Difficult as the attainment of Mulcaster’s ideal of the position of teachers may have been, he was undoubtedly on the right path to seek it, when he advocated that their training should be entrusted to the universities. The demand for adequate preparation is the only reasonable means of securing at once a fitting status, and a reward sufficient to attract the best talent, and the recognition of the work of education as deserving to rank with the other learned professions for which a special academic training is required, is the natural expression of a healthy public sentiment on the matter. The higher the requirements are pitched, the safer will be the guarantee that aspirants will be drawn to the work by a genuine belief in it as their true vocation, for the sake of which it is worth while to make some sacrifice. The atmosphere of a university, moreover, offers the fullest opportunity to the teacher of acquiring the breadth of general culture, and the _savoir vivre_, in which he is so apt to be deficient.
Mulcaster’s proposals for university reform in general will be found in several important respects to have anticipated the course of subsequent legislation. He wished the State to have a free hand in controlling the uses of private endowments according to the special needs of each generation, as long as the confidence of the original founders was not betrayed, and he was not slow to point out directions where he considered that changes were urgently needed. We know that in his time the condition of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was far from satisfactory, partly because definite abuses had crept in, and partly because their constitution naturally offered a passive resistance to regulative organisation. Mulcaster’s suggestions all tend to greater concentration of aim and facility of classification. He may have carried his desire for uniformity too far when he advocated the specialisation of every college to a particular study, and even to a particular stage in that study. So far as residence is concerned there is surely no need to forgo the benefits of a varied social intercourse among students of different standing and pursuits, but it cannot be doubted that every effort should be made to counteract the loss this may entail by providing full opportunities throughout the whole university for the emulation of those who are in the same academic position. In Elizabethan days there was not the same freedom of interchange in lectures among the various colleges that now obtains, and Mulcaster was doing good service in deprecating the isolation and dispersion of interest that interfered with progress. We must also commend the discernment he showed in presenting the claims of a definite and comprehensive curriculum in general learning to the attention of those who wished to engage in professional studies, as well as his zeal for the more careful selection of candidates for scholarships, fellowships, and degrees. Nor is it to be forgotten that he was probably the first to suggest the appointment of “readers” in the universities,--an arrangement that was not adopted till almost our own time.