254 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



are relatively happy only because they are blind to the beauties of the 

 world around them. One pities the Wrangler as one does a deaf man at 

 a concert, or a colour-blind man at a flower show. 



Nature knowledge now is getting into the position that science 

 generally occupied in the older classical schools : it is accessible only to 

 the boy whose bent is too strong for the teacher, and who thus shows an 

 individuality which tends to mark him down and so confirm his position 

 as a freak. Possibly I am exaggerating, but it is obvious that scholar- 

 ships are driving us to premature specialisation. The schools conform to 

 the universities : each professor in the university pounces on the scholar 

 and turns him to account as a recruit for his Honours school. 



If I do no more than encourage some of you to read Sir Richard 

 Gregory's Address again, my intrusion into this Section may be partially 

 justified. 



In an Address to the Universities Congress five years ago, Dr. Farnell, 

 then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, referred to as ' alarming ' the recent 

 decline of classical studies and their replacement by science, even at 

 ' Oxford, the stronghold of Hellenism.' 



This change-over to science and technology, dictated largely by 

 utilitarian motives, is even more alarming to the teachers of science, 

 whose agitation to this end has been embarrassingly successful ; for the 

 change brings with it a responsibility which was unforeseen in its fullness. 

 When we remember that our chief public men and our army of adminis- 

 trators, here and overseas, who have made the British Empire what it is, 

 have been trained mainly on classics, the duty of replacing them effectively 

 falls on our teachers of science as a burden that they ought to feel as 

 serious. That our classical teachers have been successful, even con- 

 spicuously so, is beyond question. Anyone who has had the privilege of 

 watching the members of the Indian Civil Service carrying on the 

 administration of their districts — with sympathy as well as efficiency, not 

 here and there, but generally ; not under the eye of the Press or of 

 Parliament, but isolated, alone and unobserved — would seriously seek for 

 the cause of their efficiency and character ; for nine-tenths of the data 

 employed in their early education has had no direct application to the 

 problems that they have now to tackle. 



I do not feel inclined to modify the words that I used here in 1924 in 

 drawing the attention of teachers in engineering institutes to their new 

 responsibilities — ' Stresses set up by limitations of time and economic 

 necessities force us, in modern educational institutions, to concentrate 

 our attention on, and even in some instances to limit it to, professional 

 and vocational subjects. But it is our duty to see that these stresses do 

 not exceed the intellectual elastic limits of our students, and so be followed 

 by mental strains. 



' If the older system of classical education justified itself, not by the 

 outturn of experts in the Greek and Latin languages, but by the develop- 

 ment of character and capacity for affairs, we have to see to it that science 

 and technology are also so taught that these essential features are developed, 

 not inhibited, in the student.' 



