Science in National Education 



mind which habitually favours concerted action 

 on scientific lines is the outcome of a system of 

 general education which has had plenty of time 

 to leaven the intellectual life of the community 

 concerned, which has been inspired by a sense 

 of national duty, and which has been intelligently 

 disinterested in spirit, and not been spoiled by 

 utilitarian narrowness and by specialisation in the 

 wrong place. It is in the skilful adjustment of 

 educational means to national, as distinguished 

 from sectional or private, ends that we have 

 allowed ourselves to fall far behind. Our general 

 system of public elementary education is still under 

 forty years old, and for a considerable part of its 

 history suffered grievously from the bad tradition of 

 payment by results. And, though immense improve- 

 ments have been made in them during the last ten 

 years, our middle secondary schools are still (with 

 numerous exceptions) inferior, in point of staffing 

 and intellectual grip, to the average German, Dutch 

 and Scandinavian schools of the corresponding 

 type. Therefore we cannot yet expect to see in 

 the community at large the same habitual readiness 

 to welcome and understand plans of scientific co- 

 operation for public ends (in such matters, for 

 example, as the hygienic control of the growth of 

 towns, the organisation of agricultural industry, and 

 the establishment of closer connections between 

 scientific research and industrial enterprise) which 

 already forms so striking a characteristic of German 

 and Danish life. But we have only to persevere in 

 the work of educational improvement which we 



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