CHAPTER XXV 

 EDUCATION 



The most important practical problem of biology Our power of influencing 

 mental growth Self-education Formal education The three aims of the 

 school-master Subjects taught, and methods of teaching them The teaching 

 of young children ; of older children ; of young adults Religious teaching 

 The religious attitude is an acquirement The antagonism between religion and 

 science Methods of teaching religion Prejudice and superstition Economic 

 and social effects of methods of teaching religion Inborn and acquired feeble- 

 mindedness and lunacy The teaching of the classics Scientific teaching Science 

 teaching Some sciences are founded on few and some on many facts The former 

 are mainly interpretative, the latter mainly descriptive Systematists Darwin's 

 effort to make biology interpretative Description is the warp and interpretation 

 the woof of science The teaching of biology The importance of the science 

 Conclusion. 



o 



784. S~^\F all the practical problems on which the study of 

 heredity sheds a light, by far the most important is 

 that of the education of the young, if only for the 

 reason that the solutions of all other problems, if soluble they be, 

 depends on the intelligence of the race that takes them in hand. 

 Here, since the mental growth which the normal human being 

 makes under the stimulus of experience is so vast, since according 

 to the stimulus supplied this growth may take any one or more of 

 a thousand different directions, and since the kind and amount of 

 stimulus is very greatly under the control of the guardians of the 

 child, our power for good and evil is at its maximum. Training 

 may endow the child with wide and useful knowledge, or with 

 knowledge which, though great, is narrow and useless, or it may 

 leave him very ignorant ; it may bestow on him habits, tones and 

 attitudes of mind which enable him to utilize such knowledge as he 

 acquires to the utmost limit of his capacity, or which render the 

 widest knowledge and the highest capacity unavailing. There is 

 abundant evidence that a child of normal capacity may be trained 

 to a degree of stupidity resembling innate feeble-mindedness, or to 

 a degree of wrong-headedness resembling insanity, or, on the other 

 hand, to a degree of intelligence which, relatively speaking, 

 resembles genius. We may differ, indeed men do differ very 



477 



