240 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



social and ethical problems are involved in any discussion of 

 educational ends ; and even if we confine ourselves to the 

 question of means for attaining those ends, it is obvious that 

 education is also an art. Again, Mr. Branford's able and sug- 

 gestive chapter on " Science and Occupation " enables us to 

 clarify our ideas through his conception of levels of skill. At 

 the lowest level we have routine skill, an unconscious product 

 of mere practice. Scientific skill is more than this : there 

 is the addition of rational thought about practice ; and the 

 consequent understanding brings added power. Directed by 

 consciously acquired principles skill becomes deliberate and 

 communicable by language. A science is born. But there is a 

 still higher level in this hierarchy : that of cesthetic skill. The 

 word is used of course in a very wide sense, and is as applicable 

 to the work of a physicist or mathematician as to that of an 

 artist. It consists in the possession of what Prof. Whitehead 

 has called that most austere of all qualities — a sense of style. 

 It is the elusive " rightness " which distinguishes the work of 

 the artist from that of the practitioner, and is incommunicable 

 because it reflects the individual and unique quality of its 

 possessor. This highest and final form of skill does not 

 necessarily crown scientific skill. It is not, in other words, a 

 certain outcome of education ; but education may aid or thwart 

 its development. 



The question at issue can now be put in plain terms. To the 

 teacher, educational science is a servant whose usefulness grows 

 with his own growth in experience and skill. Its function is to 

 help him to convert the daily round of an " honest, bread- 

 winning occupation " into a self-conscious and rationally guided 

 profession. But the final step to a true vocation, though 

 dependent for its fruition on these earlier stages, is not an 

 inevitable outcome of them : it is only mediated by the appear- 

 ance of the " something more " we call aesthetic skill. The 

 work of the genius, be he physicist or teacher, is recognisable at 

 a glance in its unique completeness and rightness. But to admit 

 that is not, it seems to me, inconsistent with the supposition 

 that both a science of physics and a science of education is 

 within the realm of the possible. 



The following is a selection of references to recent work : 



Otto Lipmann, Brit. Joiirn. of Psy., 1922, 12, 4, pp. 337-51, "The School 

 in the Service of Vocational Study." As a result of his own work the 

 author concludes that the school may perform very valuable and special 

 service in the cause of vocational guidance ; not only in positive ways, 

 but also in warning pupils not to leave choice of occupation to chance 

 circumstances or mere custom. 



E. C. Oakden and Mary Sturt, Brit. Joiirn. of Psy., 1922, 12, 4, pp. 309- 

 336, "The Development of the Knowledge of Time in Children." Up to 

 eleven the conventional names of time-periods, and especially of dates. 



