Excerpt from Some Thoughts and Suggestions on Technical Education

On the one hand he is taught to "live by his wits," and on the other that a person who does so becomes a byword and a reproach. But true education should bring about the harmonious growth of the whole man, and not a one-sided development of one or two of his faculties.

With this system there has been for some years a very general distrust and an effort has been made to break away from it and replace it by some other method. That it has not fulfilled what was expected of it is patent to almost every one, and should we judge of it only by results, as we should judge anything else, it would seem at once that it was, to say the least, not satisfactory. It has been so long the habit to declare that our public school system of education is the foundation of all that is good in the country that it is difficult to look at it in any other way. We have only, however, to compare the results of such training with those of our own profession to see that it must be very defective. I remember in the year 1860 having heard my father, then 60 years of age, say of the men who started in business with him as a boy, that 90 per cent, had failed at least once, and that by far the larger part of them had never succeeded in obtaining even a competency. I have since heard the estimate of failures placed much higher. These men had all been educated under the theory then most common in the schools. No such statement could be predicated of the engineers who started in life at the same time, nor of the education which was given in the engineering schools. Any such percentage of failure in their graduates would have wiped them out of existence and consigned them to oblivion long ago. It is remarkable, in view of the fact of the constant failures in the common school education and its manifest unfitness, that attention should not sooner have been called to the adoption of the methods used in engineering schools, and that it should have required so many years to turn attention to the fact that there was something decidedly lacking in the inception and execution of our general school system, and more especially that it was training our youth in such a one-sided manner that brain development only was regarded as the legitimate object of education.

Bacon has said that education is the cultivation of a just and legitimate familiarity between men and things. Judged by this standard it must be said that our common school education is lacking in some of the essentials which bring about this familiarity. Facts in themselves are of no value; they are only important when they are applied.

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