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Inaugural address, delivered to the University of St. Andrews
Inaugural address delivered to the University of St Andrews Author:John Stuart Mill 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: facturers ; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians. What professional men should car... more »ry away with them from an University, is not professional knowledge, but that which should direct the use of their professional knowledge, and bring the light of general culture to illuminate the technicalities of a special pursuit. Men may be competent lawyers without general education, but it depends on general education to make them philosophic lawyers —who demand, and are capable of apprehending, principles, instead of merely cramming their memory with details. And so of all other useful pursuits, mechanical included. Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses. This, then, is what a mathematician would call the higher limit of University education : its province ends where education, ceasing to be general, branches off into departments adapted to the individual's destination in life. The lower limit is more difficult to define. An University is not concerned with elementary instruction : the pupil is supposed to have acquired that before coming here. But where does elementary instruction end, and thehigher studies begin ? Some have given a very wide extension to the idea of elementary instruction. According to them, it is not the office of an University to give instruction in single branches of knowledge from the commencement. What the pupil should be taught here (they think), is to methodize his knowledge : to look at every separate part of it in its relation to the other parts, and to the whole ; combining the partial glimpses which he has obtained of the field of h...« less