ISBN: 9780217839662

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not … Mehr…

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... in education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and simple method of earning a livelihood. The blame must, I fear, fall first upon the Universities. I am not speaking of the education there provided for the honour men, which is often excellent of its kind; though it must be confessed that the keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a kind from which it is useless to expect either animation or precision, so long will a blight rest upon the education of the country. While boys of average abilities continue to be sent to the Universities, and while... Arthur Christopher Benson, Books, Fiction and Literature, From a college window Books>Fiction and Literature <