Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to
obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use
of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a
University, the force of living example should fire the student with a
noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in
the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very
air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that
fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much
learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so
much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is
greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.
But the man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good
and even great, is, after all, only half a man. There is beauty in the
moral world and in the intellectual world; but there is also a beauty
which is neither moral nor intellectual--the beauty of the world of
Art. There are men who are devoid of the power of seeing it, as there
are men who are born deaf and blind, and the loss of those, as of
these, is simply infinite. There are others in whom it is an
overpowering passion; happy men, born with the productive, or at
lowest, the appreciative, genius of the Artist. But, in the mass of
mankind, the Aesthetic faculty, like the reasoning power and the moral
sense, needs to be roused, directed, and cultivated; and I know not why
the development of that side of his nature, through which man has
access to a perennial spring of ennobling pleasure, should be omitted
from any comprehensive scheme of University education.
All Universities recognise Literature in the sense of the old Rhetoric,
which is art incarnate in words. Some, to their credit, recognise Art
in its narrower sense, to a certain extent, and confer degrees for
proficiency in some of its branches. If there are Doctors of Music, why
should there be no Masters of painting, of Sculpture, of Architecture?
I should like to see Professors of the Fine Arts in every University;
and instruction in some branch of their work made a part of the Arts
curriculum.
I just now expressed the opinion that, in our ideal University, a man
should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge. Now, by
"forms of knowledge" I mean the great classes of things knowable; of
which the first, in logical, though not in natural, order is knowledge
relating to the scope and limits of the mental faculties of man, a form
of knowledge which, in its positive aspect, answers pretty much to
Logic and part of Psychology, while, on its negative and critical side,
it corresponds with Metaphysics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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