UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882 [PAGE 69]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882
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63 things which were specified, and which we have at some length discussed, should be done and taught "without excluding other scientific and classical studies." The technical studies are to be first provided for, but there shall be no prohibition or exclusion of other scientific subjects, or even of the classical studies which so many who affect to be practical, pretend to despise. Practical training is demanded, and liberal culture, as well, is to be cherished. If the farmer's boy tastes a little Latin*, it will not harm him. Even if, as is rarely the case, he unearths a Greek root, phosphorescent with age, it will not destroy him. If the mechanic or the engineer, or the technical student in any specialty, would open the doors which look into French or German apartments in the temple of science, he will find there stored vast accumulations of precious learning in the very things which he most earnestly covets, which, possessed, will add vastly to his stores of knowledge, while the act of acquisition will give keener edge and quicker play to the weapons of his mental armory. For every mind a discipline is needed, which comes from an acquaintance with other subjects than those pertaining to pure science, or to applied science, however useful those may be. The graduate of any higher school ought to know something of the laws of his own mental activity; something of the principles and methods of the government of which he is a part, and which, in some of its higher or lower departments, he may be called to administer; something of the laws of wealth and the great economies which govern production and distribution and consumption; something of the physical history of the world and of its relation to the rest of God's creation; something of the history of his own race, as it has lived on this earth, with the details of the grand march of history along the highway of nations; something of his own language and its literature, the thought, pregnant with power which the creative minds of his own and of elder days have produced, and which now, in many unrecognized but forceful influences, make up so much of the staple of our thinking and of our present culture. Never does the student gain all his acquisitions at the feet of his preceptors. The outlines only are there acquired; the impulse is received; preferences established, mental bent obtained; the development progresses while the thinking mind endures. But the doors into all these apartments of human knowledge, and to all these sources of higher culture, should have been opened to all young men and women that they may at least know what munificence of intellectual wealth lies within their reach, and these opportunities should be furnished in the technical, as well as in the literary or the classical school. What is legitimate to the schools resting on the grant of 1862 ? All forms of technical education, and in the wide scope of possibilities, every form of human learning which it has fallen to the fortune of mankind to devise or acquire.