SIR,—Mr. Keachie's letter in your issue of April 28th is,
I think, more alarming than reassuring if his point of view is at all shared by the managers of our engineering industries, whose apprenticeship schemes he describes with such enthusiasm. " Apprentice engineers are," he says, " being educationally encouraged, practically and technically, in their work with time off for day and evening classes, lectures in the factory, &e.," but he makes no reference to any plans for their general -education, which appears to be ignored. The products of such " educational" train- ing will, of course, be totally unfitted by it to play any intelligent part in the shaping of the things to come after this war ; either in industry itself or in the larger world outside.
The relationship between employer and employee must either develop on more co-operative lines or become more and more strained, and one cannot expect intelligent co-operation and understanding of the problems and difficulties of management from men who have had no general educa- tion. Very few officers in the army would, I think, today dispute that it pays in every way to spend time on the general education of the soldiers. It, is to be hoped, therefore, that firms will learn this lesson from the army's experience, and that they will not only give their full support to the Young Peoples' Colleges, when they are established, but will also initiate their own educational schemes, for adults as well as adolescents,
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