362 THE TRADES SCHOOL IN THE TRANSVAAL. 



There must be something wrong with the system which 

 causes one manager of a Johannesburg printing and pubHshing 

 house to say : 



In the last five years there has not been one of our apprentices trained 

 by ourselves that we have considered sufficiently qualified to continue to 

 employ as a journeyman. 



The crux of the matter is as stated by Mr. Waldorf Astor, 

 in the April number of the National Review, that 



Juvenile labour is at present uneducational, is a department of the 

 labour market and not a preparation for adult life. 



If that is so in European countries, how much more so is it in 

 this, where we have a kind of perpetual juvenile in the ubi([uitous 

 Native. 



We have therefore to consider carefully for our youth first, 

 the kind of occupation to be followed, and, secondly, how the 

 training is to be obtained. Here I cannot do better than by again 

 quoting South African opinion. In 1909, Mr. Samuel Evans, 

 writing to the sub-coinmittee of the Witwatersrand Central 

 School Board, who were at that time reporting upon the ([uestion 

 of trades schools, said : — 



It appears to me that the guiding principle in selecting occupations for 

 boys in this country should be this : That the occupation should be such as 

 to enable boys, when they grow to be men, to compete successfully with 

 Kaffirs, whilst earning a very much larger pay than Kaffirs. It follows 

 that if South African boys are to be taught skilled trades, this must be 

 done as part of our scheme of public education. . . . Generally speak- 

 ing, these would be trades in wliich a considerable amount of machinery 

 would be employed. 



That is to say, the trades for White boys in this country are 

 those which make an increasing demand on trained intelligence, 

 because of the evolution of improvements in those trades. As 

 soon as a trade, or any part of it, has become stereotyjjed and 

 divided into compartments in which the routine of seeing that 

 certain processes are carried out in a certain order by more or 

 less automatic tools is all that is necessary, that trade has ceased 

 to be a field for the White man, for the simple reason that the 

 skill required has been transferred from the man to the machine, 

 and it is therefore open to the Coloured person, and, after him. 

 the Native. 



Thus the curriculum of the trades school must not be one of 

 restriction, by keeping a boy on one kind of work as long as 

 possible ; it must provide a broad training, without sacrificing 

 thoroughness of workmanship, in order that the future workman 

 may rise superior to the competition of the automatic tool and 

 Native labour. Neither must its courses be conceived to the 

 profit of the em})loyer, but to the progress, as rapidly as possible, 

 of its pupil. 



