64
65
The Hong Kong Dockyard
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ious mechanic out of a boy who only joined the ranks of industrial workers, because he has failed to become à clerk.
67. We have already referred to the apprentice systems now working with the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Company and the Taikoo Dockyard & Engineering Com- Apprentices. pany. On the 1st June, 1931, there were 434 apprentices on the payrolls of the two firms. These apprentices were distributed as follows:-Taikoo Dockyard: Brass- finishers 20, Coppersmiths 12, Plumbers 18, Fitters 58, Turners 24, Electricians 9. Patternmakers 3, Joiners 22, Carpenters 12-Total 178. The Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock: Brassfinishers 6, Turners 51, Fitters 147, Electricians 24, Coppersmiths 26, Patternmakers 2-Total 256. We have explained that many of these apprentices enter upon their indentures practically illiterate and though we recognize their enthusiasm for education and improvement, we realize how little an evening class can do for a boy of 16 or more who after his day's work brings to such a class a mind almost entirely uneducated and hands and eyes almost wholly untrained. The Manager of the Taikoo Docks reports that owing to their lack of elementary education and ignorance of English some of his apprentices who are attending the Technical Class held at the Taikoo Docks are wanting in enthusiasm in tackling technical subjects, whereas they are all keen to learn English. We think that something should be done for all appren- tices; but though the raising of the general intelligence of all engineering workers is part of our aim, it is not the whole of it. We want to produce leading hands, junior foremen who can develop into foremen and draftsmen and we want in this way to create a class from which there may occasionally emerge a specially brilliant youth who can be sent on to the University.
Groups A and B.
68. It appears from the statement made to us by the Manager of the Taikoo Docks that the boys whom his firm takes on annually as apprentices have mostly been to a lower primary school-many of them have doubtless attended the Quarry Bay Lower Primary School-and have filled the interval between their leaving school and their joining the works as apprentices, by doing odd jobs for their parents or in some form of casual labour. These boys are frequently illiterate or practically so when they become apprentices. Many of them do not know the most common Chinese characters. Of English they are nearly always quite ignorant nor have their calculating capacity or their ability to draw (this ability is probably latent in many of them) been developed. But there are also found among the annual recruits who start on the Taikoo apprentice system a few boys who are mostly sons of the firm's best Chinese employees. These boys have probably had some school education above the lower primary stage and many of them have acquired some knowledge of English.
69. We have been told that one apprentice came recently to the Taikoo Docks from King's College and the Managing Director of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co., has, we understand, received occasionally into his apprentice system boys from Queen's College and King's College. But the demand for admission into the Govern- ment Anglo-Chinese Schools far exceeds the vacancies available. There seems to be no doubt but that those boys destined to be apprentices in engineering works, whose parents can afford to keep them in school beyond the lower primary stage generally drift into private proprietary schools-schools whose lure is that they teach English but which rarely employ teachers capable of teaching that language effectively. The best boys when they become apprentices, have probably acquired a smattering of English and Chinese and a little arithmetic but have no solid grounding. In fact, though in the annual batch of the apprentices it is generally not difficult to pick out a few who show signs of having had some education and who can therefore be regard- ed as capable of further instruction, even so not only are those few far below the standard of general intelligence and education which would be demanded of apprentices in England, but they are also lacking in the rudiments of those subjects, such as elementary mathematics, drawing and the first principles of mechanics which are essential to the intelligent practice of their craft. His defect is a serious handicap to their advancement more especially as they have never had their hands and eyes trained by manual instruction. We are convinced that the first and most vital step in the process of producing locally a more responsible and effective type of engineering mechanic is to secure for him a more appropriate and more generally effective system of pre-apprenticeship or school education
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provement of
70. The first suggestion put forward in this connexion was that the Government The im 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, ship
Education. 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 These better facilities were to take the form of a special school which might be near years. one of the Dockyards but not necessarily so.
The second suggestion was supplemented by the view that: —
15
"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 ('hairman 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 he 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.
vernacular
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 between the 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. and it still exists in England. Colonel R. K. Morcom, O.B.E., of the recent Economic ticeship.
It has always existed school and
the appren- 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 a 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
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