1894. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 251 



of the higher professions. If for these reasons only, we welcome the 

 new Commission on Secondary Education. But although it contains 

 many good names, it is specially weak on the side of the natural 

 sciences. Science is represented on it by Mrs. Bryant, D.Sc, Dr. R. 

 Wormell, Sir Henry Roscoe. We should Hke to have seen some 

 representatives of the scientific teaching of Agriculture, of Medicine ; 

 some representatives of pure sciences Hke Biology and Geology. 



Lord Playfair on University Extension. 



Addressing students connected with the London Society for the 

 Extension of University Teaching (on March 10), Lord Playfair 

 paid a wise and eloquent tribute to the activity and utility of 

 University extension. He regarded the hostile evidence given before 

 the Royal Commission on the University of London as having arisen 

 from a misunderstanding of the origin and purposes of extension. Up 

 to the last quarter of the eighteenth century the working classes were 

 separated by an impassable barrier from the learned class, for these 

 spoke in a language the others could not understand. For about 

 two thousand years Latin was the learned tongue, and for about two 

 centuries Greek was raised as a second wall of separation 

 between the learned and the people. University extension was an 

 attempt to extend the higher knowledge to the people who are unable 

 to attend courses during the day. Its main purpose was not to 

 educate the masses, but to permeate them with the desire for 

 intellectual improvement, and to show them methods by which they 

 could attain this desire. 



So far as extension limits itself to these great objects it must 

 receive the approval of fair-minded people. But extension covers a 

 multitude of sins, although it is only fair to say that the London 

 Association is less a sinner than either Oxford or Cambridge. In the 

 vast population of London it is possible to get together audiences 

 who will prefer the competent expert to the mere lecturer. But in 

 the provinces it is not so, and the lecturers of the Oxford and 

 Cambridge centres are for the most part successful and popular in 

 the inverse ratio of their special knowledge of their subjects. With 

 this in itself we have no quarrel. An evangelist of the Gospel 

 requires no Hebrew or even Greek. A lecturer whose business is to 

 arouse the people, not to educate them, need be no profound thinker 

 or learned scholar. But, at least on its present lines, the University 

 Extension system is unadapted to the teaching of those who are 

 themselves to teach, and against its pretensions to recognition from 

 Government, or from bodies granting degrees, an emphatic protest 

 must be made. For, unfortunately, on every side we hear it urged 

 by the official representatives of the movement that a great educa- 

 tional work among teachers is being done. Teachers, like others, 

 need stimulation and awakening, but stimulation and awakening are 

 quite other than professional education. The theatrical methods of 



