POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



APRIL, 1890. 



SCIENCE m THE HIGH SCHOOL.* 



By Prof. DAVID STARE JORDAN, 



PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA. 



THE purpose of science-teaching as a part of general education 

 is this to train the judgment through its exercise on first- 

 hand knowledge. The student of science is taught to know what 

 he knows and to distinguish it from what he merely remembers or 

 imagines. Our contact with the universe is expressed in what 

 we call science. Throughout the ages, the growth of the human 

 mind has been in direct proportion to the breadth of this contact. 

 To the man without knowledge of science, the universe seems 

 small. Science is our perception of realities ; and as the realities 

 come year by year to occupy a larger and larger place in our life, 

 so the demand for more and better training in science will long 

 be an urgent and growing one. But science should hold its place 

 in the schools by virtue of its power as an agent in mental train- 

 ing, not because of the special usefulness of scientific facts, nor 

 because knowledge of things has a higher market value than the 

 knowledge of words. 



The time will come when the study of the objects and forces 

 of nature will be as much a matter of course in all our schools as 

 the study of numbers, but the science- work of the next century 

 will not be the work we are doing now. The science in our schools 

 is too often a make-believe, and the schools will lose nothing 

 when every make-believe slips out of the curriculum. Deeply as 

 I am interested in the progress of science, both in school and out, 

 with Prof. Huxley " I would not turn my hand over " to have 

 biology taught in every school in the land, if the subject is taught 

 through books only. To pretend to do, without doing, is worse 



* Read before the Indiana State Teachers' Association, December 26, 1889. 

 vol. xxxvi. 46 



