Academic achievement

“ Indeed, that highly-valued scientific acumen and skill which enables the student to brush away the accidental circumstances by which the laws of Nature are always concealed until the truth stands out in bold relief, is but a higher phase of the same talent which marks professional skill in all the higher walks of life. ”

“ Has the mental training and discipline of your student life developed in you a love of knowledge for its own sake, irrespective of its utility in fitting you to pass examinations and thereby to enter upon the occupations you have chosen? Has the insight you have obtained into the several branches of knowledge, created in your hearts a reverence for learning, and a desire to add to your knowledge, day by day and year by year, and to expend your best energies in the pursuit of truth? ”

“ Certainly the seventeenth century was not one in which it could be expected that the average level of academic life should be a high one. And yet, throughout that century, the two old seats of learning were producing a long series of men whose intellectual achievements in various fields are among the chief glories of England. ”

“ An Education in a university interferes with the forming of these habits; and perhaps forms opposite habits; the mind may contract a fondness for ease, for pleasure or for books, which no efforts [pg 015] can overcome. An academic Education, which should furnish the youth with some ideas of men and things, and leave time for an apprenticeship, before the age of twenty one years, would in my opinion, be the most eligible for young men who are designed for activ employments. ”

“ Of cultivating such a taste for the higher and most useful branches of learning as shall compel the students, after they have left the college, to continue to pursue the best and most practical branches of learning to the very highest walks of mental and scientific achievement. ”

“ But in the course of several years of broad and intelligent study a beginning at least can be made, and later on, as the result of continuous growth while at work, a fine, solid, comprehensive scholarship may finally eventuate. ”

“ In an ideal university, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a university, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. ”

“ Remember the great University truth, that Arts rest on Morals, and that if you would be wise and learned, the pure heart is as necessary to the successful pursuit of Science and Art as the high and unclouded intellect. ”

“ My experience, especially that gained by repeated residences at the university, had taught me beyond a doubt that the method of education hitherto in use, especially where it involved learning by rote, and where it looked at subjects simply from the outside or historically, and considered then capable of apprehension by mere exercise work, dulled the edge of all high true attainment, of all real mental insight, of all genuine progress in scientific culture, of self-contemplation, and thus of all real knowledge, and of the acquisition of truth through knowledge. ”

“ I have already emphasised what I consider to be the specific character of University education, namely, the comprehensive view of knowledge which it places before its true followers, its antipathy to all one-sidedness and incompleteness, its constant effort to gather the vast variety of human knowledge into a unity born of that higher spirit which it is its great mission to inspire. ”

“ In many cases, the diploma that the student carries home with him at the conclusion of his course is nothing less than a gold brick. It has made him believe that he has gotten an education, when he has actually never had an opportunity to find out what an education is.
I have in mind a young man who came to us from one of those little colleges to which I have referred where he had studied Greek, Latin, German, astronomy, and, among other things, stenography. ”

“ I felt like a lad having to choose from fifteen nectar flavors of ice cream, only the courses of study from which I had the privilege of choosing went into the hundreds. Almost every theme of my desire was spread before me; explorations into literature, social life, fine arts, science, language, and economics. Old yearnings could be abundantly gratified at last: a formidable list of professors and a more formidable list of studies awaited my option. ”

“ The ordinary student he strove to interest and to instruct, and as year by year his classes increased, he had good evidence to convince him that both his subject and his method of expounding it were receiving their full share of attention among the students of the University. But he had a keen eye for merit, and young men who evinced a desire to pursue the path of original research were quickly recognised and encouraged in every way to follow the right lines. ”

“ Where the official instruction ends, the higher education really begins. From that time, it is the man's own experience, and reading, and thought, and judgment, which must fit him for the requirements of higher rank. ”

“ It is not what is gained in knowledge of books, but in knowledge of self, of limitations and powers and capacities ; in what is acquired of habits of self-discipline and application, of methods of thought and research, that a college or university renders its truest service to its students ; as it is by the love of truth and learning which it instils, rather than by the honours and degrees which it confers, that a university puts its stamp upon the graduates it sends out into the world. ”

“ If a conscientious course of study at a University secured no other advantage than that of presenting to youth a picture of the dignified calling of the Scholar as a model for life, and of repelling from this sphere those who are not endowed with the requisite power, such a course would, on account of this advantage alone, be of the utmost importance to the Student. ”

“ But the higher education has been transformed, and mainly by the application of scientific methods, and of the philosophic spirit, to the study of history, economics, and the classics. When we are called to defend the pursuit of metaphysics or the study of the classics, either as indispensable to the discipline or to the enlargement of the mind, we are not called on to defend the methods of a generation ago. ”

“ But under the working of the system of almost unlimited electives which has prevailed in our higher institutions of learning during the past half-generation or more, the candidate for a future professorship is almost certain to discover that he has neglected to lay the foundations of any particular subject solidly and thoroughly well. He knows no elements, as the elements of every species of science and scholarship must be known, in order to proceed safely and with joy in hard work to its ever higher stages of study, research and discovery. ”

“ Men we shall have only as we make manhood the object of the work of the schools—intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of men to it—this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. ”

“ We estimate a man’s worth by his intellectual grasp, his æsthetic and ethical insight, and his power for action toward right and useful ends. If these characteristics make the ideal man, they should be the ideal aim of education, and a study is to be valued as it best contributes toward developing them. The same test of efficiency is to be applied to the whole curriculum of a school period. ”

“ In all the evidence here set forth tending to prove that success in scholarship leads to success in later life, no account whatever has been taken of the subjects studied. The correlation appears to prevail, year in and year out, in every part of the country, in every type of institution, regardless of the individual courses of study. ”

“ But I have thought that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are the subject of more, if not of profounder study than at any former period of English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have done, has proved how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. ”

“ The accomplishments of these outstanding individuals are a reflection of their hard work and dedication to scholarship. Their scholastic effort and rigorous approach to learning have made them the best in the State and in the Nation. ”

“ University education, as such, when it is efficient, has certain characteristics which differentiate it from the training of a specialist, however high the level of the teaching in the special subject may be. ”

“ From our fragmentary beginnings to an adequate science of education is a long journey, and the road is beset with difficulties. While we struggle along this road, generations will come and go. We will help them to attain what seem, for the time, the proper aims of education. And each individual will strive for what seems to him success in life.
As one measure of success in life, we may take the judgment of certain men. In so far as we accept their judgment of our findings concerning the relation between college students and this kind of success will seem important to us. ”

“ Devoted to the traditional studies—the literatures, mathematics, philosophy, history—it is still strangely reminiscent of old musty folkways of the schoolman and theologian. Every professor knows the desire of the average student to finish his college course and grapple with his professional studies. Every professor is aware of the sharp quickening of interest which comes on entrance to the professional schools. ”

“ Your science, your literature, should be a source then of energy as well as fortitude. They should enrich your action as well as your thought, and everywhere teach you the lesson of modest faith and perseverance, You must all have learned in your several lines of study the immense value of sustained and vivid attention. You must have come to appreciate the task which he undertakes who resolves to be even a faithful learner, much more a teacher of any important branch of human knowledge. ”

“ They had the best masters for the fine arts, geography, poetry, history and science, and even for sciences which are learned by few, and every branch seemed so easy to them, that their teachers were astonished at the progress they made. ”

“ Now the student, a young man of about twenty-one or twenty-two years, is supposed to be prepared, either to go into the world as a fairly well-educated citizen, or to continue his studies for a professional career. He finds the graduate schools of the universities ready to give him courses which lead to the degree of M.A. or Ph.D., and prepare him for the higher kind of teaching. ”

“ Higher education ever enlarges the borders of science and leads forth into new fields. It transmutes superstition into knowledge. It is the spirit of civilization and the leader of progress. It stands at the summit of human development, represents the aggregate of human knowledge, is the goal for [Pg 235] intellectual endeavor, and it points the way for the discovery and progress of the future. ”

“ Every institution of learning should, therefore, as I think, strenuously endeavor to draw every one of its students, whatever his plan of life may be, into the influence of this study, by making it peculiarly attractive. And to this end historical instruction should be — and I trust here it is — put into the hands of men who with a thorough mastery of the subject unite a high degree of perfection in the art of teaching. ”

“ When the cult of research has thus reduced itself to absurdity the time [108] will come when we shall perhaps turn to the conception of a university as a place where, by the study and discussion of problems of fundamental importance, the most intelligent young men and women are brought into contact with the best and most stimulating minds, where the balance is held true between intellect and emotion, between thought and action. ”

“ You will endeavour to correct these tendencies, to lead the student to value culture for its own sake as well as for what it brings, to despise mere position in University lists in comparison with his higher interests, and to look beyond the glittering and evanescent honours of a College, career to the requirements of after-life.
When the higher education is still in its infancy, When can we look for original research. we can scarcely look among you for the highest learning or for original research. ”

“ He is subjected to a prolonged intellectual discipline and learns to bend his mind to the task which duty imposes, whether the inclination be present or not, and with patient attention to those minute details which are most irksome, but the mastery of which is essential to thorough and substantial scholarship either in literature or in science. Such a course of training seems to me to have great advantages over any system of mere examinations. The student does not merely cram; the examination is but an incident in his course. ”

“ Not only does the student of to-day get good practical teaching, but he has the great advantage of being under professors who are generally engaged in original work. And if a man can afford the time to stay up after his degree, he is encouraged and helped to undertake research. If practical teaching is the foundation, the protoplasm as it were, of scientific education, I am sure that original work is its soul or spirit. ”

“ And amongst the ideals that inspire the life of your College, and make that life effective and united, there is one which is prominent in all your minds, whatever your special studies, your practical aims, or your hopes. It is the ideal of furthering, in all your minds, what we may call insight,—the ideal of learning to see life as it is, to know the world as we men need to know it, and to guide our purposes as we ought to guide them. It is also the ideal of teaching to others the art of just such insight. ”