Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/25

Rh model might furnish us certain of the more important and vital factors of the ideal toward which we resolve to grow! Yet the proposal at once to import largely from the methods and constitution of the German university would be likely to result in failure. There are many features of the University as already established in Germany which we should not wish to imitate if we could. The more important commendable factors—the thorough secondary education of those who matriculate, the scientific character of the teachers and the scientific and free quality of their teaching, the relative disregard for what we incline so much to overestimate, namely, the pursuits that fit directly for some form of practical life (Brodstudien)—we can gain only in time and by paying the price for them. Many things in the French university system, also, and especially what Matthew Arnold calls "too much requiring of authorizations before a man may stir," unfit it to be our model. Nor can we think of taking very freely and directly from those great English institutions of Oxford and Cambridge, to which we should most naturally look for our models. The expensive character of the education they impart, the dominance of the tutorial system in their colleges to the detriment of the university, the large amount of sinecurism which they permit and encourage, the distinction between "pass" and "honor" examinations, and between the one