Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/635

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UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE[1]

Every country has educational problems of its own, intimately dependent on its social and economic conditions. The progressive study of education tends, indeed, towards a certain amount of general agreement on principles. But the crucial difficulties in framing and administering educational measures are very largely difficulties of detail; since an educational system, if it is to be workable, must be more or less accurately adjusted to all the complex circumstances of a given community. As one of those who are now visiting South Africa for the first time, I feel that what I bring with me from England is an interest in education, and some acquaintance with certain phases of it in the United Kingdom; but with regard to the inner nature of the educational questions which are now before this country, I am here to learn from those who can speak with knowledge. In this respect the British Association is doing for me very much what a famous bequest does for those young men whom it sends to Oxford; I am, in fact, a sort of Rhodes

  1. Meeting of the British Association in South Africa, 1905. The author's Address as President of the Section for Educational Science.