation may have been mistaken in taking up engineering and stuck to the work simply because they did not like to feel their time had been wasted, and, as the years rolled by, they gradually developed into engineers. The training, after all, was their salvation. This, of course, is merely a personal opinion formed after studying some men who would like to try their hands at revising engineering curricula. They are the sort of men who come always unprepared to class and want the notes of the lesson in advance to study instead of the longer text. Men who only learn to study after many bitter experiences, their early experiences having led them to rely always upon a teacher. Faults in schools do exist and the writer will touch upon a few on other pages, but these faults are being remedied each year as teachers come together and as more of the