SCIENCE IN THE HIGH SCHOOL. 725 



than to the high school. You do not wish to have your students 

 tell you from memory the characters of the Sauropsida as distin- 

 guished from the Ichthyopsida. What you want is the answer 

 to their own questionings of the frog and the turtle. 



I was lately present at a high-school examination in zoology. 

 The teacher gave a number of the stock questions, such as " De- 

 scribe the Gasteropoda." " What are the chief differences between 

 the domestic turkey and the turkey of Honduras ? " " How do 

 Asiatic and African elephants differ ? " " On which foot of the 

 ornithorhynchus does the webbing extend past the toes ? " and 

 so on. At last he said : " I will now give you a practical ques- 

 tion : A few days ago we had a frog in the class, and all of you 

 saw it ; now write out all the characteristics of the sub-kingdom, 

 class, and order to which the frog belongs/' 



This is all useless. The definitions of these classes and orders 

 do not concern the child. To the working naturalist these names 

 are as essential as the names of the stations on the road to a rail- 

 way engineer. They belong to his business, but the names and 

 distances of railway stations do not form part of any good work 

 in primary geography. You do not need to teach your students 

 that vertebrates are divided into mammals, birds, reptiles, batra- 

 chians, and fishes. It is not true in the first place, and, if it were, 

 it is not relevant to them. Stick to your frog, if you are studying 

 frogs, and he will teach you more of the science of animals than 

 can be learned from all the memorized classifications that you can 

 bracket out on a hundred rods of blackboard ! 



The prime defect in our schools is not, after all, that the teach- 

 ers do not know the subjects they teach, but that they do not 

 know nor care for the purpose of their teaching. In other words, 

 they do not know how to teach. The book is placed in their 

 hands by the school board, and they teach by the book. If the 

 book comes to them wrong-side up, their teaching is forever 

 inverted. That this is true, the statistics gathered last year from 

 the high schools of Indiana, by Prof. Evermann, very clearly 

 show. It is no wonder that a superintendent is needed for every 

 dozen teachers. A good teacher should know the end for which 

 he works, and then he can adapt his means to fit this end. 



I once visited a large high school, one of the best in the coun- 

 try, with a science teacher whose studies have won him the re- 

 spect of his fellow- workers. But for some reason, on that day at 

 least, he failed to bring his own knowledge into the class-room. 

 I heard him quizzing a class of boys and girls on animals not on 

 the animals of the woods and fields, not on the animals before 

 them, for there were none, but on the edentates of South Amer- 

 ica. An especial point was to find out whether it is the nine- 

 banded armadillo (novemcinctus) or the three-banded armadillo 



