4io On Technical Education. [July, 
attempting to investigate, whether the system has worked 
well for the advancement of scientific and technical educa- 
tion in the kingdom. 
One great obstruction to the establishment of schools 
suitable for the middle class — and without such schools our 
technical colleges will avail us little in improving and ex- 
tending our manufacturing industries — is owing to the 
English people confining the meaning of the term “ a liberal 
education ” solely to a classical education. A classical edu- 
cation was no doubt the best that could be framed in earlier 
times, and it is probably the one most “ suitable for the 
higher classes in the present day,” but boys who are intended 
for a manufacturing or a commercial life require to be taught 
subjects that will train their mental powers as — if not more 
—perfectly, and will enable them to discharge their duties 
in after life more efficiently. 
English people have' not realised, like other peoples have 
done, that a different education is required by the different 
classes, — that the system of school education to be adopted 
ought to be determined by the wants of the particular class 
to be educated ; hence England lags behind other civilised 
countries in educational progress. We continue to dress our 
children’s minds as we do their bodies, in the prevailing 
fashion ; and a classical education is the fashionable educa- 
tion, because it is the education the higher classes receive. 
“ If we inquire,” Mr. Herbert Spencer states, “ what is the 
real motive for giving boys a classical education, we find it 
to be simply conformity to public opinion. We are guilty,” 
he states, “ of something like a platitude when we say that, 
throughout his after career, a boy, in nine cases out of ten, 
applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The 
remark is trite that in his shop or his office, in managing his 
estate or his family, in playing his part as director of a bank 
or a railway, he is very little aided by this knowledge he 
took so many years to acquire — so little that generally the 
greater part of it drops out of his memory ; and if he occa- 
sionally vents a Latin quotation, or alludes to some Greek 
myth, it is less to throw light on the topic in hand than for 
the sake of effect.” 
The merchant, the trader, the producer, the constructor, 
and the inventor, have always in the past found knowledge 
to be power ; and in the present day it is a still more im- 
portant fadtor for success in buying and selling, in manufac- 
turing and constructing, and in inventing, in consequence of 
competition being so much keener, not only between indivi- 
duals belonging to the same nation, but between competitors 
