Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/513

Rh number about 1,200 students, are attended by persons carefully selected for the purpose and anxious to pursue a continuous course of study of an advanced standard. In these classes the universities will be compelled to begin new subjects for students of matured minds who have not received the usual preparation, and will therefore necessarily deal with them in a new way. Here, if anywhere, the difference between school methods of teaching and university methods ought to be apparent; and I feel sure that, if university teachers attempt conventional methods with these students, they will be condemned to failure. It is certain that these classes will increase enormously and rapidly, and I have great hope that they will for this reason influence the methods of university teaching in a very healthy manner. In the tutorial classes the teachers will be confronted with the entirely new problem of students who have thought much, and of whom many are experienced speakers, well able to express their thoughts by the spoken word, but who, nevertheless, have received little training, and have had still less experience, in expressing their ideas in writing. Many of the students whom I have met have told me that this difficulty of writing is their real obstacle, and the matter in which they feel the want of experience most acutely. It will be a very valuable exercise for those who conduct these classes to instruct their students in the art of writing simple and intelligible English, and I hope that the necessity of giving this instruction will have a good effect upon the conventional methods of teaching English in schools as well as in universities.

I am conscious that this address is lamentably incomplete in that it is concerned only with the manner of university teaching, and scarcely at all with its matter, and that, to carry any conviction, I should address myself to the task of working out in detail the suggestions that I have made. But this would lead me far beyond the limits of an address, and I am content to do little more than touch the fringe of the problem. Reduced to its simplest terms, this, like so many educational problems, involves an attempt to reconcile two more or less incompatible aims.

The acquisition of knowledge and the training of the mind are two inseparable aims of education, and yet it often appears difficult to provide adequately for the one without neglecting the other. If childhood is the time when systematic training is most desirable, it is also the time when knowledge is most easily acquired; if early manhood is the time when special knowledge must be sought, it is also the time when training for the special business of life is necessary. To withdraw from the child the opportunities of absorbing knowledge may be as harmful as it is unnatural; to turn a young man or young woman loose into a profession without proper preparation is cruel, and may be disastrous.

And so we get the battle of syllabus, time-table, scholarships, examinations, professional training, technical instruction, under all of