The British Association at Portsmouth: Section L. Educational Science

Abstract

An Educational Review IT is my duty, as it is my pleasure, to express my cordial thanks to the council of the British Association for the honour it has done me in asking me to occupy the presidential chair of the Educational Section at the annual meeting. It has remembered what I was almost beginning to forget-that 1 was once a schoolmaster. Yet perhaps he who has once been a schoolmaster can never entirely lose' the scholastic temper or, at least, I am afraid, the scholastic manner. Some slight comfort, however, I find in reflecting that there is probably no profession which has been adopted and, I must regretfully add, has been abandoned, by so many distinguished men and women as the educational. It happened to me at one time to examine for a special purpose all the lives recorded in the “ Dictionary of National Biography "; and the number of the persons who were there stated to have been more or less constantly engaged in tuition was not less surprising than pleasing to an old schoolmaster. Apart from such persons as were born, in the proverbial phrase, with a golden spoon in their mouths, it is safe, I think, to assert that one out of every three or four eminent Englishmen has at some time or other been a teacher. Nor is this the truth in England or in Great Britain alone; it is true everywhere. Not to speak of lifelong educators or of persons whose principal work was done in education, there occur to me the names of such men as Isocrates, Aristotle, Origen, St. Jerome, Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus, Milton, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Dr. Johnson, Diderot, Cardinal Mezzofanti, Mazzini, President Garfield, Emerson, and Carlyle, who were all content at one time or other to make a scanty living by teaching..