Geology in Secondary Education. 1 



THE need for a selection of subjects in modern education becomes 

 pressingly apparent, and there is consequently every danger of 

 specialisation at too early an age. The result of this will be that men 

 and women will grow up as students of some branch of natural 

 science, literature, or mathematics, with even less in common than 

 is the case between the several groups of educated persons at the 

 present day. While every thorough worker, knowing the influence of 

 his own favourite study upon himself, is apt to put forward the claims 

 of that study as the real essential in educational progress, it is with 

 all seriousness that I assert that, in general secondary education, 

 Geology should receive a recognised position. 



Elementary Chemistry and Physics may be accepted as being 

 now taught in all self-respecting institutions, such as the great day- 

 schools, the endowed boarding-schools — which often usurp the title 

 of "public schools " — and similar progressive seats of learning. In 

 the following suggestions, everything that is put forward is intended 

 to apply equally to girls as well as to boys, the time having long passed 

 when it could be maintained that knowledge which enlarged the 

 views of the one sex would unfit the other for the affairs of life. This 

 paper is also aimed somewhat at the future, when secondary educa- 

 tion will be brought within the reach of all classes, perhaps by a 

 wider system of scholarships open to pupils of the board-schools. 



Given a fair grounding in the facts of elementary chemistry and 

 physics, the application of these facts to the great natural world on 

 which we depend leads us directly to geology. The common 

 minerals, the common rocks, their common modes of association, are 

 capable of direct observation, and offer material for consideration 

 wherever the future lot of the student may be cast. I am now taking 

 the case of the ordinary individual, whose leisure-time is becoming in 

 general increased. The correct understanding of one's surroundings 

 is capable of adding a new pleasure to existence, and of providing a 

 rational occupation — which is one of the great ends of education. 



The amount of knowledge that the average schoolboy possesses 

 a! >out the Punic Wars, or the externals of Greek mythology, is some- 



1 An introduction to a discussion at the meeting of the British Association at 

 Nottingham, September, 1893. 



