The experience of Mr Hichens is so valuable that I cannot do better than quote further.  “A big industrial organisation such as my firm, has, or should have three main sub-divisions—­the manufacturing branch, the commercial branch, and the research or laboratory branch....  I will not deal with the rank and file, but with the better educated apprentices, who expect to rise to positions of responsibility.  On the workshop side, we prefer that the lads should come to us between sixteen and seventeen, and, if possible (after serving an apprenticeship in the shops and drawing office), that they should then go to a university and take an engineering course.

“On the commercial side also we prefer to get the boys between sixteen and seventeen.  We have recently, however, reserved a limited number of vacancies for university men.  The research department also is, in the main, recruited from university men.  But there is this difference, that, whereas the research men should have received a scientific training at the university we require no specialised education in the case of university men joining the commercial side.  Specialised education at school is of no practical value.  There is ample time after a boy has started business to acquire all the technical knowledge that his brain is capable of assimilating.  What we want when we take a boy is to assure ourselves that he has ability and moral strength of character, and I submit that the true function of education is to teach him how to learn and how to live—­not how to make a living.  We are interested naturally to know that a boy has an aptitude for languages or mathematics, but it is immaterial to us whether he has acquired his aptitude, say for learning languages, through learning Latin and Greek or French and German.  The educational value is paramount, the vocational negligible.  If, therefore, modern languages are taught because they will be useful in later life, while Latin and Greek are omitted because they have no practical use, although their educational value may be greater, you will be bartering away the boy’s rightful heritage of knowledge for a mess of pottage.”

There are doubtless many different opinions as to the best way of training boys to become engineers, and in giving the results of his experience Mr Hichens does not claim that he is voicing the unanimous and well-considered judgments of the whole profession.  His statement that “specialised education at school is of no practical value to us” would certainly be challenged by those schools which possess a strong, well-organised engineering side for their elder boys.  But there would be substantial unanimity—­begotten of long and often bitter experience—­in favour of his plea that a sound general education up to the age of sixteen or seventeen at any rate, is an indispensable condition of satisfactory vocational training.  “I venture to think,” says Mr Hichens, “that the tendency of modern education is often in the wrong direction—­that too little attention is given to the foundations which lie buried out of sight, below the ground, and too much to a showy superstructure.  We pay too much heed to the parents who want an immediate return in kind on their money, and forget that education consists in tilling the ground and sowing the seed—­forget, too, that the seed must grow of itself.”