Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/424

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JESUIT EDUCATION

three hundred years ago: "In all classes the teachers should be such that they could teach a much higher class" [than that which is actually assigned to them],[1] and Father Nadal said: "All the professors should be distinguished in their respective branches, and no one can teach in the classes of Humanities and Rhetoric (Freshman and Sophomore) who is not a Master of Arts."[2] In these words Father Nadal virtually lays down as a postulate what Professor Münsterberg wants, namely, that the professors in the college course should have the doctor's degree. But the Society attached still greater weight to skill in teaching than scholarship, and we think rightly so.

Within the last two years this question of the relation of scholarship to teaching has received more attention than before, and some articles in leading reviews and periodicals found one of the reasons of the decline of teaching exactly in the excess of scholarship. It was especially the New York Nation which in the spring of 1900 brought the topic before the eyes of the public. On March 8, 1900, the Nation had an editorial on The Decline of Teaching, in which we find this statement: "It is at least a curious coincidence that the development of the modern science of pedagogy, with its array of physiological and psychological data, should have been accompanied by a distinct decline in the prominence of the teacher. No one, we suppose, will question that the number of great teachers is less now than it once was, and that the depleted ranks are not being adequately filled up. While this dearth of teaching power, notwithstanding the persis-

  1. Monumenta Paedagogica, p. 156.
  2. Ibid., p. 104.