ENCLOSURE 1
ADDRESS ON THE UNIVERSITIES OF CHINA, DELIVERED IN HONG KONG BY
PROFESSOR L.R. FORSTER, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, HONG KONG UNIVERSITY
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According to the latest available statistics there are 59 Universities in China, and these contain 33,847 students of whom only 3,500 are women. The growth in University life since 1912 has been phenomenal, and is a measure of the importance which the Chines attach to these Institutions as centres for moulding and directing the energies of the nation along the new paths, which Western nations have indicated. There has been a kind of University fever as a first response to the infection caused by the Western scientific germ. To illustrate this growth in another way, there were in 1912, 229 university Teachers at work; in 1931 there were 5894 on the staffs of the various universities, and new institutions are still springing up or developing rapidly in Yunnanfu, Wuchang and Chungking.
In a report just issued by the League of Nations Mission of Educational Experts, and composed of Dr. C.H. Becker of Berlin, P. Langevin of Paris, M. Falske of Warsaw and R.H. Tawney of London, there is the following statement:- "It is with the greatest satisfaction that we take this opportunity of recording at this point our strong sense of the educational progress made since the Revolution, and our admiration of the energy shown in coping with the difficulties by which progress has been impeded. China has been the victim for more than a generation of a combination of misfortunes on which it is needless for us to insist. To have maintained in the midst of civil disorder, international complications, sharp financial strains and the recurrent calamities of flood and drought, the conviction that the education of the rising generation is among the principal concerns of a civilised society, and to have laboured, as circumstances have allowed, to promote its development is an achievement of which not all western Governments have shown themselves capable."
This is the high tribute which these experts pay to the zeal and sincerity of those who are responsible for guiding the destiny of young China, and it is a tribute that must be endorsed by all who travel to the chief cities of China.
But the expansion of these new intellectual centres has been too rapid to allow for reasoned and orderly development, and the consequence has been considerable confusion, needless variety of work, unnecessary duplication of effort, and lack of unity and common purpose in the general university policy of the country.
The change over to the present system has been disturbing, for the higher education of China in the past consisted of a study of a definite body of work the Classics. The student knew, and everyone else knew what was conveyed by the term 'scholar'; it was a perfectly comprehensible term and involved an understandable ideal which gave a narrow definite goal that all could aim at.
The enormous variety of western subjects, and their subdivision has created a state of things in higher learning in China to which there was no parallel in the past. Nor does the new learning grow slowly and laboriously out of the past, it is transplanted in the fulness of its variety from countries which have already gone through the proliferating process, amid social and intellectual conditions which permitted this natural tendency. The revolutionary mind of China which ever seeks to live in the week after next, naturally turns for its model to that country
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