president's address. 1231 



Those who have had anything to do with the various University- 

 Examinations in which pupils from Public and other Primary 

 Schools compete, know well how terrible a failure the teaching of 

 this subject on the average must be. And in such a matter failure 

 is not merely the negative of proficiency, but it is a positive proof 

 of deterioration and stupefaction of the mind. No one not trained 

 to this analysis-business could, unless by a preternatural talent of 

 fatuity, display such a total incapacity to comprehend things as a 

 very large number of competitors do. As soon as one of them has 

 lead a sentence as proposed for parsing or analysis, it seems to lose 

 all meaning, and its reader to lose all sense. And yet this very 

 work ought to be the most logical part of our teaching, instead 

 of being, as it is in the opinion of many competent judges, the most 

 unscientific, and positively detrimental. 



I have alluded to the comparative contempt with which some 

 of these subjects are treated in those schools which lay claim to 

 the most aristocratic, if not philosophic methods of instruction and 

 discipline. But these wearisome subjects are nevertheless rendered 

 necessary by the existence of an obsolete system of orthography, 

 and an antiquated set of weights and measures, and it is of no 

 use to ignore the system under which we live. Until we reform 

 it, we must work it. It is the best we have, and ought to be used. 

 And so a just Nemesis has inflicted on the higher schools a 

 grievous imposition of tasks quite as disagreeable, much heavier, 

 and, in nine cases out of ten, without the compensation of utility. 

 Now, I am not going to run down the study of Ancient Literature. 

 On the contrary I hold it to be — for those who have both capacity 

 and leisure — one of the most fertile fields in which the human 

 mind can work. But I do protest against the general enforcement 

 of its cultivation, and more particularly, upon the methods which 

 have come to be adopted, especially during the last half century. 

 Principias and Initias and other rubbish of the kind have nearly 

 jostled any exercise of the thinking faculty out of the school door, 

 and the incessant practice of composition not only absorbs a most 

 disproportionate amount of time and labour, but also in nine cases 

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