SCIENCE AND THE AVERAGE BOY 519 



not consist of it alone, as he is completely excluded from any 

 knowledge of physics by the conditions. Public school masters 

 have justified the practice to themselves by a belief in formal 

 training or discipline. In the prefaces of many elementary 

 science text books and in the majority of articles urging the 

 claims of science as an educational medium, one comes across 

 the statement that its chief virtue is the excellent training it 

 affords for various so-called faculties, such as the faculty of 

 observation or of accuracy. Those who believe in faculty 

 training maintain that not only are the powers of observation or 

 of accuracy developed in connexion with special chemical or 

 physical phenomena by a training in the methods of these 

 sciences but also that there will result a sort of transferable 

 over-flow, that the powers of observation and habits of accuracy 

 in general will benefit from this formal training. In the same 

 way it is urged that mental gymnastics in classics or classical 

 repetition for a boy without any literary or linguistic aptitude 

 may not make him a classic but at all events they do some good 

 in that they will increase his reasoning or memorising faculty 

 in general. It is argued, in fact, that a faculty can be trained 

 irrespective of the medium used, that an overflow will accrue 

 from this training which will be available when the faculty is 

 required for other purposes than the special one in which it has 

 been formally trained. Thus we have believed and acted as 

 though the mind were an aggregate of faculties — observation, 

 reasoning, concentration, etc. and that a gain in any special 

 power was necessarily a gain to the faculty as a whole. The 

 general belief is that learning to do one thing will mysteriously 

 make other things not identical with it better done. A surplus 

 of mind can be accumulated and expended on other problems 

 than the one in which it has been acquired. Thus the subject 

 is less important than the mental discipline and the acquisition 

 of accuracy in weighing or cork boring can be justified ; though 

 the boy never reaches the stage of learning any physics or 

 chemistry, at the least he will have acquired increased accuracy 

 in numbers, in keeping accounts, even in telling fishing stories. 

 Thus we are justified in getting boys ready to study science, 

 though they will never do so. But during the last few years 

 the science of experimental psychology has been brought into 

 being. As the result of their experiments, the psychologists 

 tell us that formal training confers but little benefit outside 



