Best Essay | The
Power of Technical Education In 2023
A
great American once said, “There are obviously two educations. One should educate
us how to make a living and other how to live.” In our country, we are taught
how to live before we know how to make a living. We receive a liberal education that
broadens our outlook and refines our desires and sensibilities. But we do not
receive any technical or vocational education. As a conclusion of it, there is
great agony and distress among the educated men in the country. As the great
educationist Sir White Head has remarked:
“The
true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second what is
useful; third what is ornamental…. To reverse this arrangement is like
beginning to build at the top of this edifice. This is exactly what is being
done in our country.
Technical
education is “what is useful.” It differs from liberal education in being
directed to training in some special branch of industry. It is the teaching
of a trade or a handicraft. This is the age of machinery. Every industry
demands a specially trained body of workers. Technical training cannot be
received from books and lectures only. The student must manage tools in a
workshop. He realises gradually the importance of the dignity of labour. The
introduction of technical education in the schools of London towards the end of
the last century uplifted the image of the dignity of labor in the eyes of
children. They learned to respect the manual worker.
Technical
education is important for the prosperity and advancement of the country. It
will put an end to poverty and unemployment among the educated youth. Every
industry needs many skilled workers and technicians. We are rich in raw
resources. We can exploit them to our benefit if we prepare an adequate number of
mechanics, skilled workers, and technicians.
Technical
education has other benefits, apart from its strictly utilitarian bearings. It
is a valuable means of training pupils in manual dexterity. The nimble use of
one's fingers and wrists will always prove an asset that no one can despise.
Technical education also trains one in the habits of method, order, and
attention to detail. These things become part of a man's personality.
Technical
education has done another remarkable thing. It has exploded the myth that only
liberal or intellectual education is worthwhile. But now a man who has been
trained in any department of mechanics or industry occupies an honorable place
in society. He is no longer considered a laborer or worker.
A
purely technical education has defects. One of the defects is that now our
outlook. It makes us inhuman and unkind. It produces in us the qualities of
machines that make our thinking cold and calculating. It makes us an apology for man.
As a great the puts.
“He
is to be educated not because he is to
make
shoes, nails, and pins, but because!
he
is a man.”