SURVEYING INSTRUCTION AT THE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Education at the university should in essence be concerned more with theory than technique, with principles rather than practice. Should a university lose sight of this aim it will of a certainty become a university only in name. The attention to be given to vocational training will necessarily vary from faculty to faculty—that some vocational training is deemed desirable is shown by the very presence of an engineering department in nearly all our universities, a department in which practical training is necessarily mingled with theory. It is possible to say with truth about a certain type of engineering student that he will make a good engineer if only he can get through his examinations; to make the comparable statement about, say, a mathematics student is clearly ridiculous. In other words, the engineering profession, and in particular the civil engineering profession, has room for a good practical man to whom theory does not come easily; and yet in many of our university engineering departments no allowance is made for a man's chosen career save that after his first year of general engineering work he may elect to be a civil mechanical, electrical or aeronautical engineer. Often he has no choice of subjects for study; sometimes he is given a choice of four out of five subjects, as with the external civil engineering degree of London University where his freedom of action resolves itself into a decision between Hydraulics and Mathematics. In this examination, and many others, all candidates are required to sit the same papers in a subject, irrespective of whether they are potential first-class honours men or may expect to obtain a pass degree.