15.09
Read the information about John Henry Newman.
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
John Henry Newman (180180), English cardinal, born in London, educated at Oxford. He entered the Anglican Church in 1824. In 1828 he was presented to the vicarage of St. Mary's (Oxford). In 1837-38 he published a number of treatises in defense of the Anglo-Catholic view, including the "Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church". In 1843 he resigned the living of St. Mary's and joined the Church of Rome in 1845. He went to Rome in 1846, where he was ordained priest and created Doctor of Divinity, and became an Oratorian. He returned to England in 1847 and established an Oratory at Birmingham, where he built up a wide reputation through his eloquence in the pulpit and his strong personality.
In 1864 he was appointed rector of the new Catholic University of Dublin but soon gave up his appointment. In 1852 he delivered lectures on "The Scope and Nature of University Education." Lectures on Universities appeared in 1859. Newman, opposing the popular doctrines of the day, maintained that the duty of a university is instruction rather than research and defended tutorial supervision as a part of the university system. Among his best known works are Apologia pro Vita sua (1864), a literary masterpiece, his spiritual history written with the utmost sincerity and simplicity, Verses on Various Occasions (1868), The Grammar of Assent (1870) and religious novels Loss and Gain (1848) and Cattista (1856).
In the following extract from a series of lectures on the Idea of a University, Newman outlines his theory of the nature and purpose of a university education.
2. Translate the text about the purpose of a university education in a written form and send it by email:
THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION (extract)
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 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 aclear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, 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 get 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. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them.
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...He (an educated person) is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm.
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