Speech on Education

blem of crowds and of the loss of this vital contact. How can even the genius of the born teacher avail to lead and quicken so many? How shall he find the time, where shall he find the place and the opportunity to get intimate access to indivviduals in so great a multitude?The English universities solve the problem by their division into colleges, — or, rather, their division from the first into colleges, in each of which only a comparatively small number of undergraduates can live, enabled them to avoid this loss of the teacher amongst the crowd. Each college is a little community apart, a little academic family in which there can be no daily intimacy between teacher and pupil; and nowhere, probably, in all the academic world, is the contact between the two more natural, more constant, more influential than there. The masters of Baliol have been the foster fathers of generation after generation of men who have been awakened to the highest achievements alike of scholarship and of public service in their day. And nowhere better than in the English colleges can the part which the personality of the teacher plays in education be studied, — the deadening effect of intercourse with teachers who make their teaching a mere routine and have no spark either of enthusiasm or of natural energy with which to make themselves potent to the stimulation of the students entrusted to their care, — and the quite incalculable stimulation of intimacy with teachers fitted to be guides, eager to be guides, and showing at every step a loving familiarity with fair regions of learning and of science, — good companions, good counselors, lovers of young men and of all that quickens and informs their spirits for the work of the world. A great tutor will beget in the men he touches and energy and worth of faculty which goes to the depths of character as well as of achievement.
The personal factor in education is the chief factor. For the young it is necessary, in order that they maythat they get the real zest of learning into their hearts, that learning should live in their presence in the person of some man or woman whom they can love and must admire; whose force touches them to the quick, they scarcely know how, whose example they cannot shake off or forget, whose spoken word they cannot dismiss, whose written words even, though they be seen after many years, when the sound of the voice, the gesture, the glance of the eye have been lost, bring back upon the instant all the old magic like a recreative touch, a rebirth of the very person. No system of teaching which depends upon methods and not upon persons or which or which imageines the possibility of any substitution of the written word for the living person can work any but mechanicalmechancal effects. The teacher's own spirit must with intimate and understanding touch mould and fashion the spirit of the pupil: there is no other way to hand the immortal stuff of learning on.