Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/645

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

for its sons than that; a vision of the ideal can guard monotony of work from becoming monotony of life. But there is yet another element of University training which must not be left out of account; it is, indeed, among the most vital of all. I mean that informal education which young men give to each other. Many of us, probably, in looking back on our undergraduate days, could say that the society of our contemporaries was not the least powerful of the educational influences which we experienced. The social life of the Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge is a most essential part of the training received there. In considering the questions of the higher education in South Africa, it is well to remember that the social intercourse of young students, under conditions such as a great residential University might provide, is an instrument of education which nothing else can replace. And it might be added that such social intercourse is also an excellent thing for the teachers.

The highest education, when it bears its proper fruit, gives not knowledge only, but mental culture. A man may be learned, and yet deficient in culture; that fact is implied by the word pedantry. "Culture," said Huxley, "certainly means something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by a theoretic standard." "It is the love of knowledge," says Henry Sidgwick, "the ardour of scientific curiosity, driving us continually to absorb new facts and ideas,