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nique of instruction, within the school system as well as beyond it, and 

 it is only its abuses that are to be deplored. But these have not only 

 crept into the rapidly growing extra-mural work of higher institutions, 

 but even pervade the programs of scientific societies themselves. 



With the preferences of an audience which confessedly seeks enter- 

 tainment one can not well quarrel on the ground that it ought to 

 desire instruction instead; one can only note the appearance of new 

 predilections in the social habits of a people. But against an institution 

 devoted to the advancement of knowledge, or the fostering of an interest 

 in science, protest lodges whenever these aims are lost sight of or subordi- 

 nated. The past decade has seen a rapidly growing tendency on the part 

 of such societies to allow the presentation of purely illustrative materials 

 to trespass upon the formal discussion of their common subject matter. 

 The change is one which affects the very ideals for which these bodies 

 stand. The science of geology, for example, has perfectly definite aims 

 which are not attained by the photographic reproduction, however copi- 

 ous or admirable, of rock strata and erosion effects, of talus slopes and 

 detritus, of shifts, faults, dykes and lava-flow — though an acquaintance 

 with all these things is essential to the prosecution of its general under- 

 taking. The science of geography, likewise, is no more adequately repre- 

 sented in the flood of charming pictures to which we have grown accus- 

 tomed in periodicals and platform lectures alike than is a knowledge of 

 the development of any people embodied in the impressions one carries 

 away from those ingenious pageants to which — still as picture lovers — 

 we are turning with equal enthusiasm in the field of history. 



In public lecturing and the methods of instruction, as in magazine 

 and book-making, these phenomena have a common significance. They 

 indicate a change in the point of support on which the speaker rests, as 

 well as in the nature of his appeal to the hearer. The new demand is 

 not less strenuous than the old, but it is of a different kind. Instead of 

 requiring a definite constructive activity, stimulated and directed — but 

 never supplanted — by the mind of the speaker, it titillates the imagina- 

 tion with a series of agreeable shocks. The mind is not taxed but ap- 

 peased; the soi-disant teacher exerts himself to anticipate the moment 

 of flagging attention, and out of an abundant store to supply it at each 

 turn with a novel and pleasurable stimulus. Education and discipline 

 are not attainable by any such process. It is only by thinking that 

 knowledge comes, and thought is a function that can neither be assumed 

 by a deputy nor taken over by any other faculty. Instruction and enter- 

 tainment, though equally essential to human life, can not be confused as 

 specific aims without the sacrifice of their several values. Every normal 

 individual resents the instruction that is disguised as entertainment; 

 but the ultimate effects of a systematic pretense that entertainment is 

 instruction are no less to be feared. 



