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PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS. 779 
THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF 
TEACHERS. 
By Miss Marcarer Hopcz, M.A. 
Ir there is one cry that has been heard more loudly than 
another amid the clamour of conflicting claims on our 
attention during the past ten years, it has been the cry for 
technical schools and technical training. We are told in 
no uncertain accents that we are, as a nation, losing our 
commercial supremacy; and that this loss, when it is an 
accomplished fact, will be mainly due to our remissness 
in the matter of technical education. Among all English- 
speaking nations the cry is taken up, and throughout an 
Empire, on whose bounds the sun never sets, the County 
Councils, the Parish Councils, and municipal bodies aré all 
eager to promote, and ready to subscribe to, one cause—that 
of technical education. 
England took the lead in trade and commerce in times 
past, it is urged, because she had the apprenticeship 
system, which offered a technical training superior to any 
on the Continent; she shall still take the lead in times to 
come, by having the best built, best equipped, and best 
staffed technical schools in the world. When Mr. E. 
Williams, in his clearly-written little book ‘Made in Ger- 
many,’ pointed out that Germany was spreading her trade 
and influence far and wide, and would soon drive us out of 
the field, his readers professed to disbelieve his statements ; 
but they, nevertheless, were affected by them, and formed 
part of that vast band who cry out for a system of technical 
education, utterly ignoring or wilfully misunderstanding 
the real drift of his statements. - 
It is not because Germany has an excellent system of 
‘technical education that she is placing herself at the head 
of the commercial nations of the world, but because she has, 
for generations, had an admirable system of general educa- 
tion upon which to base her technical training. You can- 
not make an utterly ignorant man into a good builder or 
plumber by teaching him the mysteries of his craft, any 
more than you can make him into an admirable University 
Professor by a short course of lectures on thespecial Faculty 
he is to teach. There must Be firm foundations to build 
upon, and it is because England is trying to build her 
technical training upon insecure foundations that it never 
can be equal to the training given in such a nation as Ger- 
many. 
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