Oct. 6, 1870] 
NATURE 
459 
SOCIAL SCIENCE CONGRESS, NEWCASTLE 
DR. PLAYFAIR’S OPENING ADDRESS TO THE EDUCATIONAL 
SECTION 
In the address delivered by Dr. Lyon Playfair before the 
National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, he 
began by referring to the lamentable position of English education 
at present. Speaking of the Act of last session, he pointed out 
that it deals with the quantity of education, and not with its 
quality ; and insisted on the absolute necessity of introducing 
instruction in Science into our primary schools. The following 
are some of the more important passages of the address on this 
joint :— 
i The educational principle of continental nations is: to link 
on primary schools to secondary improvement schools. The 
links are always composed of higher subjects, the three R’s 
being in all cases the mere basis of instruction. Elementary 
science. and even some of its applications, is uniformly en- 
couraged and generally enforced. 1 shall not detain you with 
examples, as they are to-be found in any work treating of conti- 
nental schools. But as we have no schools corresponding to the 
secondary improvement schools for the working classes, we sup- 
pose that we can do without the higher subjects used as links. 
With what result? Our primary schools, on the whole, do not 
teach higher instruction than a child of eight years of age may 
learn. In our class of life, our children acquire such knowledge 
as a beginning ; with the working classes, they get it as an end. 
What an equipment for the battle of life! No armour-plate of 
knowledge is given to our future artisan, but a mere thin veneer 
of the three R’s, so thin as to-rub off completely in three or four 
years’ wear and tear of life. I am speaking on official record, 
for we are assured by inspectors, that nothing under Standard tv. 
suffices for permanent use, and yet the Committee of Council 
ell us that four-fifths of the children of ages at which they 
leave school pass only in lower standards. Recently, under 
Mr. Corry’s minute, inducements- have been given for sub- 
jects higher than the three R’s, but for some reason it pro- 
duces scarcely any result. So, under our present system of 
elementary teaching, no: knowledge whatever bearing on the life- 
work of the people reaches them by our system of State educa- 
tion. The air they breathe, the water they drink, the tools they 
use, the plants they grow, the mines they excavate, might all be 
made subjects of surpassing interest and importance to them 
during their whole life ; and yet of these they learn not one fact. 
Yet we are surprised at the consequences of their ignorance. A 
thousand men p-rish yearly in our coal-mines, but no school- 
master tells the poor miner the nature of the explosive gas which 
scorches him, or of the after-damp which chokes him. Boilers 
of steam-engines blow up so continually that a committee of the 
House of Commons is now engaged in trying to diminish their 
alarming frequency; but the poor stokers who are scalded to 
death or blown to pieces, were never instructed in the nature and 
properties of steam. In Great Britain alone more than one hun- 
dred thousand people perish annually, and at least five times as 
many sicken grievously, out of pure ignorance of the laws of 
health, which are never imparted to them at school ; they have 
no chance of learning them afterwards, as they possess no secon- 
dary schools. The mere tools of education are put into the 
hands of children during their school time without any-effort 
being made to teach them how to use the tools for any profitable 
purpose whatever ; so they get rusty or are thrown away alto- 
gether. And we fancy that we have educated the people! Our 
pauperism, our crime, and the misery which hovers on the brink 
of both, increase terribly, and our panacea for their cure is 
teaching the three R’s-up to Standard 111, The age of miracles 
has passed by, and our large faith in our little doings will not 
remove mountains. It is best to be frank. Our low quality of 
education is-impoverishing the land. It is disgracefully behind 
the age in which we live, and of the civilisation of which we 
boast ; and until we are convinced of that we cannot be roused 
to the exertions required for its amendment. In censuring the 
low condition of knowledge in our primary schools, as repre- 
sented by the results of the Revised Code, I do not aim to restore 
them to the position which many of them had before it. That 
code was, in fact, rendered necessary because their aggregate 
teaching was not sufficiently large and. diffused to justify the 
increasing expenditure. In imitation of our classical schools, 
~ yerbalism and memory-cramming had grown up as tares and 
choked she growth of the wheat. Words had taken the place 
of conceptions. A child could tell you about the geography 
of the wanderings of the children of Israel, but had no 
conception whatever of the ordinary phenomena around it. 
It was hopeless to put to them the commonest scientific 
questions. Whence comes the water that fills the Thames? 
What is the origin of hail, snow, rain, or dew? Why does the 
sun rise in the east, or set in the west? What produces night 
and day, summer and winter? In history they could rattle out 
to you the names and dates of kings and queens, perhaps even 
the names and ages of all Queen Anne’s children as they died in 
childhood ;. but, as a true historical conception, apart frem 
memory cramming of words and dry facts, to be vomited forth 
upon the examiner, it required a very good school under the old 
system to find it. Words, instead of ideas, were worshipped. 
Inspection, under the old system, did something to correct this 
tendency to verbalism and cram; under the new system they 
had no time, and, if they had, would find fewer of the higher 
subjects taught in any way. The teaching of science, if pro» 
perly done, is the reverse of all this, and will go far to remedy 
its defects. Booksin this case ought only to be accessories, not 
principals. The pupil must be brought in face of the facts 
through experiment and demonstration. He should pull the 
plant to pieces and sez how it is constructed. He must vex the 
electric cylinder till it yields himits sparks. He must apply with 
his own hand the magnet to the needle He must see water broken 
up into its constituent parts, and witness the violence with which 
its elements unite. Unless he is brought into actual contact with 
the facts and taught to observe and bring them into relation with 
the science evolved from them, it were better that instruction.in 
science should be left alone. For one of the ‘first lessons he must 
learn from science is not to trust in authority, but to demand 
proof for each asseveration. All this is true education, for it 
draws out faculties of observation, connects observed facts with 
the conceptions deduced from them in the course of ages, gives 
discipline and courage to thought, and teaches a knowledge of 
scientific method which will serve a lifetime. Nor can such 
education be begun too early. The whole yearnings of a child 
are for the natural phenomena around, until they are smothered 
by the ignorance of the parent. He is a young Linnaeus roaming 
over the fields in search of flowers. He is a young conchologist 
or mineralogist gathering shells or pebbles on the sea shore. He 
is an ornithologist and goes bird-nesting; an ichthyologist and 
catches fish. Glorious education in nature, all this, if the teacher 
knew how to direct and utilise it. But as soon as the child 
comes into the school-room, all natural God-born instincts are te 
be crushed out of him; he is to be trained out of all natural 
sympathies and affections. You prune and trim, cramp and 
bind the young intellect, as gardeners in olden times-did trees ana 
shrubs, till they assumed monstrousand grotesque forms, altogether 
different from the wide-spreading foliage and clustering buds 
which God himself gave to them, and which man is idiot enough 
to think he canimprove. Do not suppose that I wish the pn- 
mary school to bea lecture theatre for all or any of the ‘‘ ologies.” 
All the science which would be necessary to give a boy a 
taste of the principles involved in his calling, and an incitement 
to pursue them in his future life, might be given in illustration 
of other subjects. Instead of mere descriptive geography 
drearily taught and drearily learned, you might make it illus- 
trative of history, and illustrated by physical geography, which, 
in the hands of a real master, might be made to embrace most 
of what we desire to teach. The properties of air and water, 
illustrations of natural history, varieties of the human_race, the 
properties of the atmosphere as a whole—its life-giving virtues 
when pure, and its death dealings when fouled by man’s impu- 
rities—the natural products of different climes, these and such 
like teachings are what you could introduce with telling and 
useful effect. Far better this than overlading geography with 
dry details of sources and mouths of rivers, of isothermal lines, 
latitudes and longitudes, tracks of ocean currents, and other ten- 
dencies towards the old verbalism and memory-cramming. It 
I have explained myself with clearness, you wi!l see that 
while I advocate the introduction of higher subjects into 
our schools, I wish them to be of immediate interest and 
applicability to the working classes. The main difficulty in 
education is getting them to stay long enough at school. Teach 
them, while you have them, subjects of interest and utility. The 
short time will thus be made productive, and inducement will be 
offered for its extension. Six months spent in teaching future 
labourers the geography of the wanderings of the children of 
Israel, is sheer waste of time, either for their eternal or temporal 
interests. Think of the few precious hours as the training for a 
