c Chemical Digest
SCIENCE TEACHING In a recent address before the educational section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Thomas H. Holland spoke of "Methods of Science Teaching."' Our aim, according to Dr. Holland, should not be the study of scientific education so much as the discovery of principles applicable to all forms of education. In speaking of the value of humanism in science teaching, he says: Under the tyranny of terminolom -~ our classical friends have usurped 'the "humanities." But they sometimes forget, through their specialization in the purely rhetorical aspects of classical literature, that what gave rise to the Renaissance was the discovery of the long-buried wisdom, especially of the Greeks-their art, their religion and their science. The revolt of the intellect from previous formalism and theological bondage resulted in more than the revival of literature and art, more than the religious freedom which gave us the Reformation: it aroused curiosity regarding natural laws-what we now call the spirit of research, because the word curiasIty is more widely occupied. The invention of the mariner's compass, and the exploratory spirit which accompanied it, led to the discovery of the Americas. South Africa. India. and the Far East. The invention of gunpowder and that of paper and printing were the technological offspring of classical literature, strange as this may seem to us who see the wide gap between the modern classical school and the technical institute. Some of the scientific developments which followed the classical Renaissance had possibly independent origins, hut they were mainly the product of intellectual activities have been quickened by the rediscoverg of buried philosophies. What would 0th-ise but slow combustion developed, because of the classics, with the speed of an explosion. Greek literature acted on medieval scholasticism like nitric acid on combustible cellulose: cotton was converted into gun-cotton.
However, through specialization, the main object of the study of the classics became obscured and stricken with a formalism and even pedantry. In the same way there is a danger in our science teaching to produce by specialization, "similar cultural ptomaines and thus to obtain what corresponds to the devitalized residue of the humanities without humanism." Further: The educational balance is not secured by requiring students to attend a formal course of classics or history as well as of science. That would be merely to double the offense. Separate courses of history and science form a mechanical mixture as dead as the chemical constituents of protoplasm. It is the biographical history of science itself that coutsins the essential vitamins of the student's food. An illustration. possibly somewhat exaggerated, that I used in 1924 will show what is intended:
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Thomas H. Holland, "Methods of Science Teaching," Sch. and Soc., 2 4 185-93 (1926).
giving two sep'mte doses of two unrelated subjects to act as mutual correctives is equivalent t o giving a patient a metallic sodium pill with a sniff of chlorine gas when what he really wants is a pinch of common salt. The two constituents given separately might be fatd, whilst the two in the form of the compound sodium chloride make an essential f d .
Dr. Holland quotes a dehition of education as beimg the "deliberate adjustment of a growing human being to its enviroment" and says: May I remind our teachers of science and technology that their students are not wanted only as experts in the laboratory and workshop?. .They have post-graduate duties t o perform as citizens, and must face relationseompetitive relationswith other human beines. - . with most of whom thev cannot communicate in technical terms alone. To be appreciated they must understand and be understood by others: they want the humanities, and the humanities are not the monopoly of the classical scholar.
Dr. Holland believes with Huxley and his colleagues that every man should know something of the history and origin of the features of the "only world on which he will live in human foxm;and that without an acquaintance with those branches of science which are more observational than experimental no man should be regarded as an educated man." Quoting further: Nature knowledge now is getting into the position that science generally occupied in the older classical schools: it is accessible only to the boy whose bent is too strong for the teacher, and who thus shows an individuality which tends to mark him down and so confirm his position as a freak. Possibly I am exaggerating, but it is obvious that scholarships are driving us to premature specialization. The schools conform to the universities: each professor in the university pounces on the scholar and turns him to account as a r m i t for hi honors school. This change over to science and technology, dictated largely by utilitarian motives, is even more alarming to the teachers of science, whose agitation to this end has been embarrassingly sucwsful; for the change brings with it a responsibility which was unforseen in its fullness.. .That our classical teachers have been successful, even conspicuonsly so, is beyond question. Anyone who has had the privilege of watching the members of the Indian Civil Service carrying on the administration of their districts -with sympathy as well as efficiency, not here and there. but generally; not under the eve of the o r e s or of Parliament, but isolated, alone and unobserved-would seriously seek far the cause of their &cieney and character; for nine-tenths of the data to the problems that employed in their early education have had no d i i application they have ndw t o tackle. Stresses set up by limitations of time and economic nerrnities force us, in modem educational institutions, to concentrate our attention on, and wen in some instances t o limit it to, professional and vocational subjects. But i t is our duty t o see that these stresses do not exceed the intellectual elastic limits of our students, and so be followed by mental strains. If theoldu systemof classical education justified itself, not by the out-turn of experts in the Greek and Latin languages, but by the development of character and capacity for affairs, we have to see to it that science and technology are also so taught that these -ntiil features are developed, not inhibited, in the student. ~
W. R. W.
