490 FULLER 



paper suggested (in addition to veiled private hints to me by one of its mem- 

 bers about laws governing libel) that, since this is the Golden Anniversary 

 Year of our Society, it might be appropriate for authors of these special 

 papers to review the progress of fifty years in the various aspects of American 

 botanical science about which we are writing. This instruction seemed at 

 first easy of fulfillment in view of the usual human assumption that progress 

 and the passage of time are inseparable twins. Then came that letter, and 

 with it doubts. Has the teaching of general botany during this last half 

 century really shown progress, or only an illusion of progress, or a confusion of 

 progress with change? Certainly there have been numerous changes in general 

 botany teaching within the past five decades: remarkable advances in visual 

 aids in the form of better charts and models, Kodachrome slides, and time- 

 lapse motion-picture films; improved student microscopes, for one of which 

 Robert Brown or Wilhelm Hofmeister might have given a left arm; better- 

 looking textbooks with more readable and more attractive typography and 

 enormously advanced reproduction of photographs and drawings; highly 

 "objectified" examinations which can be graded by machines; shifts in 

 classroom techniques — the abandonment of lecturing by some botanists as 

 an outmoded medieval relic (I have the nasty suspicion that some, at least, 

 of those who disparage lecturing as a teaching device do so because they are 

 incapable of giving an eloquent and exciting lecture!), the substitution for 

 lectures of a laboratory-cum-discussion method of teaching; and changing 

 emphases upon subject matter, with diminished stress upon morphological 

 details and correspondingly increased accent upon physiological and be- 

 havioral aspects of plants. And with these changes, of course, has come another 

 change, one obviously not of our making, the change in the populations of 

 general botany, the bourgeoning numbers of students (using that loosely and 

 charitably) in our introductory courses. 



If we examine carefully into these changes, we find that not all of them 

 are truly signs of progress. I have viewed, for example, some twenty-five 

 sound films on plants and have found only three without at least one serious 

 factual error in the narration. Increasingly mechanical techniques of examina- 

 tion, while they may save botany professors hours of labor and may postpone 

 for a time those academic thromboses, actually give little measure of a stu- 

 dent's ability to put two and two together and come up with four, or to 

 demonstrate his critical sense, or to analyze, in his own way, the strengths 

 and weaknesses of experimental setups and results. Similarly, changes in 

 classroom methodology are not necessarily indicative of progress ; the effective- 

 ness of teaching is basically a function of a teacher's knowledge and enthu- 

 siasm and personality, and such procedural changes are at best only nibblings 

 around the pedagogical fringes. If we place the credits against the debits, 

 we should find, I believe, that we have made progress in our teaching of 

 introductory botany; we should find also, if we balance the books honestly, 



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