CONCEPTIONS OF TRAINING

As has been pointed out frequently enough in this journal, conceptions of how to train, and for what, are continually changing and never more rapidly than at present. Hitherto the Technical Colleges have said to industry, “Tell us what you want and we will train your man.” City and Guilds committees draw their members from industry as well as from the teaching body, and their syllabuses are drafted, they say, to meet industry's needs. Yet industry, in its most advanced form, has needs which are themselves changing so that the skill of today is outmoded tomorrow. One tendency seems clear: the move from manual to mental skill, the increase in the proportion of supervisory and staff grades in relation to the numbers of hourly‐paid ‘workers’. Moreover the old divisions into categories of skilled and unskilled, craftsmen and production workers, are also breaking down. Technological changes are resulting in status changes of a nature whose influence is widespread through the social and political fields of the whole country. What of the educational field? Is anyone there thinking about them?