The Downside Review, Volume 4

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Downside Abbey., 1885

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Page 177 - Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers ; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
Page 19 - Memory is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business when he goes to school is to learn, that is, to. store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an instrument for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing them; he welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on what is without; he has his eyes ever about him; he has a lively susceptibility of impressions; he imbibes information of every kind; and little does he make his own...
Page 177 - The proper function of a University in national education is tolerably well understood. At least there is a tolerably general agreement about what a University is not. It is not a place of professional education. Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.
Page 116 - I hold very strongly that the first step in intellectual training is to impress upon a boy's mind the idea of science, method, order, principle, and system ; of rule and exception, of richness and harmony. This is commonly and excellently done by making him begin with Grammar; nor can too great accuracy, or minuteness and subtlety of teaching be used towards him, as his faculties expand, with this simple view.
Page 177 - ... the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an...
Page 217 - Fiat Lux, or, A general Conduct to a right understanding in the great Combustions and Broils about Religion here in England. Betwixt Papist and Protestant, Presbyterian and Independent. To the end that Moderation and Quietness may at length happily ensue after so various Tumults in the Kingdom.
Page 115 - I will tell you, Gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years — not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects ; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study, is not shallowness, which it really is, but enlargement, which it is not...
Page 116 - ... through the community, I think it a graceful accomplishment, and a suitable, nay, in this day a necessary accomplishment, in the case of educated men. Nor, lastly, am I disparaging or discouraging the thorough acquisition of any one of these studies, or denying that, as far as it goes, such thorough acquisition is a real education of the mind.
Page 115 - Nor, indeed, am I supposing that there is any great danger, at least in this day, of over-education; the danger is on the other side. I will tell you, Gentlemen, what has been the practical error of the last twenty years, — not to load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has rejected all.
Page 19 - ... literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them ; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school exercises ; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive ; he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge.

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