Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/502

496 the methods of independent study, and will make the need of them clear to him. If, as is probable, some acquaintance with one or more foreign languages be necessary, he will take instruction in them as an essential part of his history course, in order that he may acquire the needful working knowledge; and to learn something of them with a definite purpose will be to him far more interesting and profitable than to study them only for linguistic training, as he would have been compelled to do at school. After all this is what would be done by his school-fellow who goes into business and finds it necessary, and probably also interesting, to acquire some knowledge of the particular foreign language required in the correspondence of his firm. It will, of course, be all the better for a university student of history to have acquired some training at school in the rudiments of history both ancient and modern, together with the knowledge of classics which is necessary for the former, and of modern languages which is necessary for the latter. But there is not space in the school curriculum for all the subjects that may be required either for the university or for the business of life; the best that can be done is to give a good all-round training and to foster a marked taste or ability where it exists by allowing the boy or girl to include the subjects which are most congenial to them in the studies of their last two years of school life, as I have already suggested, provided that mere specialization is not encouraged at school even towards the end of the school career.

The university course might then become a more complete specialization, but of a broad character—the study of a special subject in its wider aspects, and with the help of all the other knowledge which may be necessary to that purpose.

The university teacher will also differ from the school teacher in his methods, for it will be his business not so much to teach history as to teach his pupil so to learn and study history as though it were his purpose to become an historian; in so doing he will have opportunities to explain his own views and to contrast them with those of other authorities, and so to express his individuality as a university teacher should.

One might choose any other subject as an illustration. In science there should be all the difference between the school exercises, on the one hand, which teach the pupil the methods of experiment, illustrate the principles laid down in his text-books and exercise his mind in scientific reasoning, and, on the other hand, the university training, which sets him on a course involving the methods of the classical researches of great investigators and a study of the original papers in which they are contained, illuminated by the views of his own teacher. He also should awaken to the necessity of modern languages. A boy who, on leaving school, passes not to the scientific laboratories of a university, but to a scientific assistantship in a business or government