The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1909. THE BOY ON THE SCRAP-HEAP.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 114, 12 May 1909, Page 4

The Marlborough Express PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1909. THE BOY ON THE SCRAP-HEAP.

Now that we have in office a new Council, possessing, let us hope, enlightened views, the question of contributing towards the cost of running the Technical School might be once more considered by that body. There are numbers of boys in Blenheim to whom the Technical School should be a saviour from wreckage, from relegation to the human scrap-heap. But the classes require to be made attractive hi order to take these lads off the streets, and attractions cannot bo provided without money. The Borough Council have in this matter a duty to perform which . cannot safely be ignored. If the young of the community are allowed to drift they will never develop into good citizens. On the contrary, they stand in gre&fc danger of degenerating into wastrels. _ If a small annual donation will assist to stop this drift it would be money well spent. "How the boy recruits the unemployed," is a question which has recently been inquired into in London by a Royal Commission, and a report of a section of the committee furnishes some matter for serious consideration upon this matter. The report refers to the perpetual recruitment of the unemployable by tens of thousands of boys who, through neglect to provide them with suitable training, may almost be said to graduate into unemployment as a matter of course. When this question was being discussed in the Warden's Lodge of Toynbee Hall, Mr Harvey, the Warden, and one of the Commissioners, said that from the age of eighteen boys began to crowd into the ranks of the unemployed at an alarming rate. "They have no trade. When they leave school they go as van boys, messenger lads, errand boys, and- into warehouses and factories, where they learn nothing save, perhaps, one mechanical operation. At eighteen they are either turned adrift to make way for younger boys or refused any further increase in salary; and then, in their own words, they 'chuck the job' to seek for something better, which never turns up. What has often surprised me as a school manager went on theWarden,''is that the London lad frequently is without an idea up to the day he leaves school as to what he is going to be. He is always glad to get free from the discipline of school. He leaves, as a rule, on the first day the law permits. Then he looks for a job. His parents are with him in making wages the first consideration. It nearly always happens that the work that pays the highest wages to boys fresh from school is the work that leaves them stranded without industrial training at eighteen. Thus you get thousands of lads every year thrust down among the unemployed, doomed, many of them, by the very nature of their unskilled training to drift into the ranks of the unemployable. It is nothing short of a national scandal that a Government department like the Post Office-should'contribute-so largely as it does to this: industrial demoralisation of boys." The remedy for it all, in Mr Harvey's opinion, is continuation schools, and these should be compulsory. He said he had seen these schools at work in Germany, and what impressed him most was the way the employers offered facilities to their boys to attend' these classes. He thought something was wrong with an educational system that permitted shoals of lads to be thrown on "the industrial scrap-heap" in the very prime of life. By way of remedy for this deplorable state of things Mr Harvey would make continuation schools largely technical. The apprenticeship system was dying out, and was no longer adapted to modern industrial developments. Boys were rarely taught a trade now-a-days. Hence the need for Technical Schools. He did not imagine that these schools would really teach trades, but what they would do would be to teach craftsmanship, adaptability and selfreliance. They would teach the science of many of the things the boys deal with in their daily work. But, he continued, "such schools ought not to be confined to technical training only. They ought to develop a boy's general education. I would also like to see physical training made part of the curriculum. With all boys under eighteen compelled to spend half the day at school, and all boys under seventeen totally excluded from streettrading, you would have fewer youths drifting into unemployment. You would also keep more aduft-s > atjtvork. With the specialisation of industries going on to-day it is becoming increasingly easy to substitute boy labour for that of men. So intensified is this tendency becoming that lads may be employed at work from which their own fathers have been dismissed. But once it became general that boys up to eighteen-had to spend half their time at school this tendency^ would be checked. You would be saving the adults from losing their work, and so training the boys that when they became men they would be better fitted than they are to-day to keep work and to get work." These thoughtful utterances are worthy of consideration by all parents and employers, and they should certainly tend to invest our technical classes with greater importance in the eyes of all who have the interests of our youths at heart. A proper appreciation. of the position should result in substantial support being accorded to Blenheim's Technical School.