Teaching in School and College (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill PRIVATE SCHOOL-TEACHING AND SCHOLARSHIP WE hear a great deal nowadays of the lack of enthusiasm for scholarship among university students; this is no local issue, but a difficulty recognised everywhere, and one lamented by every teacher. The faculties of all American universities are constantly busy devising schemes by which the ambition of students may be stimulated, and their attention occasionally diverted to the curriculum. Some think this can be accomplished by severe penalties for neglect and indifference, others believe in the temptation of prizes and the frequent publication of honour lists. But from Seattle to Florida, in urban and in country institutions, the anxiety of the professors is audible: "What can we do to make the students study ?" Athletics are only one obstacle, and not the most formidable; there are the secret societies, which afflict schools as well as colleges, and obsess the minds of ten times the number of successful candidates; there are the undergraduate organisations, devoted to almost every conceivable object except the course of study; there are the men who are "working their way through," and have no time to prepare any lessons; there are the college papers, where some young gentlemen toil longer and harder than they ever will again; there are dances, concerts, visits to a neighbouring city; there are extraordinary and baffling cases of chronic ill health and complicated dentistry, that require frequent absences, and where the patient is able to do everything except attend classes; there is the call of the blood. In reading the Confessions of an Oxford Don, I obtained much wicked delight in finding that the same problems that trouble American deans and faculties are in England just as prominent and just as difficultto solve; the Don e...