Elementary Lecturing with the help of Schedules. 45 
All these considerations'are of course the merest commonplaces 
to professional educationists, but they are very generally neglected 
by university teachers. Mr. Church, in his elementary teaching at 
Oxford, has adopted a method by which the defects of the ordinary 
lecture are largely overcome. The method is not new—the writer 
himself used it with success in one of the first elementary courses 
he ever gave, a great many years ago : it is to some extent embodied 
in all lecture courses of which a fairly full syllabus is issued ; and for 
all we know it may be used extensively in the colleges and universities 
of the country. The method is simply to write down the substance 
of the lecture—the leading facts and ideas—in a condensed form, 
and to distribute copies, printed or otherwise multiplied, to the 
members of the class. Thus the student has, and knows that he 
has, the substance of what he would otherwise have to try to write 
down in his notebook, in an accurate and authoritative form. He is 
therefore free to attend to the lecture with his whole mind, being 
relieved from the strain of trying to get down as much as he can, and 
thus from the necessity of attending , not to what the lecturer is 
saying, but to what he said several seconds before. He can sit back 
and appreciate the lecture as a whole, get the whole thing into 
perspective, allow the light and shade, the varying emphasis, to make 
its full impression. Mr. Church expresses the difference by saying 
that whereas he used to lecture to a row of heads, with their 
attached hands writing for dear life, he now addresses a set of 
human beings listening to what he has to say. The only possible 
disadvantage of the method is that it enables the incorrigibly lazy 
student to be a little lazier, to leave his mind a blank or let it 
wander through the entire discourse. But it is doubtful if such 
students can be perceptibly benefited by any system of lecturing 
as such. 
Secure in the knowledge that his class possesses copies of the 
main substance of his topic, the lecturer need not keep closely to 
the printed text. He may, if he chooses, elaborate special points, 
discuss further illustrations, develop side lines, or what not. He 
is no longer bound to plod laboriously through his basal data, for 
those are recorded in the leaflets. The printing press takes over 
the mechanical function of imparting cut and dried data, and both 
the lecturer and the class are free to enjoy the real irreplaceable 
advantages of viva voce teaching—the influence of the living 
personality of the teacher and the power of varying emphasis. 
