Thera are some minor faults which might be noticed. As an instance, the author habitually uses the word "working" in describing the convulsions of the countenance, under the influence of strong passions: as, "his working and agonized visage"—"his face worked convulsively," &c. Although Sir Walter Scott is authority for the use of the word in this manner, we have always considered it a decided inelegance. But such blemishes cannot seriously detract from the enduring excellence of the work.
AN ADDRESS, delivered at his inauguration as President of Washington College, Lexington, Virginia, Feb. 21, 1835, by Henry Vethake.
We have read this address with unmingled pleasure. It is replete with strong common sense, and that quality is rarely much exercised in discussions of the subject of education. The opinions of President Vethake seem to us sound and practical: he has a full sense of the errors in the systems of instruction, which have prevailed too long in many of our institutions; and suggests alterations in the modes of teaching, which seem to us both practicable, and promising great benefits. We are constrained by the pressure of other matters, to confine ourselves to a brief notice of this address, and to curtail our extracts from its pages. The following strictures upon the old system of imparting information to students, will, we believe, be recognized as just and sensible, by every one who has reflected on the subject. Although these remarks are intended by the orator to refer to college exercises only, they apply with equal force to the faulty system of teaching pursued by nine-tenths of the conductors of our primary and elementary schools, at which the pupils are, in most cases, severely drilled in the study of mere words, while no corresponding knowledge of the things of which they are the symbols, is imparted by the teacher, who makes no effort to awaken the mental energies of the pupil; but is fully satisfied if he cultivate the memory, though the mind remain waste and uninformed. But to our extract:
"The error is an egregious one, which leads a student to suppose that his proper business is to store his mind as industriously as he can with the facts previously observed, and the opinions previously held, by others who lived before him. Its natural effect will be to deaden all originality of thought, and to degrade the individual, thus led astray, to a low rank in the scale of intelligence, when compared with that to which he would have entitled himself, with more correct ideas of the nature of education. The memory may have been cultivated to a considerable extent; imagination, and the reasoning power, will have remained nearly dormant. But this is not all. The individual in question will not even have acquired the ability to communicate what he has learned to others. To do so with clearness and order, is by no means always an easy matter; and it is one to which he has directed no portion of his attention, his mind having been exclusively occupied in passively receiving knowledge. And it may be added, that, although it should be conceded, that by pursuing the method of education against which my remarks are at present pointed, a greater amount of mere extraneous information can be acquired, yet this will generally be found to be true only for a comparatively short period. Those facts and opinions of which we read, that do not become the subjects of subsequent comparison and reflection, have, as it were, only a loose connection with our understandings, and, sooner or later, and sometimes very speedily, pass into oblivion. Hence it will be found that, if we have regard rather to the usefulness of manhood than to the display to be made by the youth of a college at an examination, as this is ordinarily conducted, the most effectual method even of storing the mind with what other men have observed and thought, is to regard the communication of knowledge to the student as altogether accessary to the great object of disciplining his mind, and of properly developing his various intellectual faculties. And not only will that individual, whose faculties have been most advantageously excited, be ultimately possessed of the greatest amount and range of information, but he will far surpass his competitors in the race of life, in the art of communicating, and, at proper times and places, displaying that information. He will also come to possess a capacity for attaining a still further measure of knowledge, whenever he may desire to do so, upon any subject that excites a particular interest in him, to which the man of mere memory is a total stranger.
"It is sufficiently to be lamented, that the student should occasionally fall of his own accord into the error I have been considering: but it is lamentable in a far greater degree, when his propensity to do so is encouraged by the faulty system of instruction pursued by his teacher. The young men in our colleges, have been, and still are, too frequently taught in a manner to operate thus injuriously. I refer, more particularly, to the practice of hearing them recite, on almost every subject, the contents, and the precise contents, of certain text books, with little or no accompanying comment, excepting what may be absolutely necessary for enabling them to comprehend the meaning of the work recited. In this manner of instruction, it is not geometry, or the spirit of geometry, that is acquired by the student, but what it is that Euclid, or Legendre, has delivered concerning geometry. It is not the philosophy of the human mind with which he is made acquainted; it is only the system of some distinguished author—be it that of Locke, or Reid, or Brown. It is true that we may easily conceive the reciting of a text book to be accompanied by an enlightened commentary on the part of the instructor, calculated to liberate the mind of the student from all undue subjection to the opinions, and to the peculiar classifications and modes of expression, of the author. We may, indeed, conceive the instructor to superadd every possible contrivance which is fitted to awaken in the mind of his pupils a spirit of independent inquiry. Still the tendency of the system is to degenerate into the mere recitation of the contents of the text book."
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"Another reason why young men in our colleges are tempted to neglect the general cultivation of their minds, and to devote their whole study to the storing of their memories with the contents of the text books put into their hands, is that their comparative scholarship is very apt to be estimated by their instructors, not so much by the nature of the questions which they are able to answer correctly, and by the amount of thinking and originality displayed, as by the promptitude and fluency with which they can repeat what they have servilely learned. I have been told by more individuals than one, and by graduates of more institutions than one, that on discovering, while at college, the fact to be as I have just stated, and being anxious that the best account of them should go to their friends, from their professors, they at once resolved to subject themselves to the drudgery of committing the author they were appointed to study verbatim to memory, and that, by so doing, they did not fail to secure the object they had in view. The persons of whom I speak, were young men of talent, as well as ambitious of immediate distinction. Had their minds at the time been sufficiently matured to have adequately appreciated the uselessness and the folly of this method of study, without at the same time being matured enough to adopt, of their own suggestion, a more efficient and rational method, and had they been less influenced by present rewards, without as yet aspiring to the more substantial rewards of a future reputation among men, or without the loftier stimulant of duty, they might have become, like others among their fellow students, altogether negligent of their improvement, and perhaps have contracted the most ruinous habits. It is to the system of education, upon which I am animadverting, together with the mistakes made by the members of a college faculty, in deciding on the comparative scholarship of the students—which mistakes the latter are competent to judge of, with a good deal of accuracy—that the anomaly, so often remarked, of a young man's relative standing while in college, being so often but little indicative of his future standing in the world, is to be ascribed; and the explanation is likewise manifest why some individuals of peculiar energy of character, after wasting their time in almost complete idleness while at college, astonish their friends nevertheless, by the intellectual exertions of which they shew themselves to be capable, when an adequate motive is presented for exerting their energies. This solves the mystery too, why so many self-taught men, have, in despite of the disadvantages under which they labored, surpassed the graduates of colleges in usefulness and reputation; every acquisition made by a self-taught man, in consequence of the very difficulty of making it, being accompanied by a contemporary sharpening of his intellect, which the passive recipient of another's knowledge never experiences."
Of his suggestions for the remedy of this evil, we have room only for the following passage: