Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/425

Rh tent efforts to overcome it, is characteristic of all departments of education, it is especially noticeable in the colleges and universities; perhaps in no single respect, indeed, does the average college of the present day contrast more sharply with the college of a generation or two ago." On March 22, the Nation published the following correspondence. "Your editorial upon the Decline of Teaching ought to arouse very general solicitude throughout the profession: it gives notable emphasis to the condition which some of us have perceived for several years, although, so far as I am aware, stress has not hitherto been laid upon it in any public way. Your statement of the facts implies, without directly asserting, both the magnitude of the evil and its causes. Possibly both of these should receive, at the proper time and place, more extended and more exhaustive consideration. ... In the upper schools – high schools and colleges – the evil which has brought about the decline of teaching is an entirely different one. There is no evidence that the pseudo-pedagogy has won any hold on these men, except as subjects for wise admonitions to elementary teachers. The evil here is that original research has been confounded with true teaching. Original research is an independent profession, worthy of all honor and respect, but its processes are not in any essential or fundamental way those of education. We can never bring back to our colleges the nobler ideals of character and culture until we separate them from an ideal which is purely that of a trade or profession. We should have a very analogous confusion if our lawyers were to contend that education consisted in mastering the process and methods of the law. In so far as our