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CHAPTER IV

Home Study Courses

In an earlier chapter the writer has said something about men who take up engineering studies in order to improve their standing and provide for advancement. He has no sympathy with the man who can afford the time and expense to attend a resident school and yet deliberately neglects such an opportunity in order to learn the business "practically," whatever that may mean. For the man who is really fit to be an engineer and who is unable to do anything more than study alone he has the utmost sympathy. For many years the writer has conducted classes in evening schools, where the service, rather than the small salary, is considered to be compensation, and he is now a member of the educational committee in the Y.M.C.A. Institute, so that he thinks he has a pretty fair understanding of the men who imagine they would like to "learn more to earn more." There are enough mature earnest men to justify him in giving up a chapter to guidance in home study, but he is frank to say that an enormous number of men are filled with desire and not with ambition, the difference not being plain to many.