Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/722

704 the school boy or girl, as also in the next grade of civilization above the savage, the object is furthered by the use of those finer instruments which we call tools. In the university, as in the most civilized races, it is by the use of scientific instruments and machines. The three grades of hand-work, then, in their adaptation to brain-culture, are the use of rude implements, tools, and finer instruments.

Mr. G. S. Ramsay has shown that the advantages which workmen of certain other countries are supposed to possess over British workmen in the same trades are due not so much to mere special skill in manipulation as to the superior general scientific knowledge possessed by them and those who have the directing of them. The German beet-sugar industry has attained its great proportions by making the technical part of the work subordinate to the scientific principles on which it is based. So American and Canadian butter and cheese have gained the predominant place in British markets through the makers having been wide-awake and having adopted all the scientific improvements in treatment and processes which the home makers neglected. In each of these and other cases cited by Mr, Ramsay we find the same state of things r the producer "fails to understand the importance of pure knowledge; he despises and disbelieves in principles, and imagines that the only thing he need know is what applies to his own particular work."

These views are wholesome, and it promises well for the future of technical education that they are gaining currency among the persons who are endeavoring to make this branch of instruction a living fact in schools.

Lord Armstrong, criticising, in the "Nineteenth Century," the English system of elementary education, charges it with being liable to the radical objection of "aiming at instruction in knowledge rather than in the training of the faculties," and adds that "cheapness of production and superiority of quality will decide the victory in the race of competition, and if by early training we develop the mental and bodily faculties of our people, we shall improve our chance of maintaining a foremost place; but not, I think, by any forced or indiscriminate system of imparting knowledge." This declaration was partly accepted and enlarged upon by Lord Hartington, in an address in behalf of the English National Association for the Promotion of Technical Training.

The same thought has been expressed by Lord Ripon, who gave as a reason for being specially interested in the school of handicraft, of which he is patron, that he hoped it might become a center of artistic education for the workingmen, and that they might derive from it not merely benefit in regard to their particular trades, but also in regard to their intellectual advancement and cultivation. By exciting the interest of workmen in their work, and by finding play for their imagination and other faculties, the institution might do something to solve some of the most difficult of existing social problems.

Such declarations, coming from different quarters and made from so many points of view, tend to strengthen the hope that technical education will be built up on the right grounds, firm and solid ones, and that when it has gained its place it will have come to stay. Removed from the narrow basis of merely imparting special knowledge in particular processes to the broader and comprehensive one of fitting those who apply themselves to it both mentally and bodily for pursuits requiring skill and intelligence, it will be brought into harmony with the controlling principle that education is good in proportion as it tends to develop capacities for useful action rather than to increase acquirements in knowledge, and will be destined to form an inseparable part of such education.