778 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 411. 



article? If not, she must be prepared to 

 see the average man remaining -uneducated. 

 Advocacy of teaching of the kind that 

 was given at Finsbury is often met by the 

 opposition not only of pure mathematicians 

 and academic teachers, but I am sorry to 

 say also of engineers. The average engi- 

 neer not merely looks askance at, he is 

 really opposed to, the college training of 

 engineers, and I think, on the whole, that 

 he has much justification for his views. 

 University degrees in engineering science 

 are often conferred upon students who fol- 

 low an academic course, in which they 

 learn little except how to pass examina- 

 tions. The graduate of to-day, even, does 

 not often possess the three powers to which 

 I have referred. He is not fond of read- 

 ing, and therefore he has no imagination, 

 and the idea of an engineer without imagin- 

 ation is as absurd as Teuf elsdroch 's notion 

 of a cast-iron king. He cannot really com- 

 pute, in spite of all his mathematics, and 

 he is absurdly innocent of the methods of 

 the true student of nature. This kind of 

 labeled scientific engineer is being manu- 

 factured now in bulk because there is a 

 money value attached to a degree. He is 

 not an engineer in any sense of the word, 

 and does not care for engineering, but he 

 sometimes gets employment in technical 

 colleges. He is said to teach when he is 

 really only impressing upon deluded pupils 

 the importance of formulfe, and that what- 

 ever is printed in books must be true. The 

 real young engineer, caught in this eddy, 

 will no doubt find his way out of it, for the 

 healthy experience of the workshop will 

 bring back his common-sense. For the 

 average pupil of such graduates there is no 

 help. If he enters works, he knows but 

 little more than if he had gone direct from 

 school. He is still without the three quali- 

 fications which are absolutely necessary for 

 a young engineer. He is fairly certain to 

 be a nuisance in the works and to try an- 



other profession at the end of his pupilage. 

 But if it is his father's business he can 

 make a show of knowing something about 

 it, and he is usually called an engineer. 



Standardization in an industry usually 

 means easier and cheaper and better manu- 

 facture, and a certain amount of it must 

 be good even in engineering, but when we 

 see a great deal of it we know that in that 

 industry the true engineer is disliked. I 

 consider that in the scholastic industry 

 there has been far too much standardiza- 

 tion. Gynmasien and polytechnic systems 

 are standardized in Germany, and there is a 

 tendency to import them into England; 

 but in my opinion we are very far indeed 

 from knowing any system which deserves 

 to be standardized, and the worst we can 

 copy is what we find now in Germany and 

 Switzerland. What we must strive for is 

 the discovery of a British system suiting 

 the British boy and man. The English 

 boy may be called stupid so often that he 

 actually believes himself to be stupid; but 

 of one thing we may be sure, he wiU find 

 in some way or other an escape from the 

 stupefying kind of school work to which 

 the German boy submits. And if it were 

 possible to make the average English boy 

 of nineteen pass such a silly school-leaving 

 examination as the German boy,* and to 

 pass through a polytechnic, I am quite sure 

 that there would be little employment 

 among common-sense English engineers for 

 such a manufactured article. But is it pos- 

 sible that British boys could be manufac- 



* The following is, I understand, a stock ques- 

 tion at certain gymnasieu: 'Write out all the 

 trigonometrical formulae you know.' I asked my 

 young informant, ' Well, how many did you write ?' 

 ' Sixty-two ' was the answer. This young man 

 informed me that a boy could not pass this ex- 

 amination unless he knew ' all algebra and all 

 trigonometry and all science.' Strassburg geese 

 used to be fed in France; now they are fed in 

 Germany. German education seems to be like 

 smothering a fire with too muph fuel, or wet slack 

 which has the appearance of fuel. 



