The Growth of an Educated Class

Abstract

HERE will be many besides the present writer who consider the provision of higher education in the Colonies one of the most urgent tasks to be pursued in our generation, prior in importance, as ideally it should be prior in time, to the provision of democratic forms of selfgovernment. Mere literacy, if upon examination it can be found that there is any measurable substance of meaning in the term 'mere literacy', is not enough; a nation can be truly self-governing in the modern world only when its citizens can conduct for themselves the various technical and professional tasks which life in the modern world demands, that is to say only when it includes a sufficiently large class of highly educated and experienced persons. Experts can, of course, be hired-at the market price-in any society, and no society is so advanced that it will not occasionally need to employ an 'expatriate' foreigner with some rare qualification. In the human sense, an under-developed society might be defined as one in which there are not enough well-educated persons to manage its affairs without habitually employing a numerous class of experts from outside. But it would be a grossly insufficient analysis of the problem of higher education to describe it as the provision of external teachers on loan until a class of home-trained teachers can arise. Higher education confined within national limits is but a barren growth and, in a world where international co-operation is necessary for mere survival, cross-fertilization between universities is essential to enlightened progress. In nothing has the Commonwealth been more active and useful than in the exchange of teachers and research workers among its universities, and to conceive these exchanges as a passing phase of the 'colonial' period would be narrowminded indeed.