Excerpt from Practical Mechanics

The primary fact in technical education not yet sufficiently recognised is this - that illiterate men often acquire and possess a useful knowledge of the principles underlying their trade. But the theory usually acted upon is that a man must be quite ignorant of the principles of his trade unless he has been led up to them through weary years' study of the elementary principles of science. On the contrary, the wise apprentice sees for himself that some illiterate journeyman gets good wages, is well thought of by his master, is able to do his work better, perhaps, than any other man in the shop, can be trusted in emergencies, and has a confidence in himself which experience justifies and the apprentice feels that although the journeyman might be a better workman if he knew the elementary principles of science, still, some how or other, he has gained an exact knowledge of those more complicated laws with which he has to deal in his trade.

It is good for a man to know the well-established elementary principles of science, to which all complicated laws can be reduced; this enables him to compare his own experience with that of all other people, and enables him to make better use of his own observations in the future.

In giving this knowledge, however, the usual plan of operations is to act on the assumption that the man knows nothing, because he did not begin his previous study with Euclid's axioms, and to teach him the elemen tary principles as schoolboys of no experience are taught. N ow, the standpoint of an experienced workman in the nineteenth century is very different from that of an Alexandrian philosopher or of an English schoolboy, and many men who energetically begin the study of Euclid give it up after a year or two in disgust, because at the end they have only arrived at results which they knew experimentally long ago.

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