Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/62

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
46
THE HIGHER EDUCATION

tific culture. The choicest and most promising of these youths thus engaged in a university education may also be expected to do creditable original work, and thus enrich the scientific knowledge and literature of the country; and to institute valuable courses of instruction, and thus enrich the teaching of the university. And, in my judgment, it will be far worthier and more profitable for the country to raise at first a few, and then a larger and larger number, by the steps of a thorough, enforced secondary education, to the level of a genuine university culture than to bring the name of university culture to the level of those who are really only low down in the secondary stage of education.

This department of more general philosophical and scientific studies, to which the educated youth of twenty is invited, should be placed parallel with the courses in the professional schools in order to form the whole circuit of university education. Such relations should be instituted and maintained between it and the more strictly professional schools of the university as that each shall assist and enrich the other. In this way, on the basis of a secondary education attained at the close of what corresponds to the present sophomore year, the young man in the advanced academical courses should have the privilege, not only of selecting such of these courses as are most nearly akin to