United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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taken on as Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College in New England. Ten ' j ears after my Oxford days, while watch¬ ing the working of the Austrian imperial system, I began to see what my tutor had been driving at when setting me the essay subjects he did on the Roman Empire. At the time I had tried, without much success, to find the answers in books—now I was to get them, at least in part, from actual life. Another ten years, set to teach the History of Civilisation to third year Dart¬ mouth men, I found myself forced to make them see that the roots of all their ideas and institu¬ tions lay deep in the past. No easy matter for men who didn’t want to believe that anything of importance had happened before Lincoln’s day, or at best Washington’s. I learned far more than they did. It was a case of getting beneath the surface; of coming to grips with the “causes of things”—Vergil’s immortal phrase. Only on this level can we have knowledge. As Socrates saw long ago everything else is only “opinions”—not worth much in the clinch. By dine of effort I got at Dartmouth some historical background for what the years in Europe had been as an experience. This was now to be of priceless value when, in 1935. I was asked to come to the University of London for Polish Studies. For this narrower field the whole of what I had been doing through the years was to prove an indispensable framework. At fifty I was to begin my real job, and my fitness for it even at that age was very shaky. I was just coming to grips with things when, four years later, the Second War broke out, and upset everything. The more so as in September, 1939, I had to take over the Direction of the School of Slavonic Studies, an administrative job from which I did not get free until 1947. This left me three quiet years to enjoy teaching before retiring on the age limit in 1950. That meant coming home. In review, it looks as though I had always been about ten years behind the times. In Oxford I was just ready to begin when I had to leave. In London I was just getting hold of my field when it was time to retire. Does that make sense? Is not the whole picture one of bits and pieces? In a way yes, but such is life. The only decision that I could really call my own during these years was that of 1912. From then on my wife and I were in a real sense the creatures of fate—we did the thing that seemed to be thrust upon us; we had no choice. But I want to draw two lessons from it all: i. For all worth-while work time is of the essence. What’s done in a hurry is of the devil!, says a Polish proverb. It is worth nothing. Im¬ patience will ruin everything. Eagerness and enthusiasm—-yes; but coupled with a realisation that while mushrooms mature in a night, oak trees take a hundred years. ii. A corollary of the above. It is true that we must think our way into our living if the latter is to be of any value, if it is to last the course. But it is also true that we must live our way into our thinking. Experience is a precious part of all knowledge, a condition of all true under¬ standing. Unless he is a moron, any man can become learned: only those who face life over many years can become wise. All this looks like an admission of cultural determinism. So be it! Only let us not think that this means in any way a denial of person¬ ality. In the past it is people that have counted: the future will not be different. —WILLIAM J. ROSE. ’05. A helpful hint. . . Call by Number You save time on out-of-town calls when you give the Long Distance operator the number you want. Write down the out-of-town numbers you already know. If there ' s a new number you don ' t have—or an old one you ' ve forgotten—be sure to add it to your list when the operator gives it to you. Manitoba Telephone System 10

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WHAT THE CLASSROOM HAS MEANT TO ME By DR. WILLIAM J. ROSE W r HEN the Editors of VOX honoured me with an invitation (or command) to contribute something for the 1954 issue, I at once asked to see some of the recent numbers so that I could learn what sort of a creation this ancient journal has become. I knew the lady well enough fifty years ago, and my name can be found on some of her pages, but tempora matantur: would I recognize her after so long a time? Could I fit myself into the new pattern of things? Well, the Old Grey Mare is not what she used to be—that I can say at once. (Of course the truth is, she never was!) But I must admit that in some ways you young folk have us oldsters beaten a mile. Many of the things I have read— verse and prose, sense and nonsense, would have been quite beyond our reach. Some of the “con¬ ceits”, in the proper sense of that term, startle me; some of your ways of saying things rather offend me: but I have to hand you an “Oscar” (is that the term, or is it the Nobel Prize?) for originality. So far, so good. Only what am I to do about it? As a co-factor of the newest VOX, what am I to say? Most old men tend to become gar¬ rulous, and garrulity is dull; almost invariably they swing into reminiscence, and that can be very boring. All the same, I shall take the risk and set down something about what college and university have meant to me during a long space of years. The privilege of returning and spend¬ ing a session where I sat as a green under¬ graduate at the beginning of the century means that for me the wheel has gone full circle. Put another way, the stone has done a lot of rolling: has it gathered any moss? The list of academic halls where I have sat under the great and the near-great is rather for¬ midable, and I should be a learned man—per¬ haps even a wise one. Oxford, Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, Dartmouth College, London, U.B.C.—rather a mixed bag, and involv¬ ing work in two languages besides my own. Plenty of variety; no lack of opportunity. It should be admitted that in three of them I had only a few months each, and that in Prague I attended the German and not the Czech classes. It was a lot easier to get a Rhodes Scholarship in 1905 than it is in 1954. When I set out for Oxford I had a high opinion of myself: was, in short, a very conceited young man, whose only saving grace was that he really did want to learn. It took only a few weeks of meeting up with the real thing to disillusion me. Thinking I knew a lot, I discovered that I knew nothing. I can still hear, across the ages, the voice of my distinguished tutor telling the Head of the col¬ lege and his col leagues: “Of course, Mr. Rose is no scholar”! That was a tough blow, and I’ve been trying to recover from it ever since. The fault, if it was one, lay in part with my teachers at Wesley and ’Toba: they coddled me when they should have used the rod; they let me dawdle along when I should have been ex¬ tending myself. I was to discover how harmful this can be when I came back three years later, and started to teach. I had some gifts as a teacher, but I didn’t know my stuff. Something had to be done about this, so in 1912, accom¬ panied by a lovely and brave young bride (like myself, Manitoba born), I set out afresh with some savings we had accumulated for what was then thought of as the home of learning—the universities of Germany. Here we had first to master German as the medium of instruction; not just enough to let us get about, but to the point where we could think in it and dream in it. Then it was that I discovered something im¬ portant: I could learn languages by ear, but not from books! Why was that method not used in good part with the Latin and the Greek? Two years later the war of 1914-18 caught us, and I turned right about to devote myself to modern studies. By the end of the war I had become fairly proficient in Polish, and I was drafted as a Relief Worker in what was then called European Student Relief. With this went service under the Red Triangle, and I settled down in Warsaw, but still more in the ancient university of Cracow, to use my spart time in reading. Five years of intermittent study, with scanty attendance at lectures, enabled me to bluff my way to a Ph.D. in the History of Educa¬ tion. My thesis was written in a burst of energy in the summer of 1925. Two years later I was 9

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