Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/509

 exists for merely delivering lectures like a machine, irrespective of the difficulty and importance of the subjects of his lectures, or the value of the lectures themselves. It appears that he would base the numerical strength of the teaching staff for each department of Post-Graduate studies on the assumption that every University Lecturer must deliver at least 18 lectures per week (these are the figures that Prof. Sarkar has quoted on behalf of Dacca, though they are all wrong); he would then have an approximate idea of the number of lectures necessary for a particular department and then calculate on this mechanical basis the numerical strength of teachers that should be provided for the different branches of study. By the way, we learn from the Inspection Report of the Patna College during the session 1909-10, which finds a place in the Minutes of the Calcutta University for the year 1910, that even Prof. Sarkar had not to deliver more than 11 lectures per week although he always parades that he used to deliver 18 lectures per week besides doing research work. It should also be carefully borne in mind in this connection that the bulk of Prof. Sarkar’s work was under-graduate teaching, which is, as everybody knows, substantially different from Post-Graduate instruction.

The entire case of Prof. Sarkar is thus based on a narrow and erroneous conception of the scope and function of higher teaching in a modern and progressive University, and it postulates a state of things which can, or rather, which should never exist in any University of the world. In short, the spirit in which Prof. Sarkar has approached the question of University re-organisation and reform betrays, to say the least, a lamentable lack of appreciation of the manifold activities in the progressive Universities of Europe and America. He miserably fails to realise that in University education the most important thing is not the number of lectures that a teacher can deliver per week, but the capacity and fitness of a teacher to undertake the teaching in a particular branch of a highly specialised subject. The