PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 791 



While, therefore, it should be the aim of a teacher of young children to set 

 before them the subjects of their lessons in an attractive manner, so that the 

 novelty is never lost, and not to weary their active and restless minds with too 

 sustained an effort, it should at a later stage be the teacher's aim to keep the 

 object and purpose of the new fact or idea as constantly as possible in view, and 

 not to distract the ardent mind with purposeless and disconnected scraps of 

 learning. 



I ask you to bear this distinction in mind, for it is a principle which may 

 guide us in differentiating University methods from school methods of education. 



The distinction need not involve us in a discussion of the ' Ziel-Angabe ' in 

 elementary education, for that is rather a question of keeping the interest alive 

 during each lesson than of maintaining a permanent purpose in view throughout a 

 course. 



The much discussed Heuristic method as applied to very young children does, 

 no doubt, fulfil this object so far as it provides the inquisitive mind with novelty 

 instead of a set task, but so far as it makes the purpose more prominent than 

 the process it may become a method more suited to the adolescent or the adult 

 mind than to that of the young child. 



I can fully realise that a most difficult and anxious time for the teacher must 

 be that of the maturing intellect, in the interval between childhood and the close 

 of the school career, when the method and spirit of the teaching must to some 

 extent gradually change with the changing mental characteristics of the pupil. 

 But, whatever may be the right methods of teaching children of ten and young 

 men and women of twenty, many of our failures are due to one or both of two 

 prevalent mistakes : the first, the mistake of teaching children by methods that 

 are too advanced ; the second, that of teaching University students by methods 

 that are better adapted for school children. It is with the latter that I wish to 

 deal in this address; but we may in passing remind ourselves that when young 

 men and young women are sent straight from the University to teach children 

 with nothing but their University experience to guide them, it is not surprising 

 that they often proceed at first on wrong lines and as though they were dealing 

 with University students. 



The difficulty of divesting oneself of the mental attitude and the form of 

 expression familiar in University circles, if one is to become intelligible even to 

 the higher classes in a school, is betrayed by the unsatisfactory nature of many 

 of the papers set by University examiners to school children. The teachers com- 

 plain, and rightly complain, that there is often an academic style and form about 

 them which just make them entirely unsuitable for the child. 



It is, of course, hopefid that a diploma in pedagogy or some evidence that 

 they have received instruction in method is now generally required of those 

 who are to become teachers in schools. It seems to me, however, somewhat 

 curious that, while efforts are now being made to give instruction in educational 

 method to such persons, no similar effort is made to give instruction in more 

 advanced methods to those who are called upon at the close of their under- 

 graduate career to become University teachers, and that in consequence many of 

 them have no method at all. 



This may be a matter of comparatively small importance to those who possess 

 not only the necessary knowledge, but also the natural gift of personal influence 

 and the power of inspiring those whom, they teach. But for those who are not 

 blessed with these powers it may be almost as difficult to fall into the ways of 

 successful University instruction after the sudden transformation from student 

 iqto teacher as it is for those who become teachers in schools. 



Granting, then, that there should be a radical difference between the ways of 

 school and University teaching, and that there is at present an unfortunate 

 overlapping between the two, let me next consider how the distinction between 

 the intellectual interest of a child and the intellectual interest of a man may 

 guide us in adjusting our methods of teaching when students pass from school to 

 the University. 



A tenable, perhaps even a prevalent, view concerning a liberal school education 

 is that its chief purpose is not so much to impart knowledge as to train the mind ; 

 indeed, some teachers, influenced, perhaps, in the first instance by the views of 

 Plato, go so far as to think that no subject which is clearly of direct practical 



