Certainly we do not spare money on education. The new
Municipal Technical School opened yesterday at Birmingham contains one hundred and thirty-four rooms, of which one hundred and sixteen are devoted to teaching, occupies an area of two thousand square feet, and has cost £89,000. Its expenditure is about £10,000 a year, and although this is pro- vided by a grant under the Local Taxation Act, still the whole comes out of the taxpayer in one form or another. Appa- rently the expenditure is productive, for the school is used by sixteen hundred students, of whom about two-thirds are in- structed in science and one-third in metallurgy. The school will, in fact, develop at last into a kind of physical Univer- sity, which as it has grown naturally, and has not been forced, may be of the highest utility to the Midlands. We should have liked nevertheless to hear that the entire original expense had been defrayed by a millionaire's cheque.
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