The Camford Visitation

Abstract

MR. WELLS'S address as president of the Educa-cational Science Section of the British Association last year dealt with certain aspects of education in the schools only. In his latest story, with its cover of dark and light blue, he deals with university education and its place in society. The story begins with an amusing sketch of a dyed-in-the-wool scholar, the master of Holy Innocents College, a preserver of culture, of true scholarship, born to appreciate without ever creating. His breakfast oration has got to the stage of denouncing “the dictatorship of the half-educated. We are being endowed, Sir, and told what to know and teach, by the unholy wealth of ironmongers and the overblown profits of syndicated shop-keepers.” Then enters the visitant as a voice, an unseen presence, asking: “Half-educated? Now how can you measure education and divide it into halves and quarters? What do you mean by education?...” For the rest of the story the visitant subjects human life, and in particular its treatment by the University of Camford, to a sympathetic but quite unsparing scrutiny. The general thesis is an appeal to the universities to play a part in “so heroic an ordering of knowledge, so valiant a beating out of opinions, such a refreshment of teaching and such an organization of brains as will constitute a real and living world university, head, eyes and purpose for Man”.