222 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



leads either, as in America, to the degradation of university education or, 

 as in England, to the treatment of secondary education as if it were 

 primarily a preparatory training for the university. This is, and must 

 continue to be, the primary function of some schools with which the name 

 ' secondary ' has become specially identified ; but secondary education in 

 its wider sense is not a special training but a general need. That does not 

 make it any the less higher education, and university influence is required 

 throughout its whole range, not because universities are highly select 

 institutions, but because universities, whose business it is as teaching 

 bodies to educate grown-up men and women, are, on the whole, the best 

 guides to the teaching of boys and girls who are growing up. 



I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere as to the administrative 

 steps which the universities should take, as teaching bodies, to make their 

 influence felt in the right way, or as to the need for a close alliance between 

 universities and technical colleges as the joint guardians of the standards 

 of higher education. Universities, however, are not only teaching bodies ; 

 and this, therefore, is not the only reason why university influence is 

 essential to any policy of higher education. There is another reason, 

 even more important at the present moment. However wisely we may 

 organise higher education, our success or failure will depend on the extent 

 to which universities, colleges, schools and classes respond to a demand 

 which can only come to them from outside. This is the point I am 

 particularly concerned to emphasise to-day. Because higher education 

 is the meeting between the free pupil and the free teacher, the teacher must 

 know what the pupil demands and what will attract him ; and the 

 universities and technical colleges are in a special sense the mediators 

 between the schools and the outside demand which the schools must satisfy. 



Let me try to explain what I mean. Many people feel keenly the need 

 for greater variety and inventiveness in our schools, but they seem to rely 

 upon teachers to originate new forms of education out of the mere study 

 of the pupil's mind. This is to regard education merely as a kind of 

 spiritual dietetics, as if the teacher's only problem was to give the pupil 

 the food best suited to his mental constitution. But it is wrong, though at 

 one time it was fashionable, to regard mental health as an end in itself ; 

 it is a far higher ideal of education to regard knowledge as an end in 

 itself, and to realise that the teacher's highest function is to pass on to his 

 pupil the knowledge that is the birthright of each succeeding generation. 

 The study of Einstein may be a less healthy mental food than the study of 

 Newton, but the teacher must pass on to his pupil the physics of the 

 present, not of the past. It is the new knowledge that makes the new 

 learning ; it is in evolving appropriate methods of teaching new things 

 that the teacher changes and varies education. The motive force of 

 innovation in education must come, therefore, from the discoverer of 

 new knowledge, whether his discovery be a new continent, a dead language, 

 a new gas, a new bacillus, or a new machine. But the discoverer does not, 

 as a rule, transmit this motive force directly to the teacher ; he transmits 

 it through other men who make it their business to synthesize new know- 

 ledge, to suggest the principles of a new physiology or to assemble new 

 machines into a new factory unit. It is these men who act, or should act, 

 directly upon the teacher and if, in an age of growing knowledge, fresh 



