A WILD ASSERTION.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1550, 20 September 1912, Page 4

A WILD ASSERTION.

PROFESSOR PICKEN AND SIR ROBERT STOUT. (To the Editor.) Sir,—The paragraph headed "University Students: How Do They Leave College?" in to-day's Dominion, calls for a little further notice. Sir Robert Stout apparently saddled me with' responsibility lor the assertion that "a great majority of students, after a course at the university, left it wrecked physically, mentally, and morally," and, when he was challenged, allowed tho blamo for what he had mis-stated to rest upon the inaccuracies of a newspaper report. Tho quotation you publish from the actual report—a report in which Sir Robert Stout said ho had read the assertion in question, and a report with which all the other reports agreed in this particular—shows that mis-reporting was in no way to blame for Sir Robert Stout's very grave misrepresentation of what I said. . Let mo ask you to compare my carefully chosen phraso "less sound in body and mind and soul" with the wild assertion "wrecked physically, mentally, and morally," apparently credited to me by Sir Robert Stout; and let mo get tho point homo by means of an analogy which you will appreciate:—Tin: Dominion asserts that tho financial position of this country is less sound than it was, say, ten yeafs ago—and immediately the cry goes abroad that New Zealand is wrecked financially. I am sorry to have to indict myself upon you again, but it is now necessary for me to ask you to print tho accurato Record of what I said in tho context of tho phrase objected to. It runs this way: "The student, unless ho is of an exceptionally independent mind, must mako what is his only chance of a 11 university education (viz., the training under bis professors) altogether subsidiary to the examinations of tho University Senate, conducted by men whose only knowledge of tho actual work done is what they can learn from a bald syllabus. The College Councils can hardly be blamed if they estimate success by the results of those examinations, or by tlie numbers' of students attending classes, which ' to a very great extent depends on the success of tho classes in passing students through the university examination mill. And these considerations do not touch the question of whether any real university" work is being done. The conditions aro such that the work required can be very much better done by coaching hacks than by distinguished men of learning (and at a much loiter cost); and,' that being so, it may be taken as certain that, so far from the work being done for whick the university exists, a great majority of the students leave the colleges less sound in body and mind and soul than on the day they entered' (except for the salutary influence of their personal contact with oVie another). All this implies a great waste of public money, etc."

It will be seen that the phrase, to which (in isolation) so much exception has been taken, appeared in a proposition deduced from tho conditions under which university work is carried on in New Zealand: it stood essentially as part of a connected argument of somo length. The idea in my mind was that the object of university training -is above all things to leave those who have undergone it very much more sound, in mind and soul at any rate, than on tho day they entered upon it; and it is my reasoned .conviction (which I would l)e glad of the chance to elaborate at length before a lioyal Commission) that tho conditions of university education in New Zealand do not tend to produce that result—and,therefore, by a law of human affairs, tend tho other way. I leave it to you to judge whether an impartial reader would have read any other meaning into my (extremely condensed) statement.—l am, etc., D. IC. PICKEN. Wellington, September 19, 1912.