FUNCTION OF A UNIVERSITY

It is said with truth, that the function of university is to prepare the young to take their places in human history. It must provide its members with the knowledge and skills necessary to make them efficient citizens.

 But is the whole duty of a man exhausted by the acquisition f knowledge and professional training? Is a university only an institution for higher learning or a factory which turns out clerks and technicians able to run the machinery of the state? Mere knowledge which gratifies curiosity is different from a culture which refines personality.

 Culture is not remembering a mass of curious details about the dates of birth of the great heroes of the world or the interesting names of the fastest ships which cross the Atlantic or entertaining odds and ends  gathered from the latest  who, s who.

Plato said long ago that the culture of the soul is “the first and fairest thing that the best of man can ever have.” According to Goethe, the object of education is to from tastes and not simply to communicate knowledge.

 A man, s culture is not to be judged by the amount of tabulated information which he has at his command, but by the quality of mind which he brings to bear on the facts of life.

Education is not therefore cramming the mind with a host of technical details, putting sight as it were into blind eyes.

 The eye of the soul is never blind: only its gaze may be turned to the false and then fleeting. Too often the vision may be dragged down by the ‘laden weights’ of pride and prejudice, of passion and desire.

The function of a teacher is not to add the ‘ laden weights’ but remove them and liberate the soul from the encumbrances so that it may follow its native impulse to soar upwards.

 The student at a university does not merely learn something, but becomes something by being exposed, in the most elastic period of his life, to transforming influences, such as the constant clash of mind with mind, the interchange of ideas, the testing of opinions and the growth of knowledge of human nature