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JESUIT EDUCATION
Can we, then, be surprised to find that the Catholic institutions could not yet develop productive scholarship? However, as was said by many distinguished writers, productive scholarship is by no means the first requisite for an efficient teacher, much more essential are "intelligence, self-sacrifice, and close attention to lessons given by masters of tried experience." In the next chapter we shall show that the training prescribed by the Ratio Studiorum for the young Jesuit is excellently suited to furnish him with these requisites, and thus to make of him a good teacher.[1]
- ↑ On p. 409 it is said that a sort of "pseudo-productivity" is likely to attend the excessive emphasis laid on scholarship. This statement finds a striking confirmation in the latest Report of the Com. of Ed. (1901, vol. I, pp. 127-128). In a brief article "Higher Education made in Germany," we read among other things: "To deplore the fact that our scholarship has a strong German tinge would be like apologizing for the loins from which we sprang. And yet it is a question if of recent years we have not followed German methods too exclusively and too unintelligently." The Germans themselves often misuse the scientific method on trivial subjects. "Scholarship suffers from an enormous overproduction of monographs in which an ambitious method stretches a thin substance to the cracking point. There is a craze not to prove something valuable, but to prove something." A few remarkable instances of such "scholarly" productions of American graduate students are given in the same article.
