Explore "Tropical Education" by Grant Allen on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If any one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) 'In what university would an intelligent young man do best to study? ' I think I should be very much inclined indeed to answer offhand, 'In the Tropics.'
No doubt this advice sounds on first hearing just a trifle paradoxical; and no doubt, too, the proposed university has certain serious drawbacks (like many others) on the various grounds of health, expense, faith, and morals. Senior Proctors are unknown at Honolulu; Select Preachers don't range as far as the West Coast. But it has always seemed to me, nevertheless, that certain elements of a liberal education are to be acquired tropically which can never be acquired in a temperate, still less in an arctic or antarctic academy. This is more especially true, I allow, in the particular cases of the biologist and the sociologist; but it is also true in a somewhat less degree of the mere common arts course, and the mere average seeker after liberal culture.