Bulletin Report of The Commission on The Chinese University of Hong Kong March 1976

a dialogue happens, for through it the individual student members of the group make progress towards independence of thought and judgement while the teacher himself is enabled to measure the extent to which they are progressing or falling short. 52. In regard to (c) — the need to know the students —we have already referred to their special qualities, their talents and promise, their energies and drive and their unique openness to receive and to follow the stimulus of new fundamental ideas. These are the characteristics which engage the interest and warm the sympathies of university teachers everywhere. It is, of course, the part of an experienced teacher never to forget that the business of learning is an intensely individual, isolated, lonely activity 一 accompanied for every individual student by difficulties and stumbling blocks, setbacks, moments of despair, leaps of insight and elation, growing skills and the birth of confidence. If this is forgotten or neglected, frustration or worse will be the price. The knowledge and insight that come to teachers who meet their pupils in small groups should not only serve them well as teachers ； the experience they gain of the intellectual problems and needs of their individual pupils should also enrich the contribution they make in university boards and committees which construct or amend curricula, administer the university's teaching programme and control the entrance and examination systems. Thus the interests of different kinds of students are more likely to be borne in mind and protected. 53. In all university teaching there is a dual responsibility — to the subject itself and to the student who looks for help in his step-by-step progress towards his goal. We have called one aspect of this duality 'subject- orientated', the other 'student-orientated'. We do not suggest that the two are ever wholly separate. For no teacher can afford to let a student escape from the "compulsions" of his subject or from the rational momentum of its ideas ； nor himself to forget the variety of intellectual needs among his pupils. 54. Although, as teaching institutions, universities can have no escape from the dual responsibility we have described, they have chosen to discharge it in a variety of different ways. In some, formal structured teaching has been predominant with small-group teaching a follow-up or adjunct to it; in others, small-group teaching has been the central feature with formal structured teaching providing its framework and context. Whatever combination of methods may have been adopted, many universities throughout the world have acknowledged two kinds of teaching complementary to each other — the one concerned with the scholar's orderly exposition of his subject, its methods, history, problems and prospects, the other with ensuring help for the student in his progress along the lonely road to achieving understanding and independence of mind and judgement. Our present concern is to record our view that students in universities which pay little or no attention to small-scale teaching suffer serious disadvantages in coming to grips with their material and in progressively strengthening their grasp on their subjects. 55. Small-group "student-orientated" teaching is, we believe, more securely based and more likely to flourish to the benefit of the students when it is institutionalised, that is, supported by an apparatus designed for the purpose and respected (like the apparatus of the lecture system and the laboratory demonstration) within the university. 56. From what we have written above, it will come as no surprise that we recommend