Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/663

Rh tribute to this purpose by providing certain options in the science curriculum; that is, a given number of scientific subjects being prescribed for study with a view to the degree of B.Sc., the candidate is allowed to substitute for one of these a subject taken from the arts curriculum, such, for instance, as the theory and practise of education. This is the case in the University of Wales and in the University of Birmingham; and there are indications, I believe, that this example will be followed elsewhere. Considering how hard and sustained is the work exacted from students of science, pure or applied, it seems important that the subjects from which they are to derive their literary culture should be presented to them, not in a dry-as-dust fashion, not chiefly as subjects of examination, but rather as sources of recreation and changes of mental activity. From this point of view, for British students of science the best literature of the English language offers unequaled advantages. It may be mentioned that the board of education in London is giving particular attention to the place which English literature should hold in the examination of students at the training colleges, and has under consideration carefully planned courses of study, in which portions of the best English writers of prose and of verse are prescribed to be read in connection with corresponding periods of English history, it being understood that the study of the literature shall be directed, not to philological or grammatical detail, but to the substance and meaning of the books, and to the leading characteristics of each writer's style. If, on the other hand, the student is to derive his literary culture, wholly or in part, from a foreign literature, ancient or modern, then it will be most desirable that, before leaving school, he should have surmounted the initial difficulties of grammar, and should have learned to read the foreign language with tolerable ease.

When we look at this problem—how to combine the scientific and the literary elements of culture—in the light of existing or prospective conditions in South Africa, it appears natural to suppose that, in a teaching university, the faculty of education would be that with which literary studies would be more particularly connected. And if students of practical sciences, such as engineering and agriculture, were brought together at the same center where the faculty of education had its seat, then it should not be difficult, without unduly trenching on the time demanded by scientific or technical studies, to provide such students with facilities for some measure of good literary training.

A further subject is necessarily suggested by that with which we have been dealing-—I mean the relation of university to secondary education; but on that I can only touch very briefly. Before university education can be widely efficient, it is indispensable that secondary education should be fairly well developed and organized. Secondary education should be intelligent—liberal in spirit—not too much