UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10126, 24 October 1910, Page 4

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.

A heated controversy took place in New Zealand some months back upon the question of the general scope and utility of our University system cf education. The opinions expressed were as varied as they were irreconcilable. Co-incident with the controversy which has taken place in this Dominion, is a close scrutiny of the same subject by educationalists of the Mother Country. At a recent meeting of the Educational Science section of the British Association, a very able and instructive address was delivered by Principal Miers. The keynote of the address was the need for arousing a greater sense of responsibility among University students. Direct mental training should end with school life and at the University the trained mind should be given material upon which to do responsive work in the spirit of enquiry. The entry of the University should be the moment of which Emerson said—"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in Nature, and none but he knows, what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried." Let them visit the Universities at the present moment, and, in spite of all the investigation which was being carried on, they would find the majority of students engaged in exercises in which they felt 110 responsibility whatever. In his opinion this indicated that for them the spirit of true University education had never been awakened.