z:\ ambedkar\vol-02\vol2-04.indd MK SJ+YS 21-9-2013/YS-8-11-2013 298
298 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
problem I will deal when I come to questions 36-40. Here I will deal with the second problem. In the Incorporation Act of 1857 no provision was made for allowing the University to undertake teaching functions. The Act of 1904 for the first time described the University as being incorporated for the purpose (among others) of “making provision for the instruction of students”, a phrase which might seem to have been intended to include undergraduates in putting into practice this clause all the older Universities have followed the University Commission which recommended that the Universities might justify their existence as teaching bodies by making further provision for advanced courses of study. As a result of this we find today that the undergraduate teaching has been separated from the postgraduate teaching, the former being taken up by the University and the latter left to the colleges.
I am totally opposed to any such sharp division between post-graduate and undergraduate training. My reasons are as follows : —
(1) The separation of post-graduate work from undergraduate work means the separation of teaching from research. But it is obvious that that where research is divorced from teaching research must suffer. As has been well observed by the Commissioners of 1911 on University Education in London.
“69. Teaching will, of course, predominate in the earlier work, and research will predominate in the advance work ; but it is in the best interests of the University that the most distinguished of its professors should take part in the teaching of the undergraduates from the beginning of their University career. It is only by coming into contact with the junior students that a teacher can direct their minds to his own conception of his subject, and train them in his own methods and hence obtain the double advantage of selecting the best men for research, and getting the best work out of them. Again it is the personal influence of the man doing original work in his subject which inspires belief in it, awakens enthusiasm, gains disciples. His personality is the selective power by which those who are fittest for his special work are voluntarily enlisted in its services and his individual influence is reproduced and extended by the spirit which actuates his staff. Neither is it the few alone who gain ; all honest students gain inestimably from association with teachers who show them something of the working of the thought of independent and original minds. ‘Any one’, says Helmholtz, who has once come into contact with one or more men of the first rank must have had his whole mental standard altered for the rest of his life’. Lectures have not lost their use and books can never fully take the place of the living spoken word. Still less can they take the place of the more intimate teaching in laboratory and seminar, which ought not to be beyond the range of the ordinary course of a university education, and in which the student learns, not only conclusions and the reasons supporting them, all of which he might get from books but the actual process of developing thought, the working of the highly trained and original mind.”