The Place of the University in National Life (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from The University, in National Life

Whether a large increase in the number of University gradu ates, exercising an influence on the educational system of the country, will be a benefit to the State, depends upon the way in which the Universities conceive and discharge their function. If the main energies of teachers and taught are concentrated upon examinations and these examinations are framed in a narrow and specializing spirit, if teaching is dogmatic and learning parrotlike, if it is possible for students to pass through a University without having been brought to the point of view from which learning is regarded in Von Humboldt's words as something 'not yet revealed and never quite revealed', if spe cialization is carried so far that neither Art nor Philosophy, the two all-pervading influences in any truly liberal education, enter into the ordinary work of the ordinary student, then very little will be gained by the enlargement or multiplication of our Universities. Whether their main business be literary or scientific they will have failed if they cannot do more than this, to give to the country what it should ask and receive from an institution claiming to rank as a University. The mere aggrega tion under a single constitutional umbrella of a Training College for Teachers, a Medical School, and a Technical Institute does not ensure the presence of those qualities which we associate with the University tradition. To enable a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer to obtain a minimum professional qualification is a useful function which may well be discharged in a University, but it is not in itself a University function. The business ofa University is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgment, to enlarge curiosity, and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty View of its resources and demands.

The discipline in the Humanities is so firmly rooted and the atmosphere of classical antiquity so generally diffused in Oxford that the Pure and Applied Sciences, being comparatively late comers, are somewhat overshadowed by the older Muses. In the newer Universities this state of things is reversed. There the great impulse to academic development proceeds from the practical needs of a business community, fast becoming aware of the commercial and industrial value of Science. The Technical School, which originally was founded to train workmen and foremen for the local industries, was found to need such a background of Chemistry and Physics as it was thought that only a University could supply, and to this development a Faculty of Art, mainly devoted to the training of young women for service in the Elementary Schools, together with Faculties providing qualifications for local doctors and lawyers, were in due course appended. Growing from such a nucleus the Civic University in our great industrial centres is slowly but certainly arousing a hunger for the better things which an intellectual life can offer in a society always active, vigorous, and masculine, but too exclusively engrossed by the material struggle for existence. The obstacles are great, for whereas in Scotlandthe University habit has been continuously present for several centuries, inrthe populous and energetic part of England it is a recent innovation, ignored in some quarters, in others still looked upon as an idle and profligate luxury oppressive to the rates. By degrees, how ever, the climate is becoming more propitious to that side of academic activity which is least obviously connected with industry and trade. The North is ready to welcome the Humanities and there are no more eager audiences, though there may be many better qualified to criticize, than those which confront the really capable teacher of literature, philosophy, or history in one of our great centres of industry.