Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/656

650 South Africa should possess an institution, or institutions, of university rank, which, besides examining, should also teach. That is a natural progress, which is illustrated by the recent reconstitution of the London University itself. I am not qualified, nor should I desire, to discuss the various difficulties of detail which surround the question of a teaching university. That question is, for South Africa, an eminently practical one; and doubtless it will be solved, possibly at no distant time, by those who are most competent to deal with it. I will only venture to say a few words on some of the more general aspects of the matter.

The primary needs of daily life in a new country make demands for certain forms of higher training—demands which may be unable to wait for the development of anything so complex and costly as a teaching university. It is necessary to provide a training for men who shall be able to supervise the building of houses, the making of roads, bridges and railways, and to direct skilled labor in various useful arts and handicrafts. The first step in such a provision is to establish technical schools and institutes. Germany is, I suppose, the country where the educational possibilities of the technical school are realized in the amplest measure. In Germany the results of the highest education are systematically brought to bear on all the greater industries. But this highest education is not given only in completely equipped universities which confer degrees. It is largely given in the institutions known as technical high schools. In these schools teaching of a university standard is given, by professors of university rank, in subjects such as architecture, various branches of engineering, chemistry and general technical science. There are, I think, some ten or eleven of these technical high schools in Germany. In these institutions the teaching of the special art or science, on its theoretical side, is carried, I believe, to a point as high as could be attained in a university; while on the practical side it is carried beyond the point which in a university would usually be possible. In England we have nothing, I believe, which properly corresponds to the German technical high school; but we may expect to see some of the functions of such a school included among the functions of the new universities in our great industrial and commercial towns.

Now technical schools or institutes, which do not reach the level of a German technical high school, may, nevertheless, be so planned as to be capable of being further developed as parts of a great teaching university. And the point which I now wish to note is this—that the higher education given in a technical institute, which is only such, will not be quite the same as that given in the corresponding department of a teaching university. University education, as such, when it is efficient, has certain characteristics which differentiate it from the