Education and Industry Today

Extract

During the last half-century, industry has increasingly recognised that it is actively and directly concerned with the education and training of all who look to it for a career. Many in industry today have jobs with little intrinsic value in them, done often solely for the wages alone. These men and women neither like what they do nor do what they like. Now a few are realising that no political or economic rearrangement will remove that attitude to work: we shall have to rediscover, with Eric Gill, that ‘the artist is not a special kind of man but every man is a special kind of artist’. Perhaps then we may restore to work a sense of worthwhileness and find the desire once again to make well whatever needs to be made, and the humility and confidence to do the seemingly little things superlatively well.

During the last five years, firms, industries, associations, universities, colleges and government departments have individually, or in varying forms of collaboration, made large plans for the education of those associated with industry. Thousands of education and training officers have appeared and innumerable courses and handbooks of every description prepared.