Three Lectures on Vocational Training (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911. Excerpt: ... THE TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY The development of German industry and of German commerce since the foundation of the German Empire is one of the phenomena which both we at home and our neighbors around us regard with astonishment, and which force us involuntarily to ask what were the intrinsic causes that brought this development to pass. Hand in hand with it we see also the advance of the entire system of technical schools. All German states are paying increasing attention to these technical-school systems. The sums paid from the public purse for technical instruction have reached a height unknown before. In Prussia, the largest state in Germany, the state expenditure for continuation and trade schools amounted in the year 1886 to 570,000 marks; this expenditure rose in the year 1893 to 2,300,000 marks, in the year 1903 to 6,300,000 marks, and attained in the year 1908 the height of 12,000,000 marks, or, in round numbers, three million dollars. The expenditure for technical schools has risen in a similar manner in Austria, where it amounted, with the exclusion of Hungary, in the year 1896 to 5,200,000 crowns, in the year 1906 to 10,300,000 crowns, and in the year 1908 to 14,500,000 crowns. It is natural to presume that these rapidly rising curves of industrial development and technical training both at home and abroad stand in intimate connection with one another. We may be inclined to give technical training credit for a considerable portion of this industrial development; for it might be reasoned that technical training must have preceded the visible results of this training. But it is equally possible that industrial development preceded the development of technical training, and that thus the requirements of industry were the direct or in...