554 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
at Zurich, which has about one thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty profes- 
sors, special departments for engineers, architects, chemists ; and we have a second grade, 
which is supposed to educate young men who have been practicing in some industrial 
work for several years. Then it takes them three years of theoretical training, and then 
so much manual training as you have is not perhaps wanted. The lower grades we have 
aot at all. We have got only an apprenticeship board. We have the general instruc- 
tion. which has no such manual training as vou have. 
TRAINING FOR SCIENTIFIC PROFESSIONS. 
BY PROFESSOR JOHN M. ORDWAY, TULANE UNIVERSITY, NEW ORLEANS. 
How far do the technological schools, as they are at present organized, accomplish 
he training of men for the scientific professions, and how far and for what reasons do 
hey fail to accomplish their primary purpose ? 
CouLD we gather a mass of frank, unbiased testimony showing how far 
-he graduates of our technological schools have reaily satisfied the require- 
ments of the situations to which they have been called, it would be of 
oreat service in the discussion of the subject before us. But a just census 
of the good, the unfit, and the indifferent men is out of the question, and 
we must fall back on the indirect evidence afforded by the fact that those 
who are sent out into the world by these institutions readily find good 
places, and the demand exceeds the yearly supply. And it may be 
observed that those who have employed one well-trained student have not 
ancommonly found places for more. It is fair to infer, then, that the 
managers of industrial enterprises are finding out that mere so-called 
practical men are not always to be preferred to such as have studied the 
orinciples on which their work is based. 
Time was when men laughed at theorists, and not without reason; for 
many a one has made egregious failures because he knew not his own 
dmitations and the limitations which real matter imposes on abstract 
science. And though for this a fostered self-conceit was largely responsi- 
ole, the schools were not wholly blameless. In the instruction of former 
years the abstract and the concrete were kept too far apart. Teachers 
were content if their pupils crammed so much that they could pass the 
set examinations, relying more on memory than reason. They did not see 
to it that the knowledge was thoroughly ingrained so that it could re- 
appear in works as well as in words. 
But nowadays the student is expected to materialize his ideas and thus 
rectify his crude conceptions, and get such a grasp of facts and deduc- 
tions that they become really his own. Now, in all well-appointed schools, 
laboratory work comes in as the mediator between thoughts and things. 
Formulas are not to be accepted until they are squared with the actual 
realities. It is true that in times past exceptional men have become well 
educated in spite of defective instruction. But our institutions of learn- 
ing exist not for the brightest only. They should make good men out of