54^ Report S.A.A. Advancement of Science. 



The students, in other words, fall into three equal groups. Or 

 We can express it this way. There are three equal educational institu 

 tions (on basis of Arts degree), the teaching College at Cape Town, 

 the teaching College at Stellenbosch, and the examining University at 

 Cape Town, fed by a number of smaller schools and private students. 

 The actual yearly averages are: — S.A.C., 12; Victoria, 12; others, 

 13. If we take as a basis the Intermediate Arts Examination, 

 Stellenbosch has an annual average of 27.2, South African College 

 of 19.7, while the greater number of compeiing schools, and the 

 greater care with which the less efficient institutions can coach candi- 

 dates for this examination makes the " other colleges, etc.," line 

 considerably greater, its average being 39. 



When we come to Engineering, Mining, Surveying, and Law, we 

 find fewer competing institutions. The onlv Colleges regularly 

 preparing men for the survey examination in numbers are the South 

 African College, Victoria College, the Diocesan College and Rhodes 

 College, while Maritzburg College has passed five, and Grey College 

 one, in the last three years. A few other schools occasionally prepare 

 candidates ; the great majority are, however, private students. 



With the exception of 3 boys prepared at the Maritzburg College, 

 all the students who have taken the first mining examination of the 

 Cape, and the first and second annual examinations of the Transvaal 

 Technical Institute have been trained at the South African College, 

 the Victoria College, and the Technical Institute. Grey College has 

 done the work of the first year of the Technical Institute in the case 

 of one student. 



In Law, taking the senior or qualifying examinations as a basis, 

 by far the greater number of candidates are private students, the 

 number of such reaching to 104 last year. The average number of 

 students graduating or obtaining Law Certificates from the South 

 African College for the last 3 years is 29, the Transvaal University 

 College had 30 successes last year (its first) while the Diocesan College 

 averages for the last three years five successes, and Grey College has 

 twice, and Rhodes College once, passed a student. 



So much for the present position of University Education in 

 South Africa. It may safely be said that the majority of those 

 qualified to give an opinion regard the present state of affairs as 

 unsound. We have a number of teaching institutions, of very varying 

 efficiency, and the same degree is given, on the same terms on the 

 one hand to the candidate who has spent three years at a fully- 

 equipped University College, in an atmosphere of research, and in 

 daily contact with specialists whose original works have secured them 

 fame in their particular subjects, and on the other hand to the 

 schonlbov w-ho has been successfully coached, probably with deficient 

 laboratory equipment, bv men who, as schoolmasters, are usually not 

 specialists, but at best trained retailers of second-hand knowledge. 

 For the schoolmaster cannot be expected to attain that degree of 

 specialisation in any one subject which is now demanded of a pro- 

 fessor, not to create that atmosphere of research which is essential 

 to University work, if the verdict of the leading men in the University 

 world in Europe and America counts for anything. 



