of bringing this fact before authorities in the Universities from time to time since 1872, but it is difficult to believe that they have yet fairly realized the actual state of things. All the new machinery for Education will fail to produce the effect expected of it, if this evil be not quickly remedied. The Education Department is quite entitled to hold that a University curriculum shall be incomplete, so far as the teacher is concerned, if it do not include a knowledge of the principles and practice of Education; but to go further than this is an insult to the Universities of Scotland, which these bodies, however, seem slow to feel. The Universities are being dissociated from the teaching profession. The evil might be faced-and we might reconcile ourselves to the infliction of this blow on the University system of Scotland, especially as the Universities themselves seem to accept their position with the silence which indicates acquiescence-were it not that the education of the country is imperiled, and all that has been distinctive of Scottish school life is threatened. It is to be hoped that we shall have ere long a recognized University curriculum for teachers, and that the impending danger may be thus far obviated.

Do not imagine that the education of the country can be maintained by Codes, with an array of specific subjects to be paid for at so much a head. The higher instruction has been given in the past, not for money, but for love. Teachers, having formed their standard at the Universities, carried that standard down with them into the country, and were proud of the opportunity of forming classes in Mathematics and Latin. They felt that they kept themselves up to a higher level by connecting themselves with University work, and they saw that this higher instruction told on the intelligence, and above all on the morale, of the whole school. It is by sending out able and ambitious men, not by the manipulation of a Code (although this too has importance), that true education is promoted. Nor is it only for those who are competent to go direct from the school to the University that a curriculum is demanded, but also for those Training College students of one or two years' standing, who desire to carry their education further, and to qualify for the higher class of Public and for Secondary Schools.

In brief, a Faculty of Education is in a certain sense already constituted in the Training Colleges of the Empire; we desire to lift this up, and to constitute such a Faculty in the Universities, because we believe that there is a national work to be done which the Universities are alone competent to do. It is true that, if the curriculum which we contemplate is carried out, a certain small proportion of Training College students will pass over the Training Colleges altogether. Is this a matter for regret or alarm? Are the Scottish Universities, which have always been institutions that maintained a close connection with the people, and endeavored to supply the wants of the various professions, to be excluded now and permanently from all connection with the profession of education, because Training Colleges will lose from 5 to 10 per cent. of

their students? The heads of the Training Colleges do not, I am satisfied, share the fear which some have expressed, and the finances of these institutions are placed far above the reach of injury by any such slight innovation. Those who imagine the Training Colleges will be materially affected, except for good, by this new movement, speak in utter ignorance of those seminaries, and the sources of their strength.

Relation of Chair to Teaching Profession.

Further, the institution of this Chair, by providing professional instruction for teachers, not only directly benefits the schools of the country, but it increases the importance of the teaching body. It gives it an academic standing. It makes it possible to institute for the first time in our Universities a Faculty of Education, just as we may be said already to have a Faculty of Law, of Engineering, and of Agriculture. It thereby raises the whole question of the Art of Education, as such, to a higher level, and may serve more than almost any other external influence to attract into the occupation of schoolmaster men who might otherwise pass it by for occupations which have hitherto ranked higher in the conventional estimate of the world. It promotes the movement, which has been steadily progressing for twenty years, for the recognition of the large body of teachers as a great national institution—an organized profession, looking, as other professions do, to the University as its source and head, and drawing strength and self-respect from that connection.

Want of Precedent.

Difficulties have been thrown in the way by a few, who are at a loss to know what the movement precisely means. Timid and distrustful, and accustomed to follow precedent as the sole safe guide, they have been groping about to find what other people are thinking. What would they say at Oxford and Cambridge? What do they do at Paris and Berlin? Now for myself I should certainly be glad to find that any educational movement here was supported by the concurrent approval of other learned centers; but I venture to affirm, and am prepared to maintain, that it is to us that other nations have to look for guidance on this question. We in Scotland have been the true pioneers in education: and do we now lag so far behind that we must be sending out scouts to see what they are doing in the front? The traditions and accumulated wisdom of three hundred years are behind us, and with all its defects our present educational system is, as a whole, still worthy of our past history. In this matter, as in others, we claim to lead Europe and America. Still, gentlemen, I must so far consider the weak brother as to tell him that in England some of the most cultivated minds of the two Universities, being met together at Winchester in the Headmasters' Conference of 1873, discussed the question of instituting Chairs of Education in Oxford and Cambridge. The mere fact that the question was seriously discussed by such a conclave, in a country whose whole training and habit of mind is alien to philosophy, is itself most significant. And although there was

no very practical issue to the Conference, opinions of weight were recorded. While desiderating, as was to be expected, arrangements for practical training, as well as for theoretical and historical instruction, the Bishop of Exeter wrote as follows:

' . . . It would be well worth while to provide that men should have the opportunity of seeing something of their business, and of reflecting on what they have seen, before they begin to teach. For this purpose the ideal system would be this: to have a Professor of Education, either in London, or in Oxford, or in Cambridge, or to have one in each; to require the Professor or Professors to give certificates to such B.A. as attended their lectures and passed a good examination in them.'

Then Dr. Kennedy of Cambridge, the eminent (Emeritus) Headmaster of Shrewsbury, says:—

... Professional lectures supported by examinations and certificates, which should be essential to the function of public school teaching, though too much must not be expected from them, seem to promise some important good. Especially this, they would give to Education the status of a faculty and profession: they would oblige every master to regard his work as professional, as work to be done on definite principles, and with high public responsibility. They would enhance the personal and social dignity of masters, and thereby promote their efficiency, their usefulness, and their happiness. Such professional lectures would, I suppose, be directed to the theory and history of Education, and also to the art and method of teaching: in all which moral and mental science, without being directly taught, would be assumed and used as a principal and regulative.' This is well said, and I willingly adopt the words as my own programme.

Having heard all this, do you think that I push my argument too far when I maintain that the subject of Education as such demands, as of right, a place in the University curriculum, with a view to the constituting of a Faculty of Education? The philosophy of Education is, in fact, now a distinct subject, and the importance and intimate relation of it to the future welfare of the nation require that it shall be held in academic honor, and provided with academic standing room. Its relation to the Universities, moreover, as a means of bringing them, through some recognized functionary, a functionary controlled by the responsibilities of his position, into close connection with the whole scholastic machinery of the country, thereby extending their just influence, is sufficiently obvious.

University Objections to a Chair of Education.

We have, however, still other objections to the founding of an Education Chair to face, proceeding mainly from those who take what might be called an Academic view of the question. Education, they say, is an important subject, we admit, but it is too closely allied with practice to be a fit subject for University teaching. It is a subject rather for the laboratory of the schoolmaster than for the theoretical and historical pre

lections of a Professor. Now it is to be at once admitted that this is a fair subject for debate; but I am entitled to insist that it shall be discussed as part of a larger question—this question, namely, Is a University to train for professions at all? My answer to this is, that the business of a University is to train for the professions, and that there ought to be within a University as many Faculties as there are recognized professions. It is not because of the claims which the Theory and History of Education can make to be regarded as a subject of general University discipline (though not a little might be said on this aspect of the question, beginning from Plato), that it seeks admission to a University curriculum. It is as a complement to the Faculty of Arts, as completing the preparation of the teachers of the country for their profession, that it rests its claim. That future Educators who are receiving their general instruction in a University should there also study the subject of Education, is to my mind of the nature of a truism. Nor does it seem possible for any to hold another view without including in their condemnation all University studies which have a direct bearing on special professional preparation for active life.

That a University should close its doors to all save theoretical studies, or at least to all save those which have to do with the cultivation of a man without regard to his future occupation,-is an intelligible and perhaps tenable opinion; but in these days it is unnecessary to discuss it. One has naturally much sympathy with that conception of a University, according to which it is constituted of a body of learned men, whose sole business is to pursue science and abstract studies generally, while admitting to their workshop only the select few who desire to spend their lives far from the vulgar crowd. But such an institution requires only the collegiate life to make it a secular monastery. All monasteries have a certain sentimental charm, and this kind of nineteenth-century monastery not least. But our modern, especially Scottish, Universities, are far removed from such a conception. They are compromises between the theoretical and the practical. They aim at one end of their curriculum to meet and welcome the intelligence of the youth of the country, and at the other to connect themselves with the duties of active life. And if, in thus adapting themselves to the needs of the time, they have thought it wise to constitute or complete certain Faculties, is the equipping of the future teacher of the country with the principles, history, and methods of his special task of less moment than the equipping of the future engineer, agriculturist, physician, or lawyer?

There is yet another objection taken by a few—an objection which is certainly specious. We admit,' they say, 'the importance of the subject in itself; we recognize the desirableness of using the Universities to supply the professions of the country, because we think that we thereby contribute to the strength and dignity of those professions, and send out recruits who, along with their professional knowledge, carry with them a certain portion of University culture, and so contribute to maintain a

high standard of social life. This culture we endeavor to give, regarding it as an essential part of the merely professional training, and that whereby we prevent the University from being converted into a mere aggregate of specialist colleges. But, while admitting all this, we shall recognize no subject of instruction in any Faculty which can not rank itself among the sciences, either in itself or by direct affiliation.' There is much vagueness and half thought about this objection. It seems to be forgotten that very many of the existing Chairs are divorced by their very nature from the category of sciences. All those Chairs which have to do with Humane Letters, not merely the Chairs of ancient tongues, but of Philosophy and Literature, and even Law, have a place in the higher education of youth by virtue of qualities which are, it is not too much to say, antagonistic to the conception of science. The truth is, that the objections urged on the scientific ground are a covert attack on The Humanities, and especially on the Philosophy of Mind in all its branches. The objectors start with the assumption that nothing is worthy of University study save science, and at the same moment they restrict the term 'science' to aggregates of fact that can be demonstrated in such a way as not to admit of question. There is no science in this, the strictest acceptance of the term, except Mathematics and those branches of knowledge which rest on Mathematics.

Botany, for example, is not a science in the restricted sense of the term; it may be one day a science, but as yet it is only a system of classification, and a record of interesting observations and reasonings on the physiology of vegetable organisms-so far as they go, correct and verifiable. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there is nothing to prevent a discovery in Biology being made, which would revolutionize the fundamental conception of Botany in one day. Botany may be held to represent other departments of knowledge to which the name of science is freely accorded. The objectors would not drive such studies as Botany out of the Universities, because they include them (as I think, inconsistently) in their notion of science. The fact is, that such objectors respect Botany and similar studies, because they are at least possible sciences, inasmuch as they deal with what can be seen by the eye of sense, and handled and weighed and measured, and so forth. Their objection to Education as a special branch of study is at bottom this, that it adds another to the list of humane studies which already disturb their scientific intellects to wit, Classics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics, and I rather suspect Political Economy too. To History they may condescend to give academic standing room, because after all it has to do with things that did make their appearance as phenomena on the face of the planet, and probably admit of some sort of co-ordination. But as to those other departments of thought which I have named, and all such, the sooner they are dispatched to the limbo of ineptitudes the better. It is naturally disturbing to such minds to find subjects, which do not admit of exact treatment, assuming rank and importance in determining the progress