6i6 
NATO Toe 
Board of Trade officials, so that the standard ot 
proficiency expected from candidates for fishing 
certificates is now rapidly. approximating towards 
that expected from foreign-going merchant ser- 
vice officers. This is as it should be, and under 
the stimulus of the increasing stringency of the 
Board of Trade examinations, and the active over- 
sight of the Board of Education, fishery naviga- 
tion schools are successfully being worked at 
Fleetwood and Piel, Grimsby, Hull, and other 
places. So much for the purely professional train- 
ing of the fishermen, but with that desire to be 
“practical ” which so appeals to the local adminis- 
trators of public money, such handicrafts as sea- 
manship, net-making and mending, engineering, 
knot-making, splicing, and cookery are also 
taught, with, we fear, indifferent success. 
Nowhere in England, except at the Lancashire 
Sea-Fisheries Committee’s Laboratory at Piel, 
Barrow-in-Furness, has marine biology and 
oceanography been taught. Usually instruction 
in those subjects has taken the form of public 
lectures given at the fishing ports, and no one who 
has had personal experience of this method of 
education can claim that it is even moderately 
successful. | Systematised instruction in marine 
biology, so far as it relates to marine economic 
animals, was instituted in Lancashire in 1900, and 
has been continued in a graduaily modified form 
ever since then. Personal laboratory work is 
done by the men, and the usual methods of in- 
struction by means of lectures and demonstrations 
are also carried on in a very thoroughly equipped 
marine biological station. Scholarships are 
awarded by the county education committee to 
men who indicate their fitness for the instruction, 
and each fisherman student spends a fortnight at 
Piel, working from five and a half to nine hours 
a day for a fortnight. At the present time the 
instruction includes marine biology, seamanship, 
oceanography, and navigation. It is intensive 
and systematised, and has been successful to an 
extent indicated by the ease with which the men 
selected have obtained Board of Trade certifi- 
cates; by the disappearance of the hostility with 
which the early attempts at fishery regulation 
were met; by the applications of scientific prin- 
ciples which have been made by the fishermen 
themselves in some localities; < and by the ready 
cooperation of the men in the work of fishery 
investigation—in obtaining statistical data, for 
example. . 
Apart from such systematised instruction, deep- 
sea men can only educate themselves by infre- 
quent, and mostly evening, attendance at the 
navigation schools, or at occasional fishery lec- 
tures. In itself this is an unsatisfactory method 
of instruction, and one which demands consider- 
able expenditure of money, and of the very limited 
leisure time enjoyed ashore by these fishermen. 
But an equally serious difficulty is the defective 
elementary education of the men. At the present 
time a boy cannot go to sea in a deep-sea vessel 
until he is sixteen years of age, or unless he is 
apprenticed—a system of employment which is 
NOMZ 2375, ViOlaoel 
[AUGUST 13, 1614 
disappearing in most ports. He leaves school at 
fourteen, and the two years’ interval is often spent 
in undesirable forms of shore employment, or in 
some form of inshore, or shore, fishing; and 
during this time what little primary education he 
did acquire mostly lapses. It is in these years, 
and during the first year or two of life at sea, that 
the education of fisher lads must be organised. 
It is not asking too much from the employers, 
during this period of a fisher-boy’s life, that they 
should be made to send him to school on full or 
modified pay for, say, two or three months in 
the year to receive continuous and systematised 
instruction. It is asking too much from the lad, 
or from his parents, that he should either obtain 
his education by attending evening school after a 
long day’s work, or by sacrificing a considerable 
fraction of his earnings. If the technical educa- 
tion of the fishermen is greatly to be improved 
this. sacrifice should be expected from the em- 
ployers of lads. 
(2) The Inshore Fishermen.—lIt will probably 
be found impossible in actual practice to set up 
different systems of technica] education for lads 
likely to become inshore or offshore fishermen. 
To begin with, it is clear that what a boy will 
become when he attains the age of sixteen de- 
pends on “chance,”’ on temperament, or on oppor- 
tunity. Some knowledge of the conditions on 
part of our coast convinces us that it is generally 
the lad who becomes ‘‘shiftless,” either from 
temperament or example, or he who is naturally 
impatient of discipline or routine, or he whose 
parents desire to make the most of him regard- 
less of his future, that swells the numbers of in- 
shore fishermen, mussellers, cocklers, shrimpers, 
etc. It is all work that a strong boy, brought up 
by the seaside, can do almost as well as a man; 
work at which he can earn much more than he 
could at a skilled trade or in deep-sea boats— 
generally where a superior technique is required. 
A lad of this class who is ambitious and has 
received a tolerably good primary education will 
go to sea, not as an inshore fisherman, but either 
as a deep-sea fisherman, or in the merchant ser- 
vice. So far, then, as a primary education for a 
seaboard population can be specialised it should 
become one which includes simple science— 
marine biology and oceanography—if these 
matters can be taught at primary schools without 
prejudice to a plain elementary education without 
imperfectly taught fads. 
The organisation of the continuation education 
—that which we suggest should be given, not in 
evening classes, but continuously as a fisher-lad’s 
daily work throughout some part of the year— 
presents the greatest difficulty. There is no diffi- 
culty with respect to what ought to be taught ’ 
the lad who is going to sea in deep-sea fishing 
vessels: what he must learn is still the “three 
R’s,” and such things as nautical astronomy, 
trigonometry, marine architecture, and mag- 
netism. But. are we really going to help our 
inshore fishing population by attempting to teach 
the boys “ropework, sail-mending, signalling, 
