Alumni Oration

"The Alumni Oration. Delivered by Prof. W.F. Ganong" University Monthly XVI, 8 (May 1897): 205-211. (UA Case 67a, Box 1)

The invitation of the Alumni Society to speak for its members at this Encoenia has done me marked honor and brought me keen pleasure. To be given the pleasure of addressing a University audience and in New Brunswick is both a gratifying expression of the confidence of my brothers Alumni and an appeal to two of my chief interests in life. Had they gone but a step farther and assigned me a subject, and made that scientific, I would have felt in perfect sympathy with this occasion. But they, whether wisely or not you will soon be able to judge, have left the subject to me, and I have thought it best to leave Science to speak for herself, which at this day she is doing in a voice which none can fail to hear or find excuse to mistake, and to try to set before you the principal phases of a subject with which I am thrown not a little into contact, and which is at one and the same time apt to the activities of an Alumni Society, near to the interests of this audience, and important to the progress of this Province. My subject is—Present Tendencies in Higher Education.

What is education? Why do we want it? Though so old and often asked these questions are yet new and unanswered, and it is true that there is no subject of equal public importance which is so little understood by those whom it most concerns. All admit its value in the abstract, but there is still in the public mind the greatest confusion between the natures of education, knowledge, information, and technical or professional training, and between the functions of the common school, the college, the technical or professional school and the University. Yet in a democracy public opinion must be instructed on these questions and give its approval before progress is possible, and a chief duty of every educational leader in America to-day is the demonstration to the public of the true nature and requirements of education. Education is not a natural quality of man; there is a constant tendency to relapse from it which only eternal vigilance can prevent, while for its advancement extra-ordinary efforts are demanded. Merely to keep what has been gained, requires the careful instruction of each new generation and constant reminder to the old, while progress claims as its price never ceasing observation, experiment and discussion, here a fact demonstrated, there a principle gained, slow, painful, but precious advance. These are the reasons why the question what is education, can never grow old.

The true basis of education seems to be this. Man is an animal whose weak and weaponless body is inferior to that of many of the brutes, but who has risen to domination over them, and much more of nature, through the possession of one supreme characteristic,—mind. Mind has been his reliance in the struggle for existence, and the sharpness of that struggle has forced him to develope it highly. Mind has enabled him to use tools, to adapt himself by their aid to conditions under which in a state of nature he could not live, and to divide labor and specialize it extremely in particular lines. To make best use of mind he has had to develope some very un-brute-like characteristics, such as care for the neighbor, subordination of present pleasure to future good, and other characteristics which we call moral. Now education is simply the deliberate attempt to direct this process, to enable man, the animal, to utilize to its fullest value his great weapon, Mind; it is the dynamical factor in the rapid and certain adaptation to the condition of his environment. Viewed broadly there are in this adaptation, that is in Education, four leading elements. First: There is the awakening of the faculties and training in the knowledge which men use in common in the daily affairs of life, and the cultivation of the qualities which subordinate the individual animal to the social man. Second: There is the training of the individual to the highest possible degree in some particular line of useful activity that he may make the best living for himself and the better perform his part of the divided labor of the community. Third: There is the exhaustive training of all the faculties of the mind up to the highest point of working efficiency in order to put the mind as a whole in a condition to utilize all its potentialities. Fourth: There is with this training as a basis the utilization of mind in new activities and the winning of new knowledge. Practically these four elements have been recognized by educators, and four distinct kinds of institutions have grown up in response to them, which we call respectively the school, the technical or professional school, the college and the university. This is a description of man, the educated animal. It is pleasant to look for a moment on the flower of it all, the educated man. What is he? He is one who highly trained in, and intensely devoted to the principles and practice of a useful business or profession; with this has culture. Culture consists not alone in wide knowledge but in wider sympathy, not so much in stores of facts, as in ability to transmute facts into knowledge, not only in well-grounded conviction but in toleration, not only in absorption of wisdom, but in its radiation, in patriotism without Provincialism, in force controlled by character. How often has all this been said before and will be said again in words that vary but in thought the same. Perhaps it is not being said better than by the great advocate and illustrious example of culture, Huxley. This is his educated man, "That man I think has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that as a mechanism it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready like a steam engine to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operation; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience, who has learned to love all beauty whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness and to respect others as himself."

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After this it will seem strange to you when I say that another great tendency in Education is towards individualism, but there is here no paradox. There is a popular impression that an educational system is best managed after the fashion of an army, with an analogous system of grades, and of drill which shall bring all of the ultimate units, private soldiers or students up to a certain high identical standard. This is believed at all events for the lower grades. No doubt this comparison holds also the explanation; armies are more familiar to most people than educational systems, and they naturally enough apply the test of one to the other. But there is of course not the slightest resemblance between the aims and methods of the two, for all soldiers are to be trained to one and the same very specialized function, while students are to be trained to all of the very different functions requisite to a highly differential community; in the one case individuality is to be suppressed for the smoother working of a great machine, in the other it is to be developed for the more profitable division of labor.

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The investigation method is the only natural one. It is that by which the race has gained its knowledge, and by which individuals climb to the greatest heights in education it is best used by placing each new thing before the student as a problem, arranged to come just within the compass of his powers, his natural interest and pleasure in the exercise of power is thus called into operation. Success is made to depend entirely upon the accuracy of his own observation and reasoning, and he is encouraged to aid and test the latter by experiment. Thus is self-reliance cultivated and confidence in his own power of independent accomplishments and desire for new problems to conquer, and the study-bogie ceases to trouble, and the meaningless recitation is laid to rest. And here I beg to call your attention to the fact that this investigation method is precisely that which is used by men of business, statesmen, inventors, and everybody else who does anything worth while in the world, and it is a remarkable demonstration of the backwardness of at least primary education that this natural and universal method is hailed in education as new, and it also helps to explain how so many men of the past have succeeded so brilliantly without education. They had the clearness of sight to see and use a method superior to that which education could give them. The self-made man has no doubt often been letter made than if so called education had had much to do with the process.

The introduction of this spirit gives the teacher a new relation to teaching. The older system with its refinement of methods has a tendency to shift the responsibility of learning off from the pupil over upon the teacher, and the more the teacher drives and drills, the more does the pupil think that his duty ends with a faithful and blind obedience to the teacher's requirements. The resultant state of affairs is that a chief part of the teacher's duty is aggressive campaigning against unwilling students, and in public estimation, the teacher who can best drive his pupils to learn, is only surpassed by him who can beguile them to learning against their will. But the natural method changes this. The teacher becomes a leader, he provides the pupil with opportunities to learn, but throws the responsibility upon him. He acts as adviser and friend and sets an example. It is astonishing how little the value of example in education is valued. The superiority of example over precept is admitted in everything else, but it is usually considered not in the least necessary that teachers should show any of the attributes of students, or do any studying beyond that necessary to refresh the memory for the daily lesson, and most institutions keep the teacher so overloaded with a teaching drudgery that no time nor strength is left for anything else. The Universities long ago recognized the value of investigation methods and realized that it was only he, who is himself an investigator, who can use investigation methods. He only understands that alert spirit of concentrated observation and reasoning which is essential to intellectual progress, and the best of them now seek only men of University training and expect them to apply University spirit; and of course with modifications it is even reaching the schools. The ideal teacher of the future will, I think, be one of carefully selected material, who has been fully educated by natural methods, and who, held in authority only so far as is necessary to the unity of the system under which he is working, will be left entirely free as to his methods, and judged only by his results. This ideal is now realized in many University and college teachers.

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Another tendency, the last I shall speak of, is towards the differentiation of educational institutions into these four, the school, the college, the technical or professional school, and the university. Earlier I have given you reasons for believing that this division is not arbitrary nor only for convenience, but is grounded adaptively in the very nature of the educational problem. These institutions must work in harmony, and hence work best under one management, but the aims and hence the tools and methods of colleges and technical schools are so different that to attempt to combine two of them, or to graft one upon the other means disaster to both. Yet this is precisely what the public so often demands and I am confident that a chief cause of the discontent in this province towards this university, is on one hand due to the failure on the part of the critics to recognize that a college and a professional school are too different to be combined, and on the other, to the failure of the university to make the distinction plain by refusing to dally with things which belong to the technical school and by its neglect to constantly set forth and illustrate its proper place in the educational and social life of the province.

It is not necessary to remind this audience of the place in education of the school, for nowhere, I suppose, is the school better understood or more valued than in New Brunswick. We are all agreed that it is the proper training place for the citizens of a civilized community, and since most of them never get beyond it, it should be made as perfect as possible for them. There seems to me need for better teaching in the lower grades; there the pupil's attitude towards study is chiefly formed, and likes and dislikes developed which powerfully influence his future. We all know that a wrong start in a subject can hardly ever be compensated, and that many a case of supposed inability to learn a difficult subject like mathematics is traceable to an unconsciously hostile attitude towards it, the result of un-sympathetic early teaching. To teach lower grades demands a less knowledge of fact than to teach the higher, but requires more wisdom, and lower grade teachers should be as thoroughly educated and well paid as high school teachers.

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A question of prominence at present in the greater colleges is that of entrance requirements and the adjustment of school to college. The movement is markedly towards fewer subjects, a certain amount of selection, and better quality. It is astonishing how little the entrance examinations have changed since the middle ages. The classic mathematics and a little history, mostly ancient, are still the standards, with one modern language added. In the meantime there has arisen through the spread of democracy a necessity for training in citizenship. Moreover there has arisen a series of interests which are engrossing the attention of the world to an extent that none of the other subjects have ever gone, namely, the natural sciences. And yet few colleges require any of these for entrance, but only the old subjects as if the world were not moving. I consider it simply barbarous that so many colleges in these days should require of eighteen year old pupils a knowledge of three languages in addition to their own, some mathematics, a little history, but no training for citizenship and no science. It is no wonder that college teachers complain that children are stuffed, not educated, that they do not know how to speak properly; that their preparation in English is miserable. It is no wonder that so many intelligent people outside of the college complain that higher education is unpractical and contributes more to pedantry and dilettanteism than to the qualities which make useful men. It is no answer to say that these subjects should be taken up in college, and not in the schools, for as most persons never go to college, that is equivalent to claiming that only college men and women should be permitted to know the things necessary to intelligent exercise of citizenship and to clear understanding of the progress of the modern world, which is a reductio ad absurdum indeed. The ideal system to aim for the present seems to me to be this, to require for admission—first, thorough training in English; second, a modern language, German or French; third, a classical language; fourth, the elements of mathematics; fifth, modern history and geography, with elements of political economy; sixth, one of the natural sciences.

This condemnation of present entrance requirements is not my own but is wide-spread. The Commission of New England Colleges has been for some years at work upon it and the Faculty of Harvard College has recently taken up the entire subject and something will come out of their discussion of it. A system, the college, like the university, has its ideal, the seeking of absolute truth. Before this all artificial lines of doctrines and sects go down, most of the greater institutions started as denominational colleges, but they are far away from that now. The denominational college is most useful in a new and poor community; support can be obtained for it from people who could not be induced to give to an institution unless at the same time they feel they are giving to their church: and they will send their sons to such a college when they would not to one that is undenominational, for of these there is always more or less of suspicion among people who are afraid of possible jars to the foundation of their faith. But with increasing knowledge this disappears, and colleges tend to become undenominationalized. That in these provinces the denominational colleges predominate so largely shows that we are still in a stage which some communities have long since passed beyond.

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In summary, the points I have tried to make plain to you are these: Education is not up to the needs of the age but is advancing. It cannot be judged in its methods by utilitarian standards. The greatest advances are occurring in the centers of wealth and population, and principles are being there deduced which all should study, and not copy, but adapt. The tendencies are at present towards training citizens rather than individuals, towards cultivating individuality; towards requiring teachers to be professionals; towards a natural and not a scholastic spirit in teaching and learning; towards optimum rather than maximum results; towards specialization as the basis of breadth; towards the larger use of the sciences; towards the differentiation of four kinds of educational institutions, of which the school and the college are indispensable in every community, the technical school vital to its material prosperity. Much of what I have said does not directly apply to this community at present but it is a great gain to have before us guiding principles.

Members of the Graduating Class:

I passed from this college thirteen years before you, and in that time I have noticed some things which may interest you. I have observed that it pays to cultivate character; that temperance is consistent with hard work; that the familiar saying, there is room at the top, is true; that the man who succeeds is not the one who does everything that is expected of him, but the one who does more; that plodding, concentrated industry makes more solid advance than brilliant spurting; that every step one takes should lead logically to another in the chosen path; that leaping beyond competitors is more satisfactory than pulling them back; that service of the community brings greater pleasure than service to self; that well-based independence of thought and action brings respect; that it pays to have the same the best. Another might tell you things in other words, but I am a specialist and must stick to my line. Every precept of religion that I know of is independently confirmed by science. Of all tendencies of the present day in education, in thought, in life, the greatest is towards this, the Unity of Truth.