PRACTICE AND THEORY

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23942, 8 May 1943, Page 4

PRACTICE AND THEORY

RELATIONSHIP IN EDUCATION

ADDRESS TO GRADUATES BY PROFESSOR TOCKER

“The technical excellence that is necessary in many lines of activity can be acquired only by a training which does much to prevent the development of that type of mind which is most required to direct the technical skill. This is a real dilemma in all education, and this accounts largely for the conflict between practice and theory in educational methods.” This statement was made yesterday by Professor A. H. Tocker, Acting-Rector of Canterbury University College, in an address at the annual graduation ceremony. “The way in which a university functions in the preparation for an intellectual car.eer, such as is required for modern business or for the professions, is by promoting the imaginative consideration of the principles underlying that career,” he continued. “Its students thus pass into their period of technical apprenticeship with their imaginations already stimulated and practised in associating detailed and routine work with the general principles that govern it. In this way the routine receives its meaning and illuminates the principles which give it that meaning. Consequently, in place of the drudgery of routine work, resulting in a blind rule of thumb, the properly trained man may hope to develop a knowledge extended by imagination, but disciplined by detailed facts, by known associations among those facts, and by methods that have been tried and proved,” Professor Tocker said. *

“Here the university graduate should have a great advantage. He has studied and become informed of at least the main principles and the manner of their application within his chosen field. He should understand the nature and working of those principles as a whole, and should be able to place any particular detail in its appropriate setting. Moreover, in addition to Jhis wider knowledge and as an essential part of it, he should have at his disposal certain standards and values that have been accepted only after trial’ and proof, and an ability to apply in his own field the general methods of scientific analysis and synthesis which are common to all branches of inquiry. Add to this an imagination that has been stimulated, but also trained and disciplined by his studies, and the university graduate should possess an equipment which is invaluable and indeed essential in dealing with the complexities of the modern world. Source of Justification “It is in providing such training that the university finds its justification,” Professor Tocker said. It strives to preserve the connexion between knowledge and training on the one hand, and the zest for learning and for life on the other, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. Youth is imaginative, and where the imagination has been strengthened and strained by discipline, this energy of imagination can, in great measure,-be preserved throughout life. The tragedy of the world and the difficulty that education has to face is that those who are most imaginative have usually but slight experience, while those who are most experienced have often but little imagination. Cranks are usually people who act on imagination without knowledge. Pedants include those who act on knowledge without imagination. An important part of the task of a university is to weld together imagination and experience. Congratulations to Graduates

•, “These honours represent in every case the tangible results of sound, steady work, and constitute certificates of training undertaken, knowledge attained, and qualifications reached within the particular fields they cover,” said Professor Tocker, congratulating the graduates. “Few parents will be able to escape the conclusion that their own help and guidance, and in many cases their own self-sacrifices, have contributed in no small degree to the nappy culmination they see to-day,” he added. Parents and graduands will know that their efforts have been well spent and that these students may now be launched in life with the benefit of an approved educational or professional qualification.

The receipt of a degree or diploma might mark the end of a period of formal education or merely be a step towards a higher stage when the student turned to greater specialisation or to research. But for many it meant the attainment of a professional qualification and the beginning of a real life’s work in a wider field of activity. On the legal and academic side graduation entitled one to certain privileges in the governing of education. But there were also further tests after the attainment of a degree. One of these would be in meeting people whose education had been different from one’s own. 1