TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L.— PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. ()09 



Section L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 

 President of the Section. — Eight Eev. J. E. C. Welldon, I.).D„ 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 31. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



An Educational Review. 



It is my duty, as it is my pleasure, to express my cordial thanks to the Council 

 of the British Association for the honour they have done me in asking me 

 to occupy the Presidential Chair of the Educational Section at their annual 

 meeting. They have remembered what I was almost beginning to forget — that 

 I was once a schoolmaster. Yet perhaps he who has once been a schoolmaster 

 can never entirely lose the scholastic temper or, at least, I am afraid, tho 

 scholastic manner. Some slight comfort, however, I find in reflecting that there 

 is probably no profession which has been adopted and, I must regretfully add, 

 has been abandoned, by so many distinguished men and women as the educational. 

 It happened to me at one time to examine for a special purpose all the lives 

 recorded in the ' Dictionary of National Biography ' ; and the number of the 

 persons who were there stated to have been more or less constantly engaged in 

 tuition was not less surprising than pleasing to an old schoolmaster. Apart 

 from such persons as were born, in the proverbial phrase, with a golden spoon in 

 their mouths, it is safe, I think, to assert that one out of every three or four 

 eminent Englishmen has at some time or other been a teacher. Nor is this the 

 truth in England or in Great Britain alone; it is true everywhere. Not to 

 speak of lifelong educators or of persons whose principal work was done in 

 education, there occur to me the names of such men as Isocrates, Aristotle, 

 Origen. St. Jerome, Cardinal Wolscy, Erasmus, Milton, Kousseau, Thomas Paine, 

 Dr. Johnson, Diderot, Cardinal Mezzofanti, Mazzini, President Garfield, Emer- 

 son, and Carlyle, who were all content at one time or other to make a scanty 

 living by teaching. 



Perhaps the fact that so many persons have taken up education simply as 

 a means of livelihood is the reason why there have been so many educational 

 failures. In no profession have good men and good women done so much 

 lasting harm, or have done it so often without being aware of it, as in education. 

 For an educator, like a poet, is born; he is seldom made; if he is deficient in 

 discipline or insight or sympathy, they are hard to win by practice, harder still 

 is it to win the passion for young souls ; yet the educational profession demands 

 enthusiasm above all other qualities, and I used sometimes to say to young 

 candidates for office at Harrow that, unless a man honestly felt he would 

 sooner be a teacher of boys than a Cabinet Minister, he would not be a master 

 altogether after my own heart. 



Yet the educational profession in itself, if it is not the most striking or 

 shining in the eyes of the world, may be said to be the most inspiring and 

 the most satisfying of all professions. It is the only profession which is naturally 

 1911. R R 



