NOTES 



Educational Science 



Two of the best papers read during the Australian Meeting 

 of the British Association were by Prof. John Perry and 

 Prof. H. E. Armstrong upon the subject of science and educa- 

 tion (Nature, October i and October 22, 1914). Both speakers 

 deplored the low place now taken by science in education, and 

 indeed in the State generally. Prof. John Perry says that " the 

 classics ride us like Sinbad's old man of the sea. All over the 

 British Empire a well-educated man cannot become a pro- 

 fessional man of almost any kind unless he pretends to know 

 something of the one or more dead languages, such knowledge 

 being of no essential value to him. It is something like what 

 the old Test Act imposed upon us ; for a hundred and thirty 

 years a British citizen perfectly competent to fill the highest 

 posts could not take upon himself the smallest kind of public 

 work unless he could swear to a certain formula." "The worst 

 of it is that the average boy who has done almost nothing else 

 than Latin and Greek at school gets absolutely no love for the 

 classics ; he never reads Greek or Latin after he leaves school." 

 " One of the curses of intellectual England is due to schoolmasters 

 keeping men at school and treating them as boys until the age 

 of twenty-one. They take scholarships as stall-fed cattle take 

 prizes at agricultural shows." " Genius is very common in both 

 countries, but 99 per cent, of it is destroyed by the schools." 

 " Any ordinary citizen thinks himself fit to be a member of the 

 governing body of a school or college, and the disasters due to 

 this belief are worse than what would occur if we gave to such 

 men the command of ships. The ordinary man, especially the 

 parliamentary man, who thinks that the members of a com- 

 mittee on some scientific business ought all to be non-scientific 

 men will jeer at this statement, but it is, nevertheless, fatally 

 true." Prof. Armstrong is equally vigorous. "Our schools," 

 he says, " are for the most part in literary hands ; and it would 

 almost appear that literary and scientific interests are antag- 



510 



