Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/45

method is the most intelligent and highly trained freedom in research, in teaching, and in learning. This end and this method served at the beginning to distinguish the schools of the university order from the monastic and ecclesiastical schools; they may fitly serve still as setting the ideal to which the American university must conform itself. Writers so widely divergent in their views and ways of thought as Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman are in substantial agreement as to the end at which the genuine university aims. This end is not, then, primarily the preparation of the pupil for any particular employment or profession, or even for being a good and useful citizen in general. University culture, does, indeed, tend strongly to produce good and useful service of every kind, and good and useful citizenship; but this is its indirect tendency rather than its direct primary aim. For example, Professor Payne, in pleading for a science of education, reminds Englishmen of Sir Bartle Frere's conviction that " the acknowledged and growing power of Germany is intimately connected with the admirable education which the great body of the German nation are in the habit of receiving;" as well as of the declaration of a writer in the "Times": "I think the maintenance of our commercial superiority is very much of a schoolmaster's question;" and of the statement of another writer that "the Ger-