1882.] 
On Technical Education . 
287 
VI. ON TECHNICAL EDUCATION. 
By Robert Galloway, M.R.I.A. 
(Continued from page 224.) 
N the year 1764, Priestly, who was at the time a tutor in 
an academy in Warrington, published an Essay on a 
course of liberal education for civil and adtive life. 
“ It seems,” he remarks in this Essay, “ to be a defedt in 
our present system of public education, that a proper course 
of studies is not provided for gentlemen who are designed to 
fill the principal stations of active life , distinct from those 
which are adapted to the learned professions . We have hardly 
any medium between an education for the counting-house, 
consisting of writing, arithmetic, and merchants’ accounts, 
and a method of institution in the abstract sciences ; so that 
we have nothing liberal that is worth the attention of gentle- 
men whose views neither of these two opposite plans may 
suit. 
“ Formerly none but the clergy were thought to have oc- 
casion for learning. It was natural, therefore, that the whole 
plan of education, from the grammar-school to the finishing 
at the university, should be calculated for their use. If a few 
other persons, who were not designed for holy orders, offered 
themselves for education, it could not be expected that a 
course of studies should be provided for them only. And, 
indeed, as all those persons who superintended the business 
of education were of the clerical order , and had themselves 
been taught nothing but the rhetoric, logic, and school- 
divinity, or civil law, which comprised the whole compass of 
human learning for several centuries, it could not be expedfed 
that they should entertain larger or more liberal views of 
education ; and still less that they should strike out a course 
of study for the use of men who were universally thought to 
have no need of study, and of whom few were so sensible of 
their own wants as to desire any such advantage. 
“ Besides, in those days, the great ends of human society 
seem to have been but little understood. . . . Few persons 
imagined what were the true sources of wealth, power, and 
happiness in a nation. Commerce was little understood, or 
even attended to. ... And thus , men’s views being narrow , 
little previous furniture of mind was requisite to conduct them . 
“ But the situation of things at present is vastly different 
from what it was two or three centuries ago. The objects 
of human attention are prodigiously multiplied ; the con- 
nexions of states are extended. ... In this critical posture 
