Page:Calcutta Review (1925) Vol. 16.djvu/510

1925] cause of higher education in a country is not certainly promoted by such baleful spirit of commerce as seeks to judge education by the maxims of the counter. In his anxiety to reduce a “costly superfluous teaching staff,” and to prevent its “spectacular expansion and rank luxuriance,” our veteran educationist entirely overlooks or ignores the subjects of study and their sub-divisions under a Board of Higher Studies in the Post-Graduate Department. Here the real difficulty of the Board does not arise from the number of hours of lecture work to be assigned to a particular teacher but the problem is something different. A lecturer who has done some amount of research work in a particular subject or subjects and who has been teaching such subject or subjects for several years, can very easily take upon himself additional hours of lecture work, because that does not involve on the part of such a lecturer any extra preparation at home. But if he is called upon to undertake the teaching of a subject with which he has little or no acquaintance, then he cannot certainly do the same amount of justice to his new undertaking, although he may undergo considerable additional labour at home. What we most emphatically maintain without any fear of contradiction is that the standard of 18 hours lecture work per week, to which Prof. Sarkar lends his support, is a most erroneous and misleading standard. For the real worth of a University Lecturer does not consist in his muscular or vocal capacity for putting forth so many hours of lecture per week, but in his ability and fitness for producing some amount of original work in a particular branch of highly specialised studies and imparting instruction to Post-Graduate students in that subject. In higher teaching it is not so much the quantity of lectures delivered by an indifferent and ill-prepared teacher that counts as the quality, substance and value of the lectures of a competent and able lecturer who has been able to make himself a master of the subject or subjects which he intends to teach. For good or evil, in these days of specialisation, it is impossible