APPRENTICES. AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 89, 14 April 1917, Page 10

APPRENTICES. AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION.

Though, much thought has, from time to time, been "given to the matter of apprenticeship and technical instruction, no definite forward movement has been made. ,In Wellington this may be due to the fact that the people most interested in. technical education have been fighting a hard and discouraging, battle to improve the facilities for imparting instruction to the pupils they already have. They feel, no doubt,, that it is useless to seek avenues ,for extension when they are denied the'funds and building which would * enable them to .deal adequately with the task in hand. An interesting contribution to the .discussion of whether technical classes should be held in working hours was made by Mr. W. Ferguson, chairman of the National Efficiency Board, when addressing the Coachbuilders' (employers) Conference. Mr. Ferguson replied to the contention that instruction in working hours was impossible/by saying that he would not again go (through the five years of his engineering apprenticeship when he struggled against physical unfit-ness'to do his work during the day and attend classes at night. He told the conference, though not in so many words, that difficulties could be overcome if they were grappled with, and that the attitude of regarding the present position as incapable of improvement was not satisfactory at the present time. On this question of technical education "Unionist" in the Auckland Herald writes:—"The movement launched by the Wellington Trades Council for the compulsory attendance ■ of' apprentices at technical classes in the employers' time is meeting with encouraging support, though there is doubt whether the 'Wellington scheme —one hour of class work for every two hours in the 1 workshop—is practicable at present. ... Evidently our educational authorities think that two years of workshop practice, added to a course of technical instruction, is sufficient not only to produce an efficient workman, but even an efficient instructor of efficient workmeh, since an application was made to' the Arbitration Court last week to enable etudents in training as teclinical teachers to enter as third-year apprentices. And there is much to be said for the contention. If our apprenticeship age was raised to 17, preceded by at least two years of vocational training, two years of workshop practice and one year of technical instruction ought to be ample for the production of skilled workmen, and certainly far superior to the present five or six year apprentice period, when a boy is usually allowed to pick up a knowledge of his trade as best he can." It is to be hoped that the early outcome of the discussion, which has now been sufficiently prolonged, will be an immediate instalment of reform, however small. ;