Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/657

Rh of a specialist, however high the level of the teaching in the special subject may be. Here, however, I pause for a moment to guard against a possible misconception. I am not suggesting that the specialist training given in a technical institute, though limited, is not an excellent thing in itself; or that, in certain conditions and circumstances, it is not desirable to have such a training, attested by a diploma or certificate, instead of aiming at a university standard and a university degree. Universities themselves recognize this fact. They reserve their degrees for those who have had a university training; but they also grant diplomas for proficiency in certain special branches of knowledge. Cambridge, for instance, gives a diploma in the science and practise of agriculture; and the examinations for the diploma are open to persons who are not members of the university.

But the university training, whatever its subject, ought to give something which the purely specialist training does not give. What do we understand by a university education? What are its distinctive characteristics? The word universitas, as you know, is merely a general term for a corporation, specially applied in the middle ages to a body of persons associated for purposes of study, who, by becoming a corporation, acquired certain immunities and privileges. Though a particular university might be strongest in a particular faculty, as Bologna was in law and Paris in theology, yet it is a traditional attribute of such a body that several different branches of higher study shall be represented in it. It is among the distinctive advantages of a university that it brings together in one place students—by whom I mean teachers as well as learners—of various subjects. By doing this the university tends to produce a general breadth of intellectual interests and sympathies; it enables the specialist to acquire some sense of the relations between his own pursuit and other pursuits; he is helped to perceive the largeness of knowledge. But, besides bringing together students of various subjects, it is the business of a university to see that each subject shall be studied in such a manner as to afford some general discipline of the mental faculties. In his book on 'The Idea of a University' Newman says:

This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called liberal education; and though there is no one in whom it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it and secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students