解放军文职招聘考试The Aim of a University Education (I)

 The Aim of a University Education (I)

If then a practical end must be assigned to a Uni­versity course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates he­roes or inspires genius on the other. Works, indeed, of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of im­mortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colo­nies, or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the econ­omist or the engineer, though such too it includes with­in its scope. But a University training is the great but ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of his own opinions and judge­ments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in ex­pressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is so­phistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any sub­ject with facility.