Education; Educational psychology; Moral education
There is, however, one point of great importance. Every university
teacher should be himself engaged in research, and should have
sufficient leisure and energy to know what is being done in his subject
in all countries. In university teaching, skill in pedagogy is no
longer important; what is important is knowledge of one’s subject and
keenness about what is being done in it. This is impossible for a man
who is overworked and nervously exhausted by teaching. His subject is
likely to become distasteful to him, and his knowledge is almost sure
to be confined to what he learnt in youth. Every university teacher
ought to have a Sabbatical year (one in every seven), to be spent in
foreign universities or in otherwise acquiring knowledge of what is
being done abroad. This is common in America, but European countries
have too much intellectual pride to admit that it is necessary. In this
they are quite mistaken. The men who taught me mathematics at Cambridge
were almost wholly untouched by the Continental mathematics of the
previous twenty or thirty years; throughout my undergraduate time, I
never heard the name of Weierstrass. It was only by subsequent travel
that I came in contact with modern mathematics. This was no rare or
exceptional circumstance. Of many universities at many periods similar
things could be said.
There is in universities a certain opposition between those who care
most for teaching and those who care most for research. This is almost
entirely due to a wrong conception of teaching, and to the presence of
a number of students whose industry and capacity are below the level
which ought to be exacted as a condition of residence. The idea of the
old-fashioned schoolmaster persists to some extent at universities.
There is a desire to have a good moral effect on students, and a wish
to drill them in old-fashioned worthless information, largely known to
be false but supposed to be morally elevating. Students ought not to
be exhorted to work, but they should not be allowed to remain if they
are found to be wasting their time, whether from idleness or from lack
of ability. The only morality which can be profitably exacted is that
of work; the rest belongs to earlier years. And the morality of work
should be exacted by sending away those who do not possess it, since
evidently they had better be otherwise employed. A teacher should not
be expected to work long hours at teaching, and should have abundant
leisure for research; but he should be expected to employ this leisure
wisely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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