VOL.3, No. 2
THEROYAL ROAD
225
sirable from the points of view of the home consumer and the nation is a matter of opinion, but there is no doubt that large corporations can, and do, dispense with extraneous aid in carrying out all the research work they require, whether it be fundamental or incidental. There will be less diversity of opinion concerning the truth of the Prime Minister's statement (quoted in the report of the department) that our trade will never be able to cope with unexpected emergencies, a t home or abroad, until scientific method and scientific men occupy a better position in industrial affairs. Why the position of the scientific man is inferior to that of the financier and administrator, to what extent he himself is responsible, and how far it is due to the inherent and uncorrected perversity of others, are questions outside our present scope, but they all seem to center around the larger problem of how to bring home to the people a sense of the actual and potential value of sciehce in the maintainance and perfection of human life. Much of that value lies in r e ~ e a ~ cand h ; just as Malebranche declared that if he held truth captive in his hand, he would let it escape so that he might pursue and capture it again, so we may say that if we held world supremacy in science and industry, we would let it go, so that we might be forced to use research in the struggle to regain it. ~
THE ROYAL ROAD "I have heard a good many definitions of education, but I know of none better than this-the development of one's capacity to understand."' Each one ofns will, no doubt, concede to Mr. Munro that definitions of education are not lacking. However, we may not agree quite so readily that the one to which he refers satisfactorily conveys our idea of the true meaning of the word. "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him" is very applicable in this case and so each individual finds a different meaning in "education." What is your idea of education? Quoting further from the same author: "Education is not merely a matter of assimilating various chunks from the world's stock of accumulated knowledge, although there are a great many people, both old and young, who look upon it in that light. In much larger measure, education is the process of training men and women to realize the range and the profundity of their own ignorance." Our attention is again called, in the same article, to the tendency of people in general to seek a "royal road to learning." Nor is that tendency restricted to learning alone but persists in showing itself in the process of reaching any end which we set out to attain. We must get where we are going in not only the shortest time possible but also with the least possible effort. Mr. Munro says: "The quest for a royal road is being given up, and what people are now 1 ''Scientific Education and Unscient&c Democracy." Haword Grud. Mag.., 34, 175-85 (1925).
Wm. Bennett Munro.
226
JOURNAL 08 CKEMICAL EDUCATION
FBBRUARY, 1926
seeking, apparently, is a system of rapid transit in education. Hence, we have, almost every year, the reputed discovery of some new educational alchemy whereby we can make a silken purse out of a sow's ear, a job that is simplicity itself when compared to the task of transforming mental vacuity into genius. The problem method, the project method, the Meiklehohn method, the socialized recitation-they all point to the fact that some educators have not yet abandoned the hope of attaining the end without the means, the whole without the parts, the reward without the effort. There is nothing new in any of these methods except a new name. They are merely the Gold Dust twins of education which advertise that work can be done without doing it. No one of them, or all of them put together, can ever accomplish much as ,a substitute for sustained intellectual exertion. In the catalogue of a certain Eastern institution there is an announcement of an elementary course in which the instructor says: 'The purpose of this course is to make freshmen think.' I have no fault to find with his goal, although I am disposed to wonder why this particular form of hazing should be confined to freshmen. But is it not a strange delusion that men of any age can be compelled to think, or that thought which is induced by compulsion can ever be of value to anybody? If that were the case we need only add an Eleventh Commandment to the Decalogue, namely, 'Thou shalt think,' and all other things would be added unto us." Now, if we have failed to think for ourselves while acquiring an education, are we justified in assuming that we have been educated? "Learning to think in a rational, orderly, objective way is a long and difficult process, far more so than most people imagine. Thousands of our young men and women go through the schools and colleges without mastering the art, and hence without obtaining a real education. "Now it is the glory of pure science and mathematics that these subjects train men in orderly and ohjective thinking as no other subjects can. Here are fields of study in which loose or crooked thought leads inevitably to demonstrable error, to error which cannot be glossed over or concealed. Here are branches of knowledge in which there is no confusion between right and wrong, between post hocs and propter hocs, between the mere coincidences and the consequences of the cause. When you have finished with a prohlem.in any of the exact sciences you are either right or wrong, and you know it. That is why we call them exact sciences, to distinguish them from philosophy, sociology, economics, and the other social sciences, in which the difference between truth and error is still, in most cases, a matter of individual opinion. "It is sometimes said that the scientist renders a great service to mankind by the discovery of new ideas. But it seems to me that he renders an even greater service by exploding some of the old ones." W. R.W.
