204
WAT MAT U SENT
orbin’s
orner
MY WESTERN TRIP.
] will be at—
Chicago, Great Northern Hotel,
February 23 and 24.
St. Louis, Planter’s Hotel, Feb-
ruary, 25, 26, 27 and 23
Columbus, March 1 and 2.
Harrisburg, March 3.
F. A. CORBIN,
1000 CHAPEL ST.,
New Haven, Conn.
[ae My pay IN New York is Thursday
Place, Astor House. Time, 12 to 4.
UNIVERSITY IDEALS.
[Continued from page 203.]
Again, it is a vicious thing to teach
a boy to rely on his memorv for details.
A person whose memory is overloaded
with facts which are supposed to be of
use is popularly said to be crammed;
and the prejudice against this process
which is implied in the popular use of
that word is thoroughly justified. It
may be a. momentary necessity to cram
for a particular test or a particular case,
but the necessity is an unfortunate one.
The healthily constituted mind forgets
as soon as may be the things with which
it has been thus crammed. To teach
the student that higher education has
any analogy to a permanent cramming
process is false in theory and pernicious
in practice. Even in preparing him for
a narrow and well-defined end, the true
process is one of training rather than
cramming. Not by teaching the boy
the particular things which he is ex-
pected to do as one might teach a par-
rot, is education to be compassed, but by
teaching him methods of work which
will serve his turn in a variety of con-
ditions. Thus, and thus only, can we
lay the foundations for a successful in-
tellectual life.
THE BEST EQUIPPED MAN.
It is not the man who knows the
greatest number of useful things that
is best equipped, but the man who has
the power most quickly to find the things
he wants, most persistently and clearly
to reason out their relations to one
another, and most completely to forget
the non-essential parts as soon as he
is done with them. This is intellectual
training; and a course of study which
gives this habit of research and order
and completion of each thing by itself
has a value that increases as years go on.
Grave as were the defects of the one-
sided system of classical education, it
is probably true that the boy who learned
from it those intellectual habits which
were known by the name of mental
discipline went into life better equipped
than the man whose studies had ren-
dered him familiar with all the more
important facts of every day life, and
unfamiliar with the habit of handling
tough and knotty problems as they might
arise. :
For the facts of life can be learned as
they are needed. A great many of them
must be learned in that way and in no
other. But habits of reasoning, in nine-
teen men out of twenty, are the result
of good training as distinct from bad
training; and if the acquisition of facts
English Matt Weaves.
They are shirtings of the
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Should see. Your order
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OPP. OSBORN HALL.
has been allowed to take the place of
good training, it has been purchased at
a price all too dear.
Thus far we are on safe ground. Only
those who are inexperienced in educa-
tional problems will allow themselves to
be so blinded by the attractions of cram
as to forget the superior claims of dis-
cipline..
THEORY RATHER THAN PRACTICE.
Out next point is a more doubtful
one, and needs to be studied more care-
fully. It is this: In the matter of train-
ing, itself, our higher institutions of
learning should undertake to teach
theory rather than practice; methods
of reasoning rather than methods of
doing things. :
Let me not be misunderstood. I do
not wish to countenance the old idea
that all learning should be obtained
through books. Books are best under-
stood when their lessons are combined
with the lessons of the laboratory. But
I mean that the laboratory should be in
reality a laboratory, and not a work-
shop,—a place primarily for scientific
experiment and determination of prin-
ciples, rather than for the construction
of a finished product, valuable for its
utility.
I say this with a fair measure of con-
fidence, because I am sure that it repre-
sents the general tendency of Ameri-
can professional schools, and that this
tendency is itself a result of the ex-
perience of their graduates. The best
law schools in the country concern them-
selves less with the purely practical side
of their teaching, and more with the
development in the student of the power
of thought which underlies the cases
that are studied. The best medical
schools are become, in relatively less
| degree, schools of applied medicine, and
| more schools of advanced physiology
and pathology. In many, at least, of the
scientific schools—though here the ques-
tion has been made the subject of con-
troversy on which I am loath to enter—
the tendency of late ‘years is to reduce
the purchase of apparatus and physical
appliances to a minimum, and make the
study of science a study of applied
mathematics, even as the sttidy of the
law is become a study of legal principles.
Of course the degree to which we can
insist on this exaltation of the theoreti- |
cal and subordination of the practical
training depends wholly on the subject.
In general, it is perhaps safe to say that
in those things which are nominally
most practical, like physical science or
law, the need for emphasis on the
theoretical training is relatively great-
est; while in those less immediately
practical matters, like music or paint-
ing, the importance of practical masters
a the university becomes more strongly
elk.
dox is this; that whereas in the law
office or in the shop the student is con-
stantly in the midst of practical routine,
and must learn his theory either at col-
lege or not at all, in music or in paint-
ing the very character of the work al-
lows more of the theoretical contempla-
tion in after life, and renders the early
acquirement of the practical technique
more essential. |
TEACHING TO REASON.
Not only must the university really
train its students, and train them in
habits of reasoning, but it must, I think,
in the opinion of the most clear-sighted
American observers, teach them to rea-
son in more than one line. We must
recognize that the university is not a
place solely or primarily for the train-
ing of specialists, but, as far as time and
financial conditions will allow, for the
training of citizens.
Not that there is any consensus of
opinion on this point. On the other
hand, there is a large and influential
class of thinkers who are disinclined
to call any education a university edu-
cation until it has become specialized ;
who conceive of our higher institutions
of learning as charged with the primary
duty of training skillful specialists in
those theories which shall enable them
to take the lead in the country and in
the world in their various professions
or callings. To the man who holds this
view, delay in the choice of a lifework
seems a misforttine, and a system of
training which countenances such delay
involves, to his mind, a waste of the pro-
ductive forces of the community. It is
on this principle that the universities of
France and, speaking broadly, those of
Germany, are constituted. It is in no
The reason for the apparent para- |
WEEKLY
slight sympathy with this view that
many of our newer universities, whose
graduate departments have outweighed
their collegiate department in import-
ance, have been conceived and carried
on. And it may fairly be added that
even the most enthusiastic advocate of
the principle of broad education in
America feels the necessity of providing
for enough specialization to prevent the
student from degenerating into a
dilettante, without concentration on any
one line.
THE CONTROLLING ARGUMENT.
What then are the arguments which
can be urged against a view supported
by such plausible reasons and such large
weight of authority? They are derived
mainly from the nature and constitution
of the American state. We are educat-
ing independent citizens to exercise their
share of rule and leadership in a demo-
cratic society. Much as we need to have
good lawyers and good doctors, good
engineers and good artists, we need still
more to have good citizens. Our prim-
ary object is not to train a man to fill
his place as a part of a well ordered
machine, but to see to it that he is
capable of indenendent judgment con-
cerning the running of that machine as
a whole. He must understand and be
interested in the affairs of the common-
wealth for whose safety he is respon-
sible.
It is this difference of conception of
the relations of the citizens to society
which is accountable for the different
character of university education on the
[Continued on page 205.]
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COLLEGE MEN
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This house is patronized largely by Yale,
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THE. OSNMENALLE
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CHARLES T. PENNELL,
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J. Kaiser,
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O42
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