Notes

Abstract

ON Friday evening last, Sir Lyon Playfair, having distributed the prizes and certificates gained by the students of the City of London College, delivered an interesting address, taking as his chief subject the need for vital improvements in English methods of education. There had been, he said, a marked change going on over the world in regard to work. Machinery had been taking the place of muscular labour. Less human labour was employed, but it was much better paid than formerly. The workman must adapt himself by trained intelligence to these changes, otherwise he would go to swell the ranks of unskilled labour. Foreign countries had been quicker awake to the changes that were going on than we had been. We were proposing technical education, while France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland had been adapting themselves to the altered state of things by improved schools, secondary schools, commercial, building, and other special schools, which they had been promoting for many years. Germans and Frenchmen were taking places in English counting-houses, because the youth of London had not been educated in those languages which were necessary to commerce. We were now beginning to awake to the necessity of doing what was being done in other countries. Until comparatively lately we had nothing but classical schools. The learned classes had been entirely separated from the people; but the people's knowledge of trade improved science, and science improved trade. The learned classes were ignorant of this. This was not the way that the magnificent science and literature of Greece and Rome arose. Their great philosophers were busy in commerce, and were acquiring experience and knowledge among the masses of their own countrymen. This, he was rejoiced to see, was what we were now trying to bring about in this country.