Classical and Scientific Studies and the Great Schools of England: A Lecture Read Before the Society of Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 6, 1865

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Sever and Francis, 1865 - Classical education - 117 pages
 

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Page 16 - I call therefore a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.
Page 31 - Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccessful ; first, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.
Page 101 - I tell him that the atmosphere is compounded of oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, and then shape it into a question, — he can generally answer me. I must confess to you, that I find the grown-up minds coming back to me with the same questions over and over again. They ask, What is water composed of? though I have told the same persons, a dozen years in succession, that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen. Their minds are not prepared to receive or to embody these notions ; and that is where you want...
Page 61 - To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation ; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her foi a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen college ; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.
Page 61 - that the child should be instructed in the arts which will be useful to the man;" since a finished scholar may emerge from the head of Westminster or Eton in total ignorance of the business and conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end of the eighteenth century.
Page 40 - If a youth, after four or five years spent at school, quits it at nineteen, unable to construe an easy bit of Latin or Greek without the help of a dictionary, or to write Latin grammatically ; almost ignorant of geography, and of the history of his own country ; unacquainted with any...
Page 100 - I may say, should remain untouched, and that no sufficient attempt should be made to convey it to the young mind growing up and obtaining its first views of these things, is to me a matter so strange, that I find it difficult to understand.
Page 40 - Greek without the help of a dictionary, or to write Latin grammatically, almost ignorant of geography and of the history of his own country, unacquainted with any modern language but his own, and hardly competent to write English correctly, to do a simple sum, or stumble through an easy proposition of Euclid, a total stranger to the laws which govern the physical world, and to its structure, with an eye and hand unpractised in drawing, and without knowing a note of music, with an uncultivated mind...
Page 39 - I do not hesitate to say, that the great majority of those who take a degree in Oxford, after having spent ten or twelve years of their life in the all but exclusive study of Latin and Greek, aro unable to construe off-hand the easiest passages in either language (if they have never seen them before...
Page 103 - I think the system of education that could leave the mental condition of the public body in the state in which this subject has found it, must have been greatly deficient in some very important principle.

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