How to Become a Scientist — High School Years 81 



he would learn and to a large extent how he would learn 

 it. The movement has been much criticized and we will not 

 review the arguments here. It probably fell short of com- 

 plete success because of overconfidence in the ability of the 

 individual child to repeat the history of the human race. 

 In its extreme forms, it also overlooked the importance of 

 self-discipline and the development of emotional and intel- 

 lectual techniques for sustaining the inevitable drudgery 

 and hard work necessary for carrying to completion any 

 task worth doing. 



As a result partly of the progressive movement and partly 

 of a truly remarkable effort to offer primary and secondary 

 school education to everyone, the people responsible for 

 primary and secondary education tended to lose touch with 

 the people responsible for the growth of knowledge in col- 

 leges and universities. Methods of teaching received increas- 

 ing emphasis at the cost of careful consideration as to what 

 should be taught. The content of many courses, especially 

 perhaps in the sciences, slowly became obsolete, or, in 

 extreme cases, disappeared entirely. 



As a matter of fact, few elementary or high school teach- 

 ers have had much contact with advanced work in the 

 sciences. Far too many have had little or no scientific train- 

 ing at all. They are thus in a poor position to reveal the 

 joy of discovery and the beauty of scientific concepts which 

 are the stuff most scientists live by. Instead, if the teaching 

 of science is related to anything at all, it is referred to the 

 world of practical affairs. As a result, physics books have 

 tended to contain less and less about physics and more and 

 more about automobiles. Mathematics has been presented 

 as weighing, measuring, and keeping accounts, with httle 

 reference to the pleasures of finding out the hidden relation- 

 ships between numbers which keep mathematicians intellec- 

 tually alive. 



