300 



NATURE 



[December 28 



forgiven wtvn h<" luRg"'** thnt th*« whol** country might 

 benefit ii inlcnti* put tht-m 



more iii It i« a well- 



known I.Ki ui.ii I..'.' .w. I.......... (..■.. • ■••v(r practice, 



toid to have the hijjhcst university 4|i. , who tell 



you frankly that they do not b«>lieve in 'ny,-. 



The greutent of your profcttsional men ptts»cd through 

 school and entered college with the smallest possible 

 scquaintanie with natural science ; their university course 

 involved very little study of natural science ; that course 

 was so narrow that, although we hear such men talk of 

 their love for literature they take no pleasure in reading 

 Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Goldsmith or Dickens, and 

 they take no interest in those applications of science %-hirb 

 are transforming the world. Now I consider with Sir 

 Norman Lockyer that the study of natural science is as 

 important a line of defence of the British Empire as our 

 Army and Navy. 



And yet all the most expensively educated clever men are 

 ignorant of natural science. In several papers and 

 spiM-ohes.* I have pointed out the great loss which the 

 country feels on account of this and the absence of breadth 

 of culture and mental power which are due to it. How- 

 ever harmful the present university standard may be to 

 clover men, it is even worse for the average man, because 

 all our secondary schools train boys as if they were going 

 to a classical university. The average boy represents more 

 than 90 per cent, of all the boys in the higher schools. I 

 say that he is capable of the highest kind of training; you 

 may make him fond ot lx>oks, and he will then educate 

 himself until he dies. You can put him in the way of 

 being fond of English literature, of writing good English ; 

 of easy computation ; of recognising the significance of 

 scientific discovery ; of being proud of himself ; of having 

 confidence in his reasoning powers. He will not then 

 readily let his emotions be played upon by an eloquent 

 foolish speaker, and he will not easily be deceived by a 

 quack of any kind. You can make him a well-educated 

 man, fit to be a citizen of Belfast, to take scientific charge 

 of a business that he likes ; but, once for all, understand 

 that it is not through Latin or Greek or academic mathe- 

 matics that you will develop his mental powers. 



At present Latm is the curse of his young life. He 

 spends two or three years on Euclid or on a wretched 

 thing that has taken the place of Euclid ; you do not try 

 to make him familiar with geometrical ideas, and yet you 

 think he will learn to reason about them. You try to 

 teach him everything through books, through words, 

 although you know that since he was an infant he learnt 

 everything that he did learn through experiment and 

 observation. Whatever is likely to be unessential to him 

 in life you teach him laboriously ; he gradually takes in 

 as much as enables him to pass e.xaminations. and then he 

 quickly forgets it all. No part of his school work has been 

 a pleasure to him. You know all this, but you say that 

 his mind is trained, although he may forget his school 

 work. Well, it is not of much use, but I will say to you 

 that you have not trained his mind. Whatever you have 

 done has been to enslave and degrade the boy's mind. 

 You have made him believe himself to be stupid. He did 

 get training from his friends, from play ; and he and his 

 companions will go on educating oach other through their 

 sports, as puppies do. But how different his life would be 

 if vou let him teach himself through his own scientific ex- 

 periments. \\. the age of twenty-one he dislikes books ; 

 he reads no newspapers ; even the sporting news he would 

 prefer to hear by word of mouth. He cannot write his 

 own language — the language of his mother, his wife that 

 is to be, his enemies and friends. The first chance of real 

 literary education he has is when he falls in love, and he 

 has to be careful of his spelling and grammar when he 

 writes love-letters. Then it is that he finds himself with too 

 small a vocabulary. Read the evidence of Lord Roberts 

 before the War Commission ; without that it is scarcely 

 possible that you can believe that nineteen-twentieths 

 of our public-school boys should be so illiterate as thev 

 are. They are ignorant of everything that is essential to 

 ^eir life except what they learned outside the class-room. 

 But they speak the truth ; they have a sense of personal 



2 See, for example, "Eneland's Neglect of Science " (Nature, Julys. 

 1900) and an address delivered at Oxford (Nature, December 31, 1903). 



NO. 2200, VOL. 88] 



honour : they Mrorn meanncM. They often become what 

 called good' men of buvinea* if they tat: wel! - ' 

 thev manage bu»inet« and estatet on old-estai 

 weft enough; but alas for them if the buttnet»c 

 manage are changing their character ! All bi. 



(letting to be conducted now more and more ' 

 ines ; scientific management means success, lud ..:. 

 management means failure in nearly all I ; ::• - 

 days, and most public-school boys are so ^;r.,ii«<l \\..i\ i 

 cannot be trained. I can speak partic uliil. of ni.j 

 facturcs which arc applications of phybital «.!< 1,1 • 

 such a boy is pitchforked into works he learns i 

 If he enters a technical college like this he has no 

 ledge, no habit of thought on which it is possible to buil< 



I have been during my life several times all ov<t ' 

 globe, and wherever 1 have gone I have found 

 average English public-school boys who were 1 • 



training for no job but that of a hewer of v,.,.„^ 



drawer of water ; children of Gibeon they are, and so tl. 

 must remain. The last time 1 was in Winnijx'g I 1 

 strong evidence of the poor reputation of the m 

 gentlemanly young Englishmen who were trying to : 

 living in Canada and the United States; wherias 

 sons of poor parents coming from schools where they w< 

 taught only English subjects and how to compute w< : 

 thought to be starting on brilliant careers. 



There is an enormous number of young engineers wh' 

 fathers paid great premiums for them on their enter i 

 works, and they cannot get work to do or they are g; 

 to get the wages of a common fitter. Perhaps they h.i 

 picked up sufficient knowledge to be able to look aft 

 engines and electrical machines, but their knowledge 

 very superficial; their labour is really unskilled, and sn. 

 changes in the character of the work they are asked to •: 

 find them incapable. They are always talking of them- 

 selves as victims of competition, of an overstocked pr< 

 fession. And yet they cannot help seeing numerous m 

 who were once poor, men who were compelled to en 

 wages since they were fourteen years of age, occupy: 

 high positions ; men whose school training did not ui 

 them for entering a college such as this, and for obta 

 ing the most advanced knowledge of the theory and pracii 

 of their profession. 



If school education were taken out of the hands of t 

 pedants, the average boy might have a delightful schi 

 life. 



The Belfast well-to-do business man know^ instinctive!, 

 that his secondary schools are all wrong, and, as a ru' 

 he takes his boy away from school at fifteen and he p 

 him in business. In this way he avoids a great many 

 the evils of the public-school life — the stupefying sch' 

 work, and the self-protective rush of the boys to sports, 

 loafing, and the minor vices. 



Training in natural science, laboratory work in draw- 

 ing and in computation, is the very best method of deve!. ■ 

 ment of the reasoning faculties. It is good for the 1 

 who is called clever; it is the only possible method for \ 

 average boy. The civil engineer has but little theory ; 

 needs but little knowledge of mathematics ; but of all n 

 ho ought to be most intimately acquainted with the iwx\y 

 mental principles of science. He has few formulae or fix 

 rules ; judgment and experience enable him to see his w 

 to the solution of problems of great complexity, so that 

 needs to have his reasoning powers developed more e\ 

 than the electrical or mechanical engineer, who has vf 

 definite rules to guide him in his professional work. 



A great day science college in Belfast would give jv 

 the training that Belfast business men desire. By me.", 

 of it their businesses would be conducted more and mc; 

 on scientific lines. 



Well, you can have such a college. In London, in t' 

 colleges of the City Guilds, at the Royal College of Scien 

 in several of the polytechnics, there is no difTicult%' in fill; 

 the class-rooms in the daytime. In Glasgow and ot; 

 cities there are great science colleges where again there 

 less and less difficulty found in filling the class-rooms i 

 th*^ daytime with students who are fit for the work. 



There is no city of the size of Belfast in Germany or 

 America where there is not a great science college which 

 is filled with students doing the highest kind of engineer- 

 ing work and other science work in the dav time ; and here 



