THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNIVERSITIES ON SCHOOL EDUCATION. 455 



scholarships for special subjects. The scholar elected for proficiency in 

 classics and mathematics combined, and prepared to read for double 

 honours, is said to be almost extinct at Oxford, whilst the literary critic 

 complains that in some cases scholarships in mathematics and natural 

 science are awarded to candidates who are almost entirely destitute of 

 the elements of a liberal training. 



It may, I fear, also be said that history scholarships are at times 

 awarded to boys who have been diverted to exclusive reading of history 

 at a time when they would have been better employed on the general 

 curriculum of school Avork. 



And it might even be urged that in many schools the classical training 

 is little more than a sort of old-fashioned specialisation on the learning 

 of two languages, with very little of that training of thought, or taste, or 

 faculty which would be given by an adequate amount of attention to a 

 wider range of subjects, and, what deserves to be specially noted, with no 

 training at all in scientific method. 



Whatever force there may be in these various allegations, it must be 

 obvious that, in so far as premature specialisation is thus encouraged by 

 the universities, their influence on our schools is being exercised to the 

 detriment rather than the encouragement of a truly liberal and well 

 balanced educational system. 



On this theme I desire, in conclusion, to support what I have been 

 saying by calling into the witness-box a very distinguished living authority 

 who can speak to you from a direct personal experience of both school 

 and university education extending over half a century — Dr. Butler, the 

 Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and formerly Headmaster of 

 Harrow. 



In an address published about a year ago he says : ' A new creed 

 seems to have reached us from some unaccredited educational Mecca that 

 man lives by literature or science alone, and that schools live by scholar- 

 ships. 



' There has arisen in our schools a modern Polyphemus, one-eyed, mis- 

 shapen. Under his new name of specialisation pupils and teachers bow 

 down before him, cultivating exclusively just one part of the mind and 

 one only, and that sometimes the least social and the least human, as if the 

 boy were made for the subject of study and the emoluments attached to 

 it, and not the subject and its emoluments for the boy. 



' It is, for instance, one of my privileges,' he tells us, ' in the college of 

 Newton, and Bacon, and Tennyson to have a share in conducting entrance 

 scholarship examinations. 



* In connection with one of these examinations I take up the English 

 essay paper or the paper of general questions which by a recent and 

 refined barbarity, sanctioned as yet by only a few colleges, all the candi- 

 dates at Trinity are now obliged to attempt, and the English work shown 

 up by a considerable proportion of the candidates is simply appalling.' 

 Such is the description given of candidates for the prizes oft'ered by the 

 greatest of Cambridge colleges, and we may fairly ask. If this is the green 

 tree, what of the dry ? 



' I know,' he adds, 'from happy experience the excellent English which 

 many schoolboys are able to write. But in the essays I have in my 

 thoughts you can detect, after the kindliest search, no mind, no arrange- 

 ment, no substance. It would seem as though no topic had an interest 

 for the writers, and that they had, so far in their lives, found almost 



