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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION

lines it was not looked upon with much favor, the British being a great people to laud practical (?) methods. Some of the old feeling against schools crops out once in a while, but the majority of the British engineering schools to-day are not very different in aims and methods from the schools of other countries.

In continental Europe young engineers received all their theoretical instruction in schools having five- and six-year courses before going into practical work. To-day a certain amount of practical work, or shop training, is insisted upon as a prerequisite to graduation, this work being sandwiched between school years. In the United States the apprentice system was never in favor and the schools in this country from the first endeavored to complete the scholastic training of the students before they went into practice. Engineers were in demand and for a great many years the schools could not turn them out fast enough, so there was lacking the intense thoroughness of the German and Frenchman and the practical training of the Briton. The differences in methods of instruction formerly common in the schools of different countries were well illustrated in a remark made by a prominent educator a few years ago to the effect that the British engineer was a technically trained mechanic, the continental European engineer a technically trained scientist and the American engineer a technically trained busi-