ere 
THE UNIVERSITY AND WOMEN’S WORK 67 
how sharp the distinction once was between these professions 
and other callings in life, and how little there was in the 
practical arts that exacted anything in the way of formal 
education beyond that general training of the intelligence, 
which improves the mental powers without in any way 
specializing knowledge. Special training for the practical arts, 
so long as they were nothing but crafts, lay only in practising 
them under a good master; apprenticeship was the real 
preparatory school. An extended school or college education 
did not seem to be very much to the point. It seemed to 
involve the risk of detaching a man from the currents of active 
life and making him into a kind of superior person endowed 
with a large fund of unnegotiable paper knowledge. It 
involved, also, a sacrifice of those early years of practical 
training which some people consider indispensable for the 
inculcation of good craftsmanship. ) 
It is surely to be deplored that the educational institutions 
and systems of this country have been so much designed for 
the interest of one set of callings, and that they have been so 
slowly adapted to changing needs. 
It is not uncommon to find people talking of universities as 
pre-eminently places for general education. No doubt they 
are so in a broad sense, that is to say, so far as general 
culture of the mind, the training of character, the development 
of individuality, and the acquisition of the graces are concerned. 
But surely it is also the case that the older universities were 
and still are, to a very large degree, schools of specialized 
professional knowledge. Oxford and Cambridge have been 
training schools for ministers of religion, for lawyers, doctors, 
schoolmasters, statesmen, men of letters,-and men of science, 
and this fact has had the most important consequences. The 
preparatory education suitable for these special studies became 
stereotyped as the one and only kind of preparatory education 
for mankind in general, and it was established, in various 
