A SENSIBLE SPEECH.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1508, 24 January 1901, Page 58

A SENSIBLE SPEECH.

Apropos of the arguments contained in an ‘“Educational Symposium,” which recently appeared in these columns, a speech by Sir William Arrol (the contractor for the construction of the celebrated Forth Bridge), on “Technical Education,” may be quoted. Sir William is reported to have said: —A great many people thought they could give their sons and daughters a trade by sending them to a technical school. They never made a greater mistake in their lives. What was wanted was not to send hoys to a technical school, and give them tools in their hands, but to have the best possible men there to show them how i f could be clone, to explain. matters to them, and to teach them to think for themselves, so that they might learn to concentrate their ideas and apply their knowledge usefully when they went to practical work. Let them give a boy as much education as they pleased, but let him just make up Irs mind what trade he intended to follow m after life, and then let him follow ins education on those lines. . . He had more faith in a good night-school than in a day-school, for the teaching of technical education, because if a boy was willing to learn nothing sharpened his intellect more than to attend school at night. Sir William concluded by remarking that mothers ought to realise the great- responsibility that rested upon them. A mother always had more influence over her boy than his father, and a good mother was often the means of making a wayward boy a good useful man.