A. Curtis Bond

“ Starting with a fairly good technical or theoretical education, one grapples with the problems of business more intelligently and, in most cases, more successfully. If one chance to become an employer, he can utilize the practice of his employes to demonstrate his theories, and often will this theorizing, and the thoughts created by an early technical education, suggest means for lightening, simplifying, and improving the labor that practice had failed to find an opportunity of modifying. ”

“ There are many instances in which technical education may justly be claimed to be a necessity, and naturally, in those professions which demand a knowledge or a character of schooling, that can be more thoroughly conveyed by means of that which instructs in the theories of a craft or art, as distinct from its practice. ”

“ It is true, this theoretical knowledge can not provide for all emergencies that are likely to occur in the workshops, but it lays a foundation which will aid the student, when those emergencies present themselves, in comprehending and overcoming the difficulty; and it is a question we would be loath to decide in the negative, whether or not a mechanic, who, after being educated in a technical school, had had a reasonable experience in a shop, would not find a readier and more effective remedy for an accident than one who had been brought up in a shop and lacked school training. ”

“ It is impossible to foresee, as we have said, all the necessities that arise, and are likely to arise, in the course of business experience, and they absolutely require, when they obtrude upon the regular course, the judgment of a mind that has been accustomed to coping with difficult situations where a failure to devise a remedy at once meant an utter failure of the entire work. ”

“ Technical schools, adopting as they do a different course, impress the students with the comparative simplicity of business, and give them the feeling of ability to grasp and utilize the intricacies and peculiarities of the trades. ”

“ Disposing thus of a man's individuality, some means are essential to convey the thought of the designer into the hand of the worker, and customs have grown and laws have been adopted that will serve as a sort of mental telegraph between these two—laws which govern the flight of the artist's fancy and instruct the artisan in an standing of the designer's purposes. ”

“ The want of education, with which most apprentices must contend, interferes in other ways with their progress. The master is apt, in many instances, to exaggerate the difficulties to be overcome, and enlarge upon the mysteries surrounding his work-bench. ”

“ No scope is given the workman; he is bound by lines beyond which he dare not go, and his fancy, if he has any, serves naught in the creation of his subject; drawings control this creation, and the living translator of those drawings, from what was in the past an intelligent reasoner, has become in the present an automatic machine. ”

“ In the case of the architect, for example, nature may indicate the urgencies of the profession; it provides for the beautiful, for the attractive features, but the details it avoids; teachers must show the mechanical portions of the work, and instruct in the principles which make the building possible and form a support for the decorative exterior. ”

“ The doubt this would arouse in an unschooled mind might be fatal to success, and the superstition that there was something impossible for the apprentice to comprehend, is liable to remain with him as a drag-net to his future usefulness, trammel his ambition, and perhaps turn his abilities into a channel less profitable to himself and to the world. ”

“ Another consideration worth noting is the comparatively short time during which a man improves his skill in the trade or art he may have adopted. The Technical Commission of Great Britain sets the period at from ten to fifteen years as a maximum, and this may be regarded as a reasonable estimate for the time at the end of which progress in the individual ceases ”