Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ORGANISATION OF COMMERCIAL EDUCATION It is now nearly twenty years since the London Chamber of Commerce, with an initiative which does it credit, convened a conference to consider how we could improve our commercial education in London. For nearly twenty years the subject has been debated and discussed by schoolmasters and merchants, administrators and educationists ; but the time has not been wasted. We have, I believe, all learned a great deal about needs and possibilities. We have discovered that we have already at our disposal much more commercial education than we imagined. Much has been done, meanwhile, to increase and improve that provision. And we are, I think, able with some confidence, and wide general concurrence, to lay down the lines on which the commercial education of a great city such as London can be, and should be organised. know now, for instance, that by com- mercial education we must mean, not merely instruction in any one subject or set of subjects, judged superlatively useful—nor yet education of any one grade or kind, regarded as specially lacking—but simply the best possible education of the man (or woman) who expects to spend his working life in an " office " or in " business " of one sort or another. We no longer accuse each other of ignoring " culture," or excluding what Dr. Arnold called the education of the citizen. Nor, on the other hand, do we denounce any subject not visibly subservient to office routine as " mediaeval pedantry." We find that we all really want the same thing, namely, the particular sort of education, whatever it may prove to be, which will enable our " business men " to fulfil most perfectly all their functions, however diverse, in the organised community of which they form part. We have, in a word, whe...