Crowding the Learned Professions.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 936, 7 February 1890, Page 4

Crowding the Learned Professions.

The rush to the learned professions began, it is sometimes affirmed, after the depression in agriculture and the corresponding rebound from the commercial prosperity of fifteen or twenty years ago. This may, no doubt, be partially true. But as the same phenomenon has been noticed in every other country, the explanation must be sought a little deeper. The real cause will, we venture to think, be found in the ever-increasing tendency on the part of the parents and their sons to look to the * gentlemanly professions ’ instead of the lucrative and more certain callings of a less ‘ genteel ’ description. In Germany and America this trait is perhaps exhibited in its most exaggerated form, simply because in those countries professional training is cheap and the preliminary education abundant or easy to attain. But we see it everywhere else. Since the School Board brought the three R’s within the reach of every child it is notorious that these youthful graduates have displayed a repugnance to the useful lives in which they have been bo n. They want to * better themselves ’ by becoming city clerks or nursery governesses. It is the first result produced by an unwonted state of affairs. By and by education will get too common to be marketable. It will ' then bo regarded simply as a preliminary to any catling, and not as a necessary antecedent of what'the' Germans call ‘bread studio*- A carpenter, or a black smith, or a machinist, or a shop-keeper will discover that he i§ none the worse for beiug a good scholar, an 4 will even find that in the epfi aace d esteem, the greater ( pleasure the enlarged cfiances ip life which it gives him, he is quite as much benefited by bis education as if he had sought to earn his living by means of i|; directly.—London Standard.