Overseas: Canada

To teach in a university in North America is always a confrontation with the possibilities of mass education. The numbers are enormous; the organization of teaching, for anyone brought up in the British system, becomes a disturbing administrative problem that is not always easy to work with, and which can destroy a compact sense of what one is supposed to be teaching. But if the university is odd, the ‘further’ education part of teaching — in this case in Montreal in Canada — is stranger still: the extraordinary variety of students, the consequence of an immigrant population, raises very sharply the question ‘Why do they want degrees?’, and beyond that, ‘What ought they to be taught?’