Unless singular talents, or the bare force of circumstance, recommend another course of action, it is not desirable that new teachers should at once become Masters of the higher class of Grammar or of Humanity, though otherwise not unfit for these grades. On all accounts, say the critics, the rule should be that they start with the lowest classes, and then, year after year, advance to the next higher grade, with the best part of their scholars. A certain crudeness and inexperience which, at the beginning, are unavoidable in their management, will cause, as long as it lasts, not so much evil with the younger as with the older students. Inexperience wears away with practice. Then again, if the Masters go up each year, and the scholars go with them, the same students are very much with the same teachers. The young people have not to pass so often from one kind of management to another. Frequent change entails a waste of time, until each party comes to know the other, and understand his own as well as the other's part.[186] In 1583, Father Oliver Manare, visiting the German Provinces by the General's authority, had noticed this point, in his ordinance for the management of _convictus_, or boarding colleges; that "frequent changes were burdensome to the students themselves, because they were forced to accommodate themselves often to new teachers or prefects."[187]
In the same sense, these critics, whom we are following, consider it undesirable that a Master should resign his post in less than three years. Frequent and manifold changes provoke complaints on the part of the outside world. Besides, the Master's own efforts at acquiring perfection in the magisterial art will be cut short. When there is no prospective permanency in a position, the mind is not so seriously applied to the work in hand.[188]
In all this, a most important question regarding boys is being faced by these critics; and a definite practical solution is adopted. The question is, which of the two alternatives to adopt, whether to submit boys to one person's dominant influence, or to pass them on through the hands of divers experienced and permanent Professors, stationed respectively in the different grades. This latter alternative, if it is understood to mean that one Professor remains perpetually in one grade, and another in another, scarcely seems to merit consideration with them, except as regards the two highest literary classes,--of Poetry and Rhetoric,--where the requirements of erudition are so considerable as to need a lengthened term of years for filling the chairs worthily. But, if the alternative regarding permanent Professors means that the same teachers remain constantly within the limits of the same curriculum, then the question seems to be the one which the critics of the preliminary _Ratio_ argue about in both senses, for and against; and they finally arrive at a solution, or rather a compromise.[189]