February 13, 1896] 



NATURE 



347 



may be judged from the fact that many a parent who 

 grumbles at having to pay £6, £7, or ^8 a year for his 

 son's education, willingly pays a 30J. or 40^-. fee for the 

 examination which tests it. As a matter of fact, if £7 be 

 a fair sum to pay annually for a boy's education, an 

 examination at the same rate would be rather overpaid 

 with half-a-crown. 



Our whole system of examinations rests upon a wrong 

 basis ; it assumes that the value of a boy's education 

 depends upon how much he has learnt, whereas the true 

 criterion is how he has learnt it. The climax of absurdity is 

 reached in those examinations which test the knowledge of 

 a language, as French or German, by the knowledge a pupil 

 has of one specified book ; it is true that some of our 

 examining bodies have attempted to meet this difficulty 

 by setting books of an extremely uninterestmg character, 

 in order that the pupil's attention, not being able to find 

 interest in the subject-matter, may be solely occupied with 

 the language, but that is a digression. 



Those who have taught science in schools have long 

 been dissatisfied with the ordinary course, and have felt 

 the necessity of a change ; but the question, " What 

 change ?" has hitherto been asked in vain. In answering 

 this question, it is important to bear in mind that we do 

 not want to train boys to be chemists or physicists ; that 

 is the part of the technical institute, and a system of 

 instruction which may be excellent for producing trained 

 chemists may be extremely unsuitable for developing the 

 latent powers of children. 



The chief principles which it is hoped to introduce by 

 means of this syllabus are as follows. 



The insistance at the outset of measurement ^s the chief 

 factor in scientific work, and as the basis of reasoning. 

 It is not too much to say that all scientific reasoning is 

 the outcome of measurement, but measurement has been 

 conspicuously absent hitherto from our school courses, 

 and the balance, which is often stated to be the instrument 

 of precision of chemistry, has never yet had its due place 

 in the chemical teaching. The mental realisation of the 

 value of numbers, and what a theologian would call an 

 " experimental faith " in arithmetic, are important results 

 from this kind of work. The figures in an arithmetic 

 book, however they may profess to deal with concrete 

 substances, represent to a boy's mind only abstract ideas, 

 which, by means of skilful juggling, may be made to 

 produce certain "answers," but the answers convey to 

 him no meaning. A good instance of this is found in his 

 view of decimals ; any average boy will tell you that a 

 mistake in the first or second decimal place causes his 

 sum to be wrong, but the misplacement of a decimal 

 point is not worth considering ; in practice the former 

 error is a trifle, the latter causes a grotesque absurdity. 



Another point of value in the syllabus is that it teaches 

 a boy to perform experiments with a definite purpose, and 

 to suggest experiments himself— to put, in fact, questions 

 to nature. Herein lies its great superiority to qualitative 

 analysis, which, as practised in most schools, is scarcely 

 superior to the setting of puzzles. Any boy who has 

 worked intelligently through this course can scarcely fail 

 to have a much better idea of the problems which natural 

 science has to attack, and of the reasoning which is 

 brought to bear upon them, than one who has obtained a 

 greater amount of knowledge from text-books and 

 lectures. 



A valuable lesson which may be learnt from this 

 syllabus is that of writing down in good English prose 

 a systematic account of any experiment done, and 

 of the conclusions to be drawn from it. The lesson, in 

 fact, becomes largely a literary one. The faculty of doing 

 this is extremely rare amongst boys leaving school, 

 because it has hitherto never been cultivated, and the 

 ordinary courses of analysis, whether quantitative or 

 qualitative, rather discourage it than otherwise. Pro- 

 fessors who continue our boys' education in higher 



NO. 1372. VOL. 53] 



colleges complain, with reason, of its absence, and, once 

 acquired, it cannot fail to be of great advantage in every 

 walk of life. 



A great advantage to which I, as a schoolmaster, can 

 bear witness, is the influence of this teaching upon the 

 other work of the school ; it has caused masters who teach 

 other subjects to appreciate the value of teaching prac- 

 tically, and of reducing text-books to a secondary place. 

 No consummation could be more devoutly to be wished 

 especially in view of the present colossal output of worth- 

 less text-books, which boil down every difficulty and com- 

 press all knowledge into a few pages ; and the general 

 value of which is well instanced by the advertisement of 

 a French grammar now before me, which states that 

 several school masters and mistresses have given very 

 successful lessons out of this book, without any prex'ious 

 knowledge of the language. 



I have omitted some of the more obvious advantages 

 of this syllabus, the importance of a definite connection 

 between lectures and laboratory work, the training in 

 manipulation, and the development of step-by-step reason- 

 ing, and I pass on to consider some of the objections 

 which have been urged against this syllabus. 



Although there have not been wanting objectors to the 

 syllabus, especially the chemistry part of it, I have found 

 it difficult to induce them to formulate objections 

 definitely ; and when they have done so, many of the 

 objections raised appear to me to be positive advantages 

 Amongst these 1 class the following statements. 



That it requires closer attention and more work on the 

 part of the teacher, that it necessitates small classes^ 

 that it is unsuitable for examination. 



The only objections I have ever heard which appear to 

 me to require answering are the three following : 



(i) That many of the experiments are unsuitable for 

 boys ; one experiment which has been specially mentioned 

 in this connection, and which, I own, startled me before 

 I tried it, is the production on burning hydrogen of 

 sufficient water to estimate its physical constants. The 

 best answer to this is, " Try it." If a boy can be taught 

 to burn a jet of hydrogen at all, nothing is easier than 

 that he should burn it under a retort kept cool by a streani 

 of water running in at the tubulure and out at the neck ; 

 and if eight or ten couples are doing this, it is surprising 

 what a large amount of water can be collected in half an 

 hour. A little experience will enable any teacher to 

 simplify the experiments to the capacity of his class. 



(2) That the results of experiments are often so far from 

 accurate as to be worthless. This objection proceeds 

 from an insufficient appreciation of the aims of the work. 

 It is true that a schoolboy will not obtain Stas's numbers, 

 but he will obtain numbers which show a remarkable con- 

 cordance when the average of all the experiments done 

 by various members of the class are taken, and which will 

 enforce upon his mind the law of definite proportions. 



A boy may find that H and O combine in the proportion 

 of I : 7"3, that chalk contains 42*8 per cent, of CO.2, or 

 that phosphorus and oxygen combine in the proportion of 

 100:113; but when eight or ten couples have obtained 

 similar figures, the lessons of the definiteness of the re- 

 action, and the importance of careful quantitative work,, 

 may be learnt as thoroughly as from more accurate 

 results. 



(3) Is it not a waste of time for a boy to laboriously 

 work out a fictitious discovery when he could learn it in 

 five minutes by being told it, or by reading a book ? YeSy 

 if committing facts to memory be the desired end ; but 

 iV<9, if the end be to form habits of inquiry and of thought, 

 to understand scientific reasoning, and to prepare the 

 mind for dealing with problems where the text-book is not 

 available. 



If I may be allowed to speak of my own experience as 

 a teacher, I have now taught on these principles for some 

 time, and I can positively say that I believe this system 



