VALUE OF UNIVERSITY

Taranaki Daily News, 30 October 1935, Page 4

VALUE OF UNIVERSITY

OTHER SIDE OF QUESTION “FOSTERING THE TRUE OUTLOOK.” PROFESSOR SEWELL’S OPINION. DIRECTLY CONTRARY VIEW TAKEN Professor W. A. Sewell, 8.A., B.Litt. (Oxon.), B.A. (Leeds), sometime Lady Elizabeth Hastings senior scholar at Queen’s College, Oxford and now professor of English at Auckland University College, was definite against permitting high school pupils to sit for university examinations when he was interviewed after the New Plymouth High Schools’ Board meeting last night. “A degree course should be self-contained,” he said. “Universities would, I am sure, welcome any move on the part of the schools to keep boys and girls at school for a year or two after they have matriculated," he said. “I am equally sure that they are strongly opposed to any extension of the present practice whereby boys and girls take some part of their university examinations at school. 1 “School work and university work are, or ought to be, two very different things. A degree course is self-contained and it is imperative that-the instruction as well as the reading should be homogeneous throughout the course. There are certain subjects which are not usually taught at school, such as logic, economics and geology, in which the university teachers, in my view very rightly, much prefer, to establish the foundations in their own way. In my own subject, English, it might seem to be a matter of indifference whether the first-year and perhaps the second-year work are done at school. I think it does matter. WHAT STATISTICS SHOW. “I agree that the boys may receive excellent preparation for the university examinations in the schools and they may, therefore, do as well as. college students at the end of the year, although that is very doubtful and statistics show very much the reverse. But if we once allow the principle that university examinations shall regularly be done at school we surrender any hope we may ever have had of fostering a true university outlook and policy in this country. We think of the university wholly in terms of examinations and we forget, that attendance at the university has, or should have, fruits that are not to be measured in examination units. “W’e shall do serious damage to the educational future of this .country, if we do anything to encourage the notion that membership of a college, contact with other students of varying ages, and the stimulus of lectures from specially quali-fi-i university teachers are of secondary importance. We do this damage if we try to reduce the number of years spent at the university colleges. The schools have their job and the colleges theirs. They should do them and stick to them. “I should myself very much like to see the practice adopted in New Zealand which is now almost universal in England. There very few boys or. girls go to the university immediately after they have matriculated. On an/average they spend two years at school, so that they go to the university maturer in judgment and . richer in knowledge. These years serve as a very excellent bridge between the work done at school and the very different work done at the university. I recognise the many difficulties, economic and otherwise, in the way of the adoption of this practice; but I hope that one day it will be the rule rather than the exception.”