posted on 2021-12-12, 21:34authored byKriby, Richard Vaughan
"Lumen Accipe et Imperti ", says the motto of Wellington College; and, in becoming a teacher, after being a pupil of the College, I fully accepted the injunction to receive the light and impart it. But it took the preparation of this thesis on the apprenticeship system to bring home to me the strength of the human impulse implied in those four Latin words. In the ideal, the impulse is personified in Oliver Goldsmith's description of the village schoolmaster who "...tried each art, reproved each dull delay; Allur'd to brighter worlds, and led the way."
It is this impulse to seek skills and to hand them on which helps to explain the enigma of a system apparently always on the point of being out-moded, and yet surviving time and change, depression and prosperity, wars and its greatest challenge, the machine age.
In 1898 - before the Boer War - a Member of the New Zealand Parliament announced that a pair of boots had been made in 25 minutes, passing through 53 different machines and 63 pairs of hands. The tone of the brief, ensuing discussion was one suited to the occasion of an imminent demise, and a Bill for improvement of the apprenticeship system then before the House quietly expired.