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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 83

Technical Education

page 2

Technical Education.

We have heard, and I am glad to think that in Auckland the subject is popular, the need of technical education. (Cheers.) Now what does that imply? It does not mean teaching a boy to be a carpenter or an engineer or a mason. We have various kinds of education. We have a literary education, an education that will acquaint the boy with, perhaps, many languages and the literature of many tongues. Wo have also scientific education, an education that will give a boy or a lad a bias towards scientific pursuits. These two different kinds of education have their advantages. A literary education is a noble end in itself. It teaches culture, and it is perhaps one of the best mental gymnastics to which any boy or lad can be put. And so with scientific education. I has a useful end in itself. A boy by it becomes acquainted with nature, with its many marvels, and he becomes also mentally or intellectually trained. What, then, it may be asked, is a technical education? What does a technical education imply? It implies that there is in the most practical work that a man can do, that there is even in carpentering, engineering, and I could mention a hundred other works that mechanics are employed on, that there is lying underneath them all a principle or law, and that though you may have in a technical school a carpenter's bench or a turning lathe, that is really not technical education alone. A boy must learn the law of mechanics. He must see that in the most practical things of life there is an ideal behind by which, if he is to be a practical man, he must shape his work. That is what is meant by technical education; and by proper technical education also we hope to see our youth having a bias towards industry, and not being ashamed of work, and of hard work too. (Cheers.) If then there is in this most practical thing of life,—labour, hard labour, mechanical labour, some law to be learned, some idea to be set before the man who is to become a skilled mechanic—is there such a thing in politics?