Note (return) — PROFESSOR AND TEACHER.

It is not pleasant to listen to such reasonings, much less to see them carried into effect. But the defect which they bring to light will not be cured by closing our eyes to it and trusting to time, the sovereign healer. Time is a negative factor: it only enables the forces of Nature to do their positive work. But schools and colleges are not the product of the elemental forces of Nature: they are distinctively the work of man as a free agent. If we are free to shape any of our institutions to suit our needs, we are certainly free to shape our educational institutions. By having a definite result in view, and willing its attainment, we may succeed; but if we fail either in clearness of vision or persistency of will, we cannot expect the result to come of itself. The present university system of Germany, which might seem to a careless observer the natural outgrowth of German life, is the result of hard thinking and strenuous, well-directed effort. We should not commit much of an exaggeration were we to call it the deliberate creation of Frederick the Great, Von Zedlitz and Wolf, who dragged with them Prussia, and the other German states in her wake. They and their associates and followers, Schleiermacher and William von Humboldt, clear-headed, iron-willed men, perceived what was needed, and bent all their energies to the task. They emancipated the schools from the control of the clergy, and established the principle that teaching is a distinct vocation, requiring special training, over which the state has supervision; furthermore, that the state should pronounce who is fit and who is not fit for university education, thereby abolishing entrance-examinations, and putting an end to the ignoble practice on the part of the universities of lowering the standard for the purpose of increasing the number of students. They abolished the last vestiges of the scholastic system by raising the faculty of philosophy from its position as a quasi-preparatory course to the others, and placing it on a footing of perfect equality with law, theology and medicine.3 They removed all restrictions from the Lehrfreiheit, or professional freedom of instruction, while at the same time they preserved the right of the state to control indirectly the quality of university instruction by means of state-examinations for pastors, teachers, lawyers, physicians and officeholders. Ever since then the university system of Germany has rested upon a secure and lasting basis.