Permit me to place
before you the result of my reflections.
Under one aspect a university is a particular kind of educational
institution, and the views which we may take of the proper nature of a
university are corollaries from those which we hold respecting education
in general. I think it must be admitted that the school should prepare
for the university, and that the university should crown the edifice,
the foundations of which are laid in the school. University education
should not be something distinct from elementary education, but should
be the natural outgrowth and development of the latter. Now I have a
very clear conviction as to what elementary education ought to be; what
it really may be, when properly organised; and what I think it will be,
before many years have passed over our heads, in England and in America.
Such education should enable an average boy of fifteen or sixteen to
read and write his own language with ease and accuracy, and with a sense
of literary excellence derived from the study of our classic writers: to
have a general acquaintance with the history of his own country and with
the great laws of social existence; to have acquired the rudiments of
the physical and psychological sciences, and a fair knowledge of
elementary arithmetic and geometry.
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