504 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION 1 



By Rbofessor JOHN PERRY 



IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, LONDON 



I WANT you to understand that we have established some funda- 

 mental principles in our science: (1) A subject must interest a 

 pupil. (2) A man who trains dogs or seals or bears or other animals 

 makes a close study of their minds. In the same way we must recognize 

 that one boy differs from another, and study the mind of each boy. 

 (3) If a boy is not very receptive of an important subject we must do 

 our best with him and try to settle what is the minimum with which 

 we ought to be satisfied. Only a few subjects ought to be compulsory 

 on all boys. (4) There are two classes of boys unequal as to numbers, 

 (a) those fond of, and (b) those not capable of abstract reasoning. 

 (5) Another two classes are (a) those fond of, and (&) those not fond 

 of language study. (6) Every boy may be made to write and read in 

 his own language and he may be made fond of reading. (7) The aver- 

 age boy's reasoning faculties are most surely developed by letting him 

 do things. That is, for example, through his sports, or through wood 

 or metal working, or gardening, or experiments involving weighing and 

 measuring. Through the last of these he learns to compute. A boy of 

 eight learns decimals in an hour if he weighs and measures, whereas by 

 the usual method of teaching he is ignorant of decimals at the age of 

 fourteen. A boy learns whist very quickly if you seat him with three 

 other people at a table with a pack of cards; he would not learn in a 

 month if he had no cards. Would you teach a boy to swim by mere talk ? 

 (8) Every boy must get a good deal of personal attention. (9) How- 

 ever good a system may be there can be no good results if the teachers 

 are cheap; cheap teachers are usually stupid and over- worked. Men in 

 charge of schools and colleges never seem to learn this. The market 

 price must be paid for a capable man. (10) Fairly good results may 

 be expected from a good teacher, even when he is compelled to work on 

 a bad system, but really good results can be obtainable only from a good 

 teacher with a good system. 



I need not go into details about all these principles, but I should like 

 to dwell presently upon a few of them. At the beginning of this address 

 I spoke of the obstruction to great necessary reform — too much anti- 

 quated machinery to " scrap." Most schoolmasters will admit the neces- 

 sity for reform in the case of the average boy, but they say that parents 



i From the address of the president of the Educational Science Section of 

 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Australia, 1914. 



