Academic

“ A young academic coming into the country immediately after this great competition, &c.—Forby's Vocabulary, under Pin-basket.
A young academic shall dwell upon a journal that treats of trade, and be lavish in the praise of the author; while persons skilled in those subjects hear the tattle with contempt.—Watts's Improvement of the Mind.
ACADEMICALS. In the English universities, the dress peculiar to the students and officers.
I must insist on your going to your College and putting on your academicals.—The Etonian, Vol. II. p. ”

“ The first and only true object of the academician is, and for ever remains, the study of science. This constitutes the central point, which all intently seek, and where all find themselves, without regard to external circumstances. ”

“ It is entitled "Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies; wherein is discussed and examined the matter, method, and customes of academick and scholastic learning, and the insufficiency thereof discovered and laid open; as also some expedients proposed for the reforming of schools, and the perfecting and promoting of all kind of science; offered to the judgment of all those that love the proficiencie of arts and sciences and the advancement of learning. By Jo. Webster. ”

“ The academic career also has its heroic obligations, so I stand here without further deprecatory words. ”

“ It is an education which, so far as it goes beyond the three elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, is framed in all its essential features upon an exclusively collegiate type of studies; grammar, history, geography, foreign languages, and the like, being introduced, to the utter exclusion in all the most important of the successive "Standards" of any teaching of drawing, of mechanics, of the simplest facts of science or of natural history—of all, in fact, that most nearly concerns the workman throughout his entire career. ”

“ We gladly recognise that such specialists are doing invaluable service, in their several lines, to the cause of knowledge; but we may also wish that the desire to be scientific was more uniformly tempered by a regard for the nature of the materials with which all scholarship has to deal. Those materials are the creations of the human intellect, whether as seen in the evolution of language, or of literature, or of art. ”

“ In prosecuting our investigations into the science of education, therefore, our business is to study Nature in all the educational processes in which we find her occupied, and of which we shall find there are many;—to observe and collect facts;—to detect principles, and to discover the means employed in carrying them out, and the modes of their working;—to trace effects back to their causes, and then again to follow the effects through their various ramifications, to some ultimate end. ”

“ There are moral, metaphysical, physical professors; professors of languages, of history, of mathematics, of experimental science. Lists of questions are published, wonderful for their range and depth, variety and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon their very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious information; what then is wanting for mental culture to a person of large reading and scientific attainments? what is grasp of mind but acquirement? where shall philosophical repose be found, but in the consciousness and enjoyment of large intellectual possessions? ”

“ Devote your best energies to these objects, remembering that between the young student, however successful, and the ripe and mature scholar, there is a vast space which can only be passed over by years of patient and laborious toil. Remember also that every profession is both an Art and a Science, and that dreamy theorism and vulgar empiricism are equally to be avoided. ”

“ The school and college will probably give only the keys and apparatus of thought, a necessary language or so, thoroughly done, a sound mathematical training, drawing, a wide and reasoned view of philosophy, some good exercises in dialectics, a training in the use of those stores of fact that science has made. So equipped, the young man and young woman will go on to the technical school of their chosen profession, and to the criticism of contemporary practice for their special efficiency, and to the literature of contemporary thought for their general development.... ”

“ Our work now is to broaden both the conception of research and of teaching, to recognize that whatever imports fresh and valid ideas, fresh and valid aspects—not simply of chemical and physical matters, but of aesthetic, social, and political matters, partakes of the honour and claims of research—and that whatever conveys ideas and aspects vividly and clearly and invigoratingly, not simply by word of mouth but by book or picture or article, is teaching. ”

“ Education is not [167] completed within these walls. When you shall have quitted this peaceful retreat, and selected the profession or state in life in which you are to be engaged, then you should apply all your efforts to the acquisition of that species of knowledge which is more especially needed. Here are inculcated those elementary principles of science and literature which experience has shown to be best fitted to form the foundation of the character of the scholar and gentleman—those rudiments of instruction, which, omitted here, are rarely indeed acquired afterwards. ”

“ Therefore, the great business of the scientific teacher is, to imprint the fundamental, irrefragable facts of his science, not only by words upon the mind, but by sensible impressions upon the eye, and ear, and touch of the student, in so complete a manner, that every term used, or law enunciated, should afterwards call up vivid images of the particular structural, or other, facts which furnished the demonstration of the law, or the illustration of the term. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Education broadens to include all men, and deepens to reach all truths. Scholars are no longer confined to Greek, Latin and mathematics, but they also study science; and science converts the dreams of the poet, the theory of the mathematician and the fiction of the economist into ships, hospitals and instruments that enable one skilled hand to perform the work of a thousand. ”

“ You have set no restrictions upon access to the instruction you propose to give; you have provided that such instruction, either as given by the university or by associated institutions, should cover the field of human intellectual activity. You have recognised the importance of encouraging research. You propose to provide means by which young men, who may be full of zeal for a literary or for a scientific career, but who also may have mistaken aspiration for inspiration, may bring their capacities to a test, and give their powers a fair trial. ”

“ A connected series of discussions on the foundations of education in the related sciences of biology, physiology, sociology, and philosophy, and a thoroughgoing interpretation of the nature, place, and meaning of education in our world. The newest points of view in the realms of natural and mental science are applied to the understanding of educational problems. The field of education is carefully divided, and the total discussion is devoted to the philosophy of education, in distinction from its history, science, and art. ”

“ Social Science, History, Literature, Philology, Mathematics, Physical and Mechanical Science are all represented, the object being to illustrate the special function of the University in the discovery and orderly arrangement of knowledge. ”

“ There, too, are the learned and philosophical societies, for the study of Science, Letters, and Art. Whence come the men of superior education who occupy the pulpits, exercise the professions of Law and Medicine, or fill the chairs of the Professors in the Colleges of the Union? ”

“ The student who repairs to them sees in the list of classes and of professors a fair picture of the world of knowledge. Whatever he needs to know there is some one ready to teach him, some one competent to discipline him in the way of learning; whatever his special bent, let him but be able and diligent, and in due time he shall find distinction and a career. Among his professors, he sees men whose names are known and revered throughout the civilised world ”

“ Oral teaching was of supreme importance on account of the cost and rarity of manuscripts.
The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge: its professors have to be at the top of the wave of progress. Research and criticism must be the breath of their nostrils; laboratory work the main business of the scientific student; books his main helpers.
The lecture, however, in the hands of an able man will still have the utmost importance in stimulating and giving facts and principles their proper relative prominence. ”

“ Our course of study contains much which should result in increased appreciation and sympathy in the activities which characterize our modern society. Geography, history, nature study, literature, all deal with men in their [152] relationship with one another in a common environment. If teaching means anything more than gaining knowledge, the method employed in school subjects cannot be without moral significance. ”

“ But great changes have been made, and are still making, in the degree of previous qualification.
‘Still, it would be premature to say, that there is any one of the American universities where classical knowledge, or even science, is profoundly attained, even at the present day. Some of the professors push their studies, for a life, certainly; and you well know, after all, that little short of a life, and a long one too, will make any man a good general scholar. ”

“ As a matter of fact neither history nor natural science occupies any such prominence in the school course as we have judged fitting. Much thoughtful study, experience in teaching, and pioneer labor in partially new fields will be necessary in order to bring into existence such a course of study based upon the best materials. ”

“ Education, I say, is now looked upon as a science, closely allied to and continually assisted by its sister science of sociology, definitely based upon and springing out of the sciences of psychology and physiology, and even having its roots deep down in the sub-soil of biology. ”

“ In which direction does human nature most tend? In which direction do educational institutions, in particular, exert their influence? Does the average student, for example, subordinate his teachers and the ideas he acquires to himself? Or does he become subordinated to these, even submerged by them? This is the most important of all the problems concerning study ”

“ Teaching, however is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People. Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning ”

“ Again, no college or university is properly equipped that is not furnished with a complete series of the objects and implements of instruction and research. In regard to instruction, the impressions made through the eye are the most definite and indelible, and may serve as nuclei around which by association to group facts and suggestions the most varied. ”

“ Professors must live; to live they must occupy themselves with practice, and if they occupy themselves with practice, the pursuit of the abstract branches of science must go to the wall. All this is a plain and obvious matter of common-sense reasoning. ”

“ When courses of study in science were first proposed, our colleges were controlled almost exclusively by men of classical training and bias—men wholly outside of scientific life, unacquainted with scientific work, the scientific method, or the scientific spirit. ”

“ A well-planned University course is a study of the wide sweep of generality, I do not mean that it should be abstract in the sense of divorce from concrete fact, but that concrete fact should be studied as illustrating the scope of general ideas. ”

“ The question as to what shall be taught in our common schools is yet to receive a definite solution. Next in importance to right methods of teaching ranks the subject-matter of teaching. 'What knowledge is of most worth? What branches are the most useful, first for discipline, and second for use or particular application?' Upon this subject we have no settled policy. As a consequence, many things inferior usurp the place of those of superior worth. ”

“ Let me first say a few words on the great controversy of the present day with regard to the higher education, the difference which most broadly divides educational reformers and conservatives; the vexed question between the ancient languages and the modern sciences and arts; whether general education should be classical let me use a wider expression, and say literary—or scientific. ”

“ History, sociology, government, music, fine arts, literature, logic, psychology, philosophy, religion, and various sciences presented as liberal rather than technical education—mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy—these subjects are often condemned as impractical. ”

“ The preliminary training that is the undergraduate work at the universities consisted of the Seven Liberal Arts—the trivium and quadrivium, which embraced logic, rhetoric, grammar, metaphysics, under which was included not a little of physics, cosmology in which some biology was studied, as well as psychology and mathematics, astronomy, and music. ”

“ Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. ”