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provement of
Education,
70. The first suggestion put forward in this connexion was that the Government The in- should be asked to provide scholarships to enable the sons of artizans and mechanics to Fre-Apprenti- go for their general education to such schools as Queen's College or King's College, reship there to prepare to become apprentices. The second was that the Committee should impress upon the Education Authorities the necessity of providing better facilities for Chinese children of the artizan class to learn "English and kindred matter" after they have learned their own language but during a school life of from 6 to say 15 years. These better facilities were to take the form of a special school which might be near one of the Dockyards but not necessarily so. The second suggestion was supplemented by the view that:
"Some fair standard of education and brain-training is essential in the case of all young people, including Chinese, and such education in the case of the latter should cover some training in the English language before there is the slightest use of trying to heap on to the youth any technical education at all."
Menace.
71. The first suggestion brings us up against a difficulty that we believe to be a The White very real one. We have referred to it already and have quoted the Singapore Technical Collar Education Committee on it. The difficulty is the lure of the clerical or white collar occupations. The reality of this difficulty has been impressed upon us by the Director of Education, by the Acting Manager of the Taikoo Dockyard, by Mr. MacKichan and by the Building Contractors who told our Chairman that the sons of the more success- ful workers in the building industry now go to some small extent to private schools and that, having picked up therein a little English and imbibed a general distaste for labour, they generally manage to become store-clerks, shop-assistants or domestic servants. Anyway they are lost to the industry.
72. The second suggestion does not appear to us to meet in any way the needs of the case. Simply to ask Government to provide better educational facilities for Chinese children of the artizan class is merely to shift on to someone else's shoulders the solution of a vital aspect of the problem which we have been called upon to investi- gate. A special Government school providing a general literary education with special emphasis on English a school which is to be in no sense technical nor under the control of anyone whose business it is to look after those who are likely to become the future workers of the engineering industry--would be in effect merely an additional English school which Government would certainly be loth to establish and maintain. If Government did establish such a school, either in the neighbourhood of one of the Dockyards or elsewhere, it is difficult to see how such a school could be reserved for possible future apprentices, for even if preference were given to sons of employees of engineering firms (and part of the suggestion was that such boys should be educated free) there would be no guarantee that boys educated under these conditions would join. the engineering industry at all. If experience be any guide, this would probably be the last thing they would wish to do. A special general school established and main- tained by Government in response to a demand for better educational facilities for the children of the Chinese artizan class would reproduce the white collar danger in an acute form.
between the
school and
73. The problem is to bridge over the gap between the vernacular primary The bridge school and the apprenticeship and to bridge it in such a way as to avoid the distraction vernacular of more popular forms of employment which are much easier of access. The problem primary is by no means confined to Hong Kong or even to the East. It has always existed the appren- and it still exists in England. Colonel R. K. Morcom, O.B.E., of the recent Economic ticeship. Mission, to the Far East, who in addition to being a Director of Messrs., Belliss & Morcom Ltd., and Chairman of the British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers As- sociation was also for years member of the Education Committee of the Birming- ham City Council, told our Chairman that the problem of keeping boys who should eventually become apprentices in engineering works from drifting into other forms of livelihood and especially from getting submerged in various forms of casual labour was one of vital importance. The tackling of the problem, is, in England, the func- tion of the Junior Technical School. The following is an extract from a Survey of Technical & Further Education in England and Wales which was published by the Board of Education, Whitehall in 1926 (Educational Pamphlet No. 49) :-
"Boys of 13 or 14 with a taste for engineering and with the requisite ability can obtain, in almost any large centre of population, a pre-apprenticeship