68
The Quali- fications
required
in the
Principal of the
Technical School.
Proposals Recapitu. lated.
22
workers will be employed. In this capacity the Principal might be of considerable assistance to the University in connexion with such students as might be working, either during their course or after it, in local engineering works. We suggest it would be advisable to co-opt the Principal of the Technical School to be a member of the Board of the Faculty of Engineering.
82. The Technical School will have to be created. A great deal will depend on its first Principal. He must be a man who has been through the works himself. He should also have taught and be an enthusiast for teaching. He will have to be an organiser and one who will secure the confidence of those who are actually working in, and supervising and directing, the various industries. Physical and mental energy will be essential, seeing that he will have to realize that the evening classes will require his attention just as much as the Junior Technical School. As to his professional qualifications one suggestion given us as an indication of what might be looked for was a successful apprenticeship which had led up to special study in a University or elsewhere, as a Whitworth scholar. Another suggestion was that he should be of the foreman type. We believe that the right man is to be found in Britain by those who know where to look for him. We believe that the best way to recruit the Principal would be to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies to consult the Board of Educa- tion, Whitehall. The Board is in touch through its Inspectors of Technical and Con- tinuation Schools, with all the technical education work which is being done by all the Local Education Authorities in England and Wales. The Secretary of State might also be asked to consult at the same time the Secretary to the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland. Either of these two authorities would know the type of man required and would probably be able to find a suitable candidate. It has been suggest- ed to us that it is advisable that the Principal should have had some experience of the Chinese mentality. We agree that this would be desirable, but we do not know of any such person who is thus qualified and would be likely to accept the post. We should also feel a little diffident about appointing a local man who would probably start on the work oppressed by a sense of the difficulty of this task. What is required is in our opinion some one not too old but fresh and vigorous-some one with confidence in himself and a belief in his mission. The organization of technical education is rather a specially delicate matter anywhere, but in England and Scotland the difficul- ties have been overcome. Administrative experience under a local education authority in England or Scotland would be a valuable quality in the Principal. At the time of his recruitment the Principal should not be more than 35 years of age.
83. The question of the salary for the Principal of the Technical School is not an easy one. The City of Manchester was recently advertising for a principal of its school for Building Trade Apprentices. The salary offered was £525 a year. The Motor Mechanic Instructor at the Kuala Lumpur Trade School receives an incremental salary of Straits $350 to $600. This is equivalent to £490 to £840 a year. The Agricultural Instructor at the Sultan Idris College is paid Straits $100 to $800 a month or from £560 to £1,120 a year. The salary of the Principal of the Technical Schools in Ceylon who is a B.Sc. and a Member of the Institute of Electrical En- gineers is £900. The three officers last named are on the permanent pensionable establishments of their respective Governments. The maximum salary of a school- master in the Hong Kong Government Education Department is nominally £950 year. As the whole scheme is experimental we think that the Principal should be recruited on a five years' agreement and that under the terms of his first agreement he should receive a non-incremental salary of £850 a year.
a
84. Our idea is then that there should be established and maintained by Govern- ment, for five years in the first instance a Technical School which should have two lepartments a Junior Technical School and a Department for the Further and Technical Education of Workers. The function of the Junior Technical School will be to educate boys from 12 to 14 to 16 to 18 who are going to be apprenticed to some constructive trade. We suggest that the curriculum of the Junior Technical School should cover 4 years and that the number of pupils in each year should be limited to start with to 30. The total capacity of the school would therefore at first be 120. The instruction given in the school would have to be, to begin with at any rate, more general and less technical than the curriculum of a Junior Technical School in Eng- land. This is partly because the pupils who come to it will be far less educated than the English pupils and also because the Junior Technical School while it will have to
23
As
continue to teach its pupils Chinese will also have to initiate them into English So far at least as boys who are going to be apprentices in the Engineering and Ship- building Industry is concerned the curriculum will not be difficult to suggest. regards the Department of Further and Technical Education for Workers, the arrange- ment for the teaching of apprentices in the dockyards which will be part of the work of this department of the Technical School will not be difficult to formulate in outline. But we do not propose that the Technical School should be confined to the Engineer- ing and Shipbuilding Industry. We therefore postpone the elaboration of the School's work until we have discussed another Industry which has been brought prominently to our notice. We refer to the Building Industry, the needs of which we now proceed to investigate.
Building
Logan's
85. The Building Trade is probably the largest individual trade in the Colony. The We believe that at the moment there is something like $2,000.000 worth of building industry. going on. Colonel M. II. Logan, D.S.O. of Messrs. Palmer Turner & Co., whom we Colonel have already quoted, has put in a strong indictment of the standard of building work Indictment. in this Colony which he contrasts most unfavourably with that which obtains in Shanghai. "I wish" he wrote to our Chairman from Shanghai, "That you could in- fluence the Government and the general body of business men (in Hong Kong) to send a commission up here to see how industry and building methods have progress- ed." Colonel Logan further contends that the work of the contractors is had largely because the general level of labourers' and coolies' work is low and because the experienced foreman does not exist. In Colonel Logan's opinion there should be in Hong Kong a technical school which should aim at turning out, for the building trade, intelligent and trained men who could rise to the position of foremen. We have already referred to the Building Construction Class which is being conducted by the Technical Institute. Those who attend this Class are, we were told, in the main the daytime employees of architects and contractors.
MacKichan's
86. It has been ascertained from Mr. MacKichan of Messrs. Leigh & Orange, Mr. that those who are destined to become workers in the building industry as carpenters, statement. blacksmiths, fitters, founders, plumbers, cementers, etc.. usually go to a vernacular primary school and then after an interval they become apprentices for three years after which, without satisfying any test, they can join the various guilds and work at their trades. Mr. MacKichan thinks that it is necessary that something should be done to improve the general standard of capacity and intelligence of the workers and he admits that the standard of work is deteriorating. He is, however, very anxious that the attempt now contemplated to make the workers in the building industry more effective by means of instruction should not tend to distract boys from their hereditary avocations into clerical and other "white collar" lines of employment. He was at first more inclined to limit any attempt to improve the capacity of the young workers by education to attendance at evening classes during apprenticeship. When asked what he contemplated teaching carpenters in evening classes he suggested:
(a) the reason for, and the use of, tools;
(b) joints and finishing:
(c) the uses of the various kinds of timber and how to prevent the deteriora-
tion of timber.
As regards blacksmiths, fitters, founders and plumbers, Mr. MacKichan thought their curriculum in evening classes should be much the same as that designed for engineering apprentices. Mr. MacKichan regards it as very necessary, that the carpenter apprentices, and indeed all apprentices, should learn some English, also how to calculate. with specific reference to figuring out dimensions, quantities etc. Confronted by the problem, how the apprentices of the building trade were, in their present educational condition, to study in evening classes the principles of their various crafts and at the same time acquire some facility in English expression (it must be assumed that when the apprentice starts his apprenticeship he will know no English and indeed be practically illiterate and it must be remembered that his ap- prenticeship covers a course of 3 years only), Mr. MacKichan admitted the need of some special school which the building apprentice that is-to-be could attend for two or three years before entering his apprenticeship and in which he could study some simple English and arithmetic. Mr. MacKichan thought that the establishment of such
69