xii ELEMENTS OF GENERAL SCIENCE 



repudiate their own students and their own examples by 

 roundly vituperating science as taught in the lower schools. 

 They tell us it would be better that the boy should not take 

 physics in the high school and that the girl should come to col- 

 lege without any of the chemistry or botany with which she has 

 been misled in elementary courses. If we go to the high schools 

 and ask what science the sophomore or the junior should study, 

 we hear a clamor of tongues telling discordant tales. Finally, 

 there are few, and these are for the most part the outlaws of 

 science, who deal with elementary-school problems. 



Perhaps it would be well to follow the advice of some 

 scientific specialists and close all the science courses for a 

 time. To be sure, there are many future citizens who would 

 then never have the opportunity of knowing nature as she is 

 expounded by the apostles of the pure thought and undiluted 

 research. There would be more probability that unsound views 

 about nature would pass current among the untutored popu- 

 lace. On the other hand, the scientists might have time dur- 

 ing their cloistered association with one another to realize that 

 they need the world quite as much as the world needs them. 



If we decide not to close the science courses, there is the 

 obvious alternative that we discover what has been the 

 matter and reform the courses so as to fit them to the real 

 situation. Experience does not seem to justify any expecta- 

 tion that the expert chemist, physicist, geologist, or biologist 

 will always be wise in regard to the minds of students. Expe- 

 rience does show that the minds of students constitute part 

 of the problem of science teaching. In fact, so important is 

 the mind of the student that to neglect it seems to the lay 

 thinker to be a cardinal error symptomatic of a lack of scien- 

 tific breadth. Hence the enthusiasm of the lay observer when 

 the scientist is seen actually experimenting with the problem 

 of teaching. 



In this matter of experiments in teaching, the instructor in 

 science is a newcomer, a veritable amateur, as contrasted with 



