COLLEGIATE EDUCATION.
IN this country, collegiate and academical or university educa- tion are apt to be used as convertible terms. In England, the Colleges are so numerous, wealthy, and powerful, that they have eclipsed the Universities, of which they are but appendages. In Scotland, the one or at most two Colleges which had with diffi- culty been established in each University of a poor country, were about the time of the Reformation so organized as to supply sub- stitutes for Universities. In Ireland, too, the University of Dublin and Trinity College are the same thing. Owing to the identification of colleges and universities, arising out of such dissimilar causes, the college and university have come to be considered, if not exactly the same, yet as inseparable. To this we owe the phtenomenon of a "University College," which pos- sesses no one characteristic of the college of an European university. It would be little better than a waste of time to insist upon this confusion of ideas, were nothing more than a point of verbalcriti- cism or of legal antiquarianism at issue. But the confusion of the college with the academy or university seems to exercise a strong though insensible influence over the minds of public men in all discussions relating to the proposed extension of academical education in Ireland.
The university is simply an incorporated body of teachers and students, the former possessing the power to grant degrees : the college is a collection of fellows, tutors, and pupils, under one roof, subjected to a kind of monastic discipline.
The college was originally a pious foundation. The idea of the university colleges was borrowed from the religious colleges which previously existed. They were foundations for the support of students and of learned men who had devoted their lives to the pursuit of learning. They were an extension of the convent- superadding the duties of study and tuition to the duties of ritual worship. The sayers of mass and the choristers were as essential parts of the college as the teachers and students. All inmates were either parties who had taken the vows, or who entered to receive instruction, binding themselves to conform during their residence to the monastic practices of the institution. Men of the world thought that the practice of ascetic devotion and sub- jection to monastic restraint might be as useful a practical lesson for a young man as any learning he might pick up in these col- leges. Similar views influenced the early English Reformers who perpetuated collegiate discipline in our Universities. They thought that by being kept constantly under the eyes of their teachers, forced to comply with certain restrictions on the liberty they enjoyed elsewhere, the young inmates of colleges might be drilled into "serious" and steady characters. It is very questionable whether such discipline is advantageous to a young man of the age for entering universities. The aca- demy or university is an intermediate step in his transition from the school either to active life or to a more exclusively professional education. The schoolboy is formed to proper habits by constant supervision and control ; the professional pupil or the young man of business is thrown upon the world as his own master. The student at the university has attained an age at which he may be left in a great measure to his own guidance,—more safely it a university and while engaged in liberal studies, than amid the thronged marts of busy life and toiling in the mechanical routine of business. These facts seem to suggest the advantage of making his university years an experimental introduction to that self-regulated existence upon which he is soon to enter under leas favourable auspices. The restraint of the cloister has not been found the best preparative for encountering the world's temptations. The habit of implicit obedience weakens the spirit of self-dependence ; compulsory abstinence from pleasure sharpens the appetite. The youth who has passed insensibly from the Constraint of boyhood to the independence of manhood—who has been allowed to mix with the world and exercise a consider- able degree of free choice—is in less danger from the blandish- ments of pleasure than the raw neophyte whose love of pleasure has been strengthened by repression.
The students of Scotch Universities are not less moral, either while there or in after life, than those of English Universities. Yet in all Scotch Universities academical discipline—the control of teachers and office-bearers--is, except during the hours of public study, scarcely perceptible. In Edinburgh there is none : in the English Universities it is more formal than real. With all the parade of Proctors and Tutors and Beadles, the students at Eng- lish Universities are very independent young gentlemen. And, instead of being injured, they are benefited by their liberty They enter the world with a stronger sense of responsibility for their own actions, and with more unbroken energy of spirit.
Strange is the pedantry which continues to attach importance to the superintendence and discipline rendered practicable by col- ' lecting young men within the walls of a college, when it is well known that it is never exercised. Still more strange is it that parents see no danger in their boys living in boarding-schools and boarding-houses at Eton, who would think their young men ruined were they to live outside the walls at college.
The idea of compulsory religious instruction is a sprout of the college system. In a free academy or university, where the stu- dents, as the young lawyers of our Inns of Court or the young walkers of our Hospitals, are, except during the hours of study, their own masters, or subject only to the guidance of relations or private guardians, it is out of the question. And this reflection is a strong reason for preferring the free academical to the collegiate system in Ireland. A college, with its established religious in- structer and performer of divine worship, is necessarily a sectarian institution. The principal advantage of the college system, its domesticity, is lost so soon as two rival creeds have their ex- pounders within it. The office of religious instructer is not that of a mere lecturer of divinity : his business is to communicate prac- tical religious education—he is the confessor of Roman Catholics, the chaplain of Protestants. A college is inevitably Protestant or Catholic. Now' one great curse of Ireland is the estrangement of its Catholic and Protestant population—an estrangement which the practice of sequestering the Roman Catholic and Protestant youth in separate colleges would render more inveterate. Trinity College strengthens, doubtless, the feeling of "ascendancy" in the young Protestants ; but it brings Protestant and Catholic to study together, and thus personal friendships are formed which miti- gate the inveteracy of sectarian politics. But, were a new Ca- tholic College reared beside Trinity, such content would become impossible, while the superciliousness of the old college and the jealousy of the upstart would render the feuds of their inmates more inveterate.
Ireland wants not colleges but free universities—seminaries of instruction, where the Roman Catholic and Protestant may re- ceive instruction in science or professional lore side by side. The authority of the university office-bearer should be limited to the direction of their studies and the enforcement of industry and attention' or at most to a censorial authority in cases of public scandal. The care for the young men's morals is the office of their parents and guardians. If their education as boys has been properly attended to, they may in a great measure be left to their own guidance. The resident clergy of the church to which they belong may be invited or authorized to superintend. their conduct. Or, in the case of unsettled youths, respectable private boarding-schools may be had recourse to. It is a poor compliment to science and letters, or their cultivators, to say that the young student cannot be safely left to-his own dispwa4 while every writer's clerk and apothecary's or merchant's ap- prentice is considered able to take care of himself.
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