Conflicting Aims within the Canadian University

CONFLICTING AIMS WITHIN THE CANADIAN UNIVERSITY A. EDEL T HE predicament of the teacher who cannot serve the mass of his students without sacrificing the few most capable, nor devote himself to these without neglecting the mass, is a commonplace. It is especially serious in the university. It is not a defect of the teacher, but an ineradicable contradiction in the material with which he deals and the system which limits his method. One given to sweeping or imaginative generalizations may see in it a manifestation of the age-old struggle between democracy and aristocracy, and accordingly · take up the cudgels for his pet prejudice. In Canadian academic circles it is more customary to refer to the probe lem as the conflict of English and A.merican tendencies. This simplification appeals to the dramatic sense: in drama forces are most stirririg when they are unadulterated and precisely antithetical. Hence it is said that the Canadian. university aspires to what is English and is swept towards the American: ·it preaches English sportsmanship and plays American games; it imports English professors and invites them to meet the Americanized minds of the students ; it aims at scholarship and drifts towards popularization . Obviously this is but attaching names to likes and dislikes, running to extremes of adulation and anImosity. The Canadian university, drawn in two directions, is suffering from a definite neurosis. But the difficulty is a deep one. It is not to be settled by facile resort to the analogy of the conflict in Canada between an historic tradition, furnishing ideals, and geographic proximity, dic532 CONFqCTING AIMS IN THE CANADIAN UNIVERSITY tating practice. Too often such a ready solution will lead to a neglect of the best achIeved in the United States, and the enshrining of faults along with virtues in whatever is English. In reality, the problem is less one of objective characteristics than internal desires. The distemper, like any complex, lies in the conflicting expression of different alms. To know what one wants is the first condition of getting it. So Socratic wisdom and Delphic inspiration united to instruct man in bidding him, "Know thyself." In what follows we shall make three suggestions: that Canadian universities have implicit in their conduct at least four separate aims, which are apt to be treated alike despite their divergence; that not all the aims are compatible .within a single institution; that their existence is expressive of conflicting social forces which are not necessarily capable of being harmonized. Recognition of the conflict at least points the direction of its partial solution. The problem is not specificaUy Canadian, but occurs wherever there is a like arrangement oJ social forces. In the United States experimental activity is being directed towards its solution, and to a lesser extent in England. This but more strongly points to the futility of rationalizing the difficulty ~n the general terms of a conflict of American and English ideals. The·implicit aims of the educational system are: (1) to raise thegenerallevel ofpopular education; (2) to turn out "gentlemen" or "respectable citizens;" (3) to prepare men for the various professions; ·(4) to foster creative cultural and scientific activity. Each of these finds a different emphasis in different parts of the system, and at present all meet in the university. We shall consider them here only at the university level. 533 THE 'UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY I Earnest professors are wont to scorn popularization.of their subjects. Really, however, it is less this they abhor than the necessity which the university imposes upon' them of being popular and scholarly at one and the same time. Few of them would object if they could work separately with their most promising students and set different standards for the.rest. Some might even prefer specializing with the one group, others with the other. Certainly the principle of popular higher education is not in doubt. That every man should know something of the results and methods of the sciences is now an imperative, no more dubious than was once the principle that every. man should be able to read and writeo In fact, it is only in some familiarity'with the sciences, and at least a partial incorporation of...