Dr Sapru’s convocation address

IT was an excellent address which Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru delivered at the convocation of the Lucknow University on Saturday. He is better known as an eminent lawyer and politician than as an educationist, but the present address shows, what some among us already knew, that he is also a keen student of our educational problems and is intensely interested in their solution along right and healthy lines. In the address before us, he not only makes an illuminating criticism of the whole system of university education in India, not from the point of view of the idealist living in the clouds, but of a practical man of the world, but also offers suggestions for improving the present conditions, which are eminently worthy of consideration. The first and not the least important of these suggestions is that each university should, instead of trying to cover the whole ground, develop a special feature of its own which it might be within its power to do by reason of its local conditions, its associations with the past and its resources. “I have no quarrel with the idea”, he said, “that no university can be complete and self-contained unless it provides for instruction in as many departments of knowledge as appeal to the younger generation or as are calculated to enrich the spiritual and economic life of the nation. What I am anxious to point out is that if our universities are to yield better results in the future than in the past… then I think the time has come for laying greater emphasis upon thoroughness and depth than upon a mere spectacular expansion of the programme of education, unsupported by adequate resources in men and money.”