PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 703 
qualifications of the teachers to impart it. Moreover, these local bodies have shown, 
in many instances, a distrust of expert advice and a desire to act independently as 
elected representatives of the people, which cannot fail for some time at least to 
lead to waste of effort and of means. It was said years ago, when the centre of 
our political forces received a marked displacement, that we must educate our 
masters, Our masters now, both in politics and education, are the people, and it 
is only, I believe, by improving their education that we can enable them to under- 
stand the essential difficulties of the problems which they are expected to solve, 
and can induce them to rely, to a greater extent than they do at present, on the 
results of the application to such problems of scientific method, founded on the 
fullest information obtainable from historical and contemporary sources. 
I might have illustrated my subject by reference to the acknowledged 
chaotic condition of our secondary education. In the report of the Board 
of Education published in December last we read: ‘While the develop- 
ment of secondary education is the most important question of the pre- 
sent day, and is the pivot of the whole education as it affects the efficiency, 
intelligence, and well-being of the nation, yet its present position may be 
described as ‘‘chaos.”’ The ‘chaos’ by which the present position of our 
secondary education is here described is intimately connected with the questions 
relating to primary education, which I have been engaged in considering. If we 
construct a system of primary education which serves equally for children of all 
classes, apart from social conditions—a system educationally sound, both as a 
preparation for immediate wage-earning pursuits and for more advanced and 
somewhat more specialised training in a secondary school, many of the difficulties 
which confront the Board of Education, and which are largely of an administra- 
tive order, would disappear. The difficulties are in part dependent on the 
question of curriculum, to the discussion of which a day will be devoted during 
the present meeting. 
University education in this country, and indeed in other countries, has also 
suffered much from the hands of the unscientific reformer. In Germany, owing 
to many causes, the higher education has made considerable advances during the 
past century; but, even in that country, a more critical study of the development 
of University education and a truer recognition of the twofold function of a 
University might have prevented the early separation in distinct institutions and 
under separate regulations of the higher technical from University instruction, 
Only within recent years has France retraced her steps and returned to the 
University ideal of seven centuries ago, But perhaps the climax of unscientific 
thinking was reached in the scheme, happily abandoned, of founding a new Uni- 
versity in Dublin on the lines suggested by Mr. Bryce in his now famous speech 
of January last. 
Our conception of the functions of a University has undergone many violent 
changes. Between the ideal of the University of London prior to its reorganisa- 
tion and that of a medizeval University, in which students were never plucked, 
obtaining their degrees whether they did their work well or badly, there have 
been many variations; but I think it may be said that, recently at any rate, we 
have come to realise the fact that our Universities, to fulfil their great purpose, 
must be schools for the preparation of students for the discharge of the higher 
duties of citizenship and professional life, and Institutions for the prosecution of 
research, with a view to the promotion of learning in all its branches, and that 
examinations for degrees, necessary, as they undoubtedly are, as tests of the extent 
of a student’s acquired knowledge, must be regarded as subordinate to these two 
great functions. 
I will not detain you longer. I have endeavoured to show under what limita- 
tions education may lay claim to be included among the sciences, and how a 
knowledge of the history of education and the application of the methods of 
scientific inquiry may help in enabling us to solve many of the intricate and 
complicated questions which are involved in the establishment on a firm founda- 
tion of a national system of education. I have taken my illustrations mainly 
from the reform of elementary, or, as I prefer to call it, primary education, and 
