Various common themes recur over this long sweep of time. Firstly there is the persistent strength of the belief in liberal education with its emphasis on gentlemanly values and the cultivation of the mind for its own sake. There is nothing wrong with this except the second-rate status which it conferred on vocational, practical, technical and commercial training for earning a living. It lay behind the Victorian preference for the ancient universities over the civics and the preference even for Oxford over the then superior Cambridge before 1914. This in turn shaped many of the attitudes and curricula of the public schools. We see it in the slow growth of the JTSs and the eventual demise of the Secondary Technical Schools under the preference of parents and politicians for the grammar school. Some see it in Morant's suspicion of technical grammar schools. It is still reflected in the recurrent complaints of British engineers that they are undervalued. More recently it shaped the formation of the new universities in the 1960s and the forsaking of their noble Victorian technical roots by many of the technological and polytechnic universities as they converged on the old liberal arts ideal. Ironically these liberal arts subjects, anxious of their ‘uselessness’ now seek to justify their value – with varying degrees of credibility – in terms of ‘embedded transferable skills’ of potential use to employers. We were unusual in abandoning the stream of technical education for schoolgoing teenagers just as our inability to accept and understand the prestige and specialism of the French grande école and German TH sets us culturally apart.