186 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



or French student on leaving a secondary school is comparable to that 

 of a student entering his junior year at college in this country. Now 

 the task of making a radical change in a body whose inertia is as great 

 as that of our public-school system is one which no one can face 

 lightly. However, our requirements do not call for thousands of 

 highly educated scientists but only for scores or, at most, hundreds. 

 Realizing that in education the private schools and universities are 

 the pacemakers in setting new standards, I suggest that the problem 

 might be approached by arousing the interest of a few forward-look- 

 ing schools and encouraging them by financial help to adjust their 

 curricula to meet the objectives just outlined. Such a program should 

 be supported by scholarships in order to prevent economic circum- 

 stances from limiting unduly the sources from which students could 

 be selected. An expenditure of half a million dollars a year would 

 support 250 boys and girls on full scholarships and give 25 schools 

 somewhat less than $10,000 a year to strengthen their staffs in order 

 to meet the new requirements. Half a million dollars a year is less 

 than one two-thousandths of the Nation's budget for research and de- 

 velopment. The experiment Avould not be a costly one over a period of 

 10 years — the least to be expected would be an increase by a hundred 

 or so in our supply of well-educated research scientists, and a reason- 

 able expectation would be the gradual spread of higher standards 

 of secondary education with special emphasis on the intellectual train- 

 ing of the promising youngster. 



Another method of increasing the supply of imaginative young 

 scientists and engineers is the introduction into the high schools and 

 colleges of some courses in the history of science and technology for 

 the purpose of inspiring imaginative youngsters who might normally 

 seek other vocations to take up a career in science. This also has its 

 difficulties because adequate textbooks have not been written. The 

 historians of science have generally been interested in the growth 

 of ideas, and their Morks cannot be properly appreciated without a 

 fairly thorough knowledge of the content of the various sciences. 

 However, this challenge could be met successfully by a teacher wlio 

 is interested in tracing the influence of technological advances on the 

 general history of the nations, and in exploring the circumstances 

 leading up to these technological advances right back through the 

 development and research stages to the methods and characters of the 

 men who originated the basic ideas. In such a book the scientific 

 background could be supplied in a general way without misleading 

 the reader or disturbing the emphasis. A knowledge of the difficul- 

 ties encountered and the successes achieved by men in past genera- 

 tions, together with a realization of the consequences of their labors 

 as seen from the vantage point of the historian, has a moulding and 

 inspirational influence on young minds that cannot be overestimated. 



