Essay: Technical education
Technical education may be defined as the practical application of the general principles and methods of scientific studies to the teaching of some trade, profession or handicraft The importance of such training in country like ours is quite obvious. In Pakistan where more than eighty per cent of the population is agricultural and another ten per cent industrial, it is a crime to make education merely literary and to unfit boys and girts, for manual work, in afterlife. In view of the modem age of industrial scientific advancement it is admired on all hands that Pakistan cannot keep pace with other countries .In the march of progress unless our eminent educationists direct the best possible attention to the introduction and patronization of technical instruction in our schools and universities, and correct the present faulty system of education which is wholly liberal and hence lopsided. An American thinker has said, "There are two obvious kinds of education. One should teach how to live and the other how to make a living." Unfortunately, in our country, we are taught how to live before we know how to make a living. We are brought to know and learn the plays of Shakespeare, the poems of Milton or the chronology of historical events but very little how to drive an engine, to handle a machine, or to work at loom in some weaving factory. That is partly why a present-day student has to face so much of distress and despair when he has'left i outside the . college walls to make his headway in the j practical world. He runs from pillar to post in search of a job with a roll of certificate's and diplomas under his arm, 'but .every where finds the same depressing reply, "No vacancy? If we do not want our educational institution^ to I produce a generation of beggars and stealers but that of 1 the honest upright gentlemen, who earn their livelihood by the sweat of their brow, then it is essential to teach the boys and girls in some special branch of industry ! mechanisms, handicraft, trade or a profession so that at the end of their educational career they are in a position to find employment easily of failing that start their own private work or business.
Numerous benefits, both practical and moral, accrue from technical education. The habit of doing manual work Will make pur students healthy, strong and agile. They will have to handle tools in a workshop and this will put a strain on their muscles and make their bodies smart and active. Technical work of minute details will train them in the habits of method and discipline, observation and attention to detail and accuracy. It will also cultivate In them the virtues of patience, faith and industry.
However, in Pakistan, there is already an excess of literary education and to remedy this excess, the need of introducing technical education in our schools and colleges is of the greatest importance. As a matter of fact, the neglect of technical education in Pakistan Is a legacy of the British .rule. It was the deliberate policy of the Britishers to deprive us of the fruits of technical instruction and give us only literary education so that they may get a train of clerks to work in their offices and nothing more. But now when we have freed ourselves from the yoke of foreign domination, we must reorient and remodel the system of our education and make it more consistent with our present needs, for it is on education' that the future destiny of our country depends.
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