PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND BUSINESS
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I am a manufacturer controlling a business of medium size built up from small beginnings. Continuous efforts to train young "business builders" , to partnership and for carrying on after my death or desired retirement have kr the most part failed, and unless suitable successors appear it would seem that in due course my business must come to an end with a consequent increase of unemployment. And always the cry goes up that young men cannot find openings! I am informed that my experience is a common one, and I am therefore driven to the conclusion that there must be something radically wrong in our educational system or home training, probably both. Several of my trainees have appeared willing but lacking in initiative, most of them almost automata, doing any straightforward work given them and awaiting the next job.
Of twelve during the last fourteen years about half—I believe seven—were from great English public schools. All are gone, some retired from a too strenuous life, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the remainder I was compelled to dismiss for various reasons, the last a youth over eighteen, and for six years at a renowned school. He, upon being told to stamp and post about a dozen letters, owing to the sudden absence of a clerk, had half finished when five o'clock struck, when he threw the remainder into a drawer and departed to watch a cricket match—not to play belt observed. I admit that there is not much in this if it were an isolated case, but it is not.
I am fond of young people and lose no opportunity of having them around me, and I do not join in the general condemnation of our public schools, which in many ways have given good service, but am convinced that they are not producing in adequate numbers men capable of meeting in business life the strenuous and international competition of today. I am only one of many who think so, and we are all wondering what, if anything, our educationists are going to do about it.
I understand that in the case of boys deciding upon a business life the following is roughly their programme : (1) To obtain by influence a post in a wealthy combine where a sure pension follows even if the position is a relatively small one ; (2) A bank, or large insurance company and for similar reasons.
Such concerns have long waiting lists as the element of "Safety First" is attractive to unenterprising minds. Hence, amongst other reasons arises the anomalous position of thousands of youths complaining that they cannot find an opening, while the heads of hundreds of smaller and medium- sized businesses cannot find suitable recruits to carry on concerns which they have successfully established by infinite toil, such toil as they would not dream of asking the present generation to undertake, to say nothing of the financial risks. The romance of business exists to a much greater measure in building up and increasing these lesser concerns where the deadening routine and red tape inevitable in the mammoth companies do not exist.
Cannot the schools do something to inspire boys with enterprise, vision and creative effort in a business life, or can they only produce candidates for the overcrowded pro- fessions, or alternatively official minds for the great combines where initiative is often suppressed with an iron hand ? I believe that the maintenance in our race of the qualities above mentioned will in the future depend to a very, con- siderable extent upon the founding and development of, small and medium-sized concerns, as our history shows, and granted such qualities in the rising generation they will survive in spite of the great combines as they are doing today, but they must be suitably recruited. The problem is how and where to find the recruits.—I am Sir, &c.,
MANunkerunEn.
Previous page
