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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION

I thought that this school will turn out any men who will be nothing better than draftsmen and detail men all their lives, I would feel ashamed and deem the school a failure." It is unfortunate remarks such as this that cause many men to fail, "For who hath despised the day of small things."

The German idea of education is different from the American, so that boys going to the technical high schools are better trained in the minor things than the average American boy is trained. At the higher schools there is also a difference due to the fact that the "private docent" in Germany, the ' 'tutor" in Great Britain, have no prototype in American schools. The student here is wholly at the mercy of the lazy or incompetent instructor for his drill in mathematics and the studies lying at the foundation of the training for his future life work, seldom coming in contact with the high-grade professor until in the two final years he has good stiff courses to take with him, predicated upon perfect preparation. If he flunks he must go to a private tutor and pay him $1 per hour for cram work. In the foreign schools he can desert the regular instructor when he has taken his measure and go to the outsider, the "privat docent," who is, however, a recognized institution and not wholly an outsider. The higher teachers are often recruited from the ranks of the "privat docents," or "tutors," who have demonstrated their fitness. It is no uncommon thing in a