UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE. 647 



UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE.* 



By SIR RICHARD C. JEBB, LlTT. D., D.C.L., M.P. 



TTWEBY country has educational problems of its own, intimately 

 -*— ■ dependent on its social and economic conditions. The pro- 

 gressive study of education tends, indeed, towards a certain amount of 

 general agreement on principles. But the crucial difficulties in fram- 

 ing and administering educational measures are very largely difficulties 

 of detail; since an educational system, if it is to be workable, must be 

 more or less accurately adjusted to all the complex circumstances of a 

 given community. As one of those who are now visiting South Africa 

 for the first time, I feel that what I bring with me from England is an 

 interest in education, and some acquaintance with certain phases of it 

 in the United Kingdom; but with regard to the inner nature of the 

 educational questions which are now before this country, I am here to 

 learn from those who can speak with knowledge. In this respect the 

 British Association is doing for me very much what a famous bequest 

 does for those young men whom it sends to Oxford; I am, in fact, a 

 sort of Rhodes scholar from the other end — not subject, happily, to an 

 age limit — who will find here a delightful and instructive opportunity 

 of enlarging his outlook on the world, and more particularly on the 

 field of education. 



As usage prescribes that the work of this section, as of others, 

 should be opened by an address from the chair, I have ventured to take 

 a subject suggested by one of the most striking phenomena of our time 

 — the growing importance of that part which universities seem destined 

 to play in the life of nations. 



Among the developments of British intellectual life which marked 

 the Victorian age, none was more remarkable, and none is more impor- 

 tant to-day, than the rapid extension of a demand for university educa- 

 tion, and the great increase in the number of institutions which supply 

 it. In the year 1832 Oxford and Cambridge were the only universities 

 south of the Tweed, and their position was then far from satisfactory. 

 Their range of studies was too narrow; their social operation was too 

 limited. Then, by successive reforms, the quality of their teaching 

 was improved, and its scope greatly enlarged; their doors were opened 



* Address by the president to the Educational Science Section of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, South Africa, 1905. 



