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Several members of our Advisory Committee on Education
including Lord Lugard who, for reasons which you will appreciate,
is specially interested in the subject, and other members who
devote special attention to the engineering profession overseas,
are disturbed by reports that reach them from time to time regar-
ding the mechanical and electrical engineering department of the
Engineering Faculty of the University of Hong Kong in its
relation to local industry.
They have been informed that there
are grounds for fearing that this department has lost the confi-
dence of the most important representatives of the local engineering
industry, including some who at the start were ready to support the
University, in the hope that it would meet their practical needs
and supply Chinese employees capable of filling in due course posts
of considerable responsibility. These firms seem to have been
forced into encouraging students who show promise to come to this
country in order to receive the right kind of training, since they
consider that those responsible for the department are not studying
local needs and conditions with sufficient care.
Such a result would obviously involve unnecessary
expenditure in maintaining an expensive Faculty which (if the
facts are as represented) has proved unequal to the task for
which it was intended.
It is apparently the arrangements for practical training
and the aversion of ex-students from the atmosphere of the work-
shops, rather than the theoretical part of the course, which has
given rise to local dissatisfaction. The regulations of the
Faculty make it clear that some provision is made, or can be made,
for practical training during the University course. There would
seem to be no lack of local engineering works, such as those of
Swire's and Holt's and the Royal Naval Dockyard, in which such
practical training could be obtained as an integral part of the
University course. In these circumstances it has been suggested
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.