376 
WATURE 
mi] 
[ Marcu 17, 1923 

Humanism in Technical Education. : 
By Sir Toomas Hottanp, K.C.S.1., K.C.I.E., F.R.S. 
V ERY few questions have been more discussed 
than that of education, and the reason for 
it is quite obvious; for educational methods are as 
varied as the students who have to be educated, 
and perfection can be reached only when a system 
is designed to meet the special circumstances of each 
individual. Some plants want pruning, others require 
fertilising, to produce their best results. One peda- 
gogue thinks discipline should be the cure for all 
students’ evils; others preach the importance of 
making the work attractive. The clash of ideals is 
heard most in our technical schools. One authority 
wants full-scale machinery, another says that the 
college workshop is merely a misleading caricature of 
a commercial factory. We are told that the student 
of science and technology can never become an 
educated man without a dose, and a fairly large dose, 
too, of the so-called “‘ humanities ” ; he must always 
be narrow otherwise, if not absolutely lopsided, and 
can never be prepared in an institute of science and 
technology efficiently to undertake the full duties 
of citizenship. 
In a community of science workers discordant 
notes are similarly heard. One presses for pure 
science as the main requirement of the practical 
technologist ; another urges training in purely techni- 
cal methods. The practical man thinks he has used 
a very hard word indeed when he calls the science 
student a _ theoretical idealist, a dreamer. The 
student of science pretends to despise the practical 
man as a mere rule-o’-thumb worker, often, however, 
because he fails to grasp the principles which underlie, 
and the long process of expensive research that has 
evolved, the so-called rule-o’-thumb. The doctrinaire 
student of science very often is, as some one has 
said of the early riser, conceited all the morning 
and stupid for the rest of the day. 
It is, however, impossible to lay stress on any one 
truth without apparently being unfair to some 
other truth. Somewhere between these extremes 
the maximum of truth is to be found. It is too often 
so that where science is taught, the student is crammed 
with the facts instead of trained in the methods. 
The product of the science class is sometimes handi- 
capped by what Prof. Huxley, the greatest of my 
predecessors at South Kensington, called “ pre- 
cocious mental debauchery ’’—the result of too many 
bouts of book-gluttony and lesson-bibbing. 
I do not intend this evening to follow up any of 
these apparently divergent doctrines. We have 
learnt now, if we never appreciated it fully before, 
that a country cannot defend itself in war, or fight 
the relentless battles of peace, without science and 
technology. But the technologist will not remain 
only an expert in the workshop. He has duties as 
a citizen and must face relations, and competitive 
relations too, with other human beings, with most 
of whom he is unable to communicate in technical 
terms alone—the technical terms that he learns in 
the class-room. To be appreciated, he must under- 
stand and be understood by others: he wants the 
“ humanities.” 
Now what is meant by the ‘“‘ humanities”? A 
dictionary will tell you that classical learning is 
intended by the same word that we also use for a 
study of the dispositions and sympathies of man. 
Sure enough, the study of classical literature once 
had this meaning. Late in the middle ages the 
From an address delivered at the Sir John Cass Technical Institute on 
January 31. 
NO. 2785, VOL. 111] 

study of the classics revealed to the world the long- 
buried wisdom, especially of fhe Greeks—their art, 
their religion, and, more important, their science. 
That discovery gave rise to the great movement 
which we speak of generally as the Renaissance— — 
the revolt of intellect from previous feudalism and 
theological bondage—tesulting not only in the revival 
of literature, art, and that religious freedom which ~ 
is generally known as the Reformation, but in the 
development also of scientific curiosity, what, to 
avoid the secondary meaning of curiosity, we now 
call research. It gave us the Copernican for the 
Ptolemaic reading of the solar system; it gave 
us also in practical form the mariner’s compass 
and, with the exploratory spirit which accompanied 
it, the discovery of the Americas, of South Africa, 
India, and the Far East; it gave us the invention 
‘of gunpowder and that of paper and printing, which - 
facilitated the distribution of the new learning to 
a wide world. 
How many of these developments, which succeeded 
one another with the speed of a revolution, were due 
to independent origin and from other sources, and 
how many were quickened by the rediscovery of 
buried philosophies, we need not stop to inquire ; 
but it is obvious that what would otherwise have 
been but slow combustion developed, because of 
this discovery, at the speed of an explosion. That 
discovery was specially the discovery of humanism 
in Greek literature. Greek literature acted on 
medieval scholasticism like nitric acid on a com- 
bustible cellulose; cotton was converted into gun- 
cotton, 
The lesson to be learnt from the Renaissance is 
strengthened by a consideration of what happened 
afterwards to classical studies. With the passage of 
time, classical learning like an organism went through 
a period of vigorous youth, vitalising the world with 
new energy and new ideas, until it reached the stage 
of adolescence, and, with it, specialisation. , 
That is the life-history of every organism. With 
specialisation the study of the classics became 
narrowed to its linguistic, grammatical, and purely 
rhetorical aspects: its main object became obscured 
and stricken with a formalism and a pedantry that 
“has given us false ideas, and the narrow spirit of 
a mutually admiring coterie, that wrote Latin and 
Greek verses to one another and to no one else. It 
has engendered a wild form of pedantry that regarded 
a false concord or a false quantity in Greek, not at 
all as we should regard a similar mistake in French, 
but as a shock to the higher order of things, which 
deserved scorn and reprobation when committed 
by a man, cruel punishment when committed by a 
boy.” 
These are not the words of a prejudiced and jealous 
scientific man, but the judgment of a distinguished 
classical scholar, the present Vice-Chancellor of 
Oxford. Reviewing the situation in this way before 
the Congress of Universities in 1921, Dr. Farnell 
pleaded for the revival of humanism in classical 
studies, and I wish similarly to direct attention to 
the importance of humanism in science and tech- 
nology, for we also are exposed to the very same 
danger that Dr. Farnell says has now nearly strangled 
classical scholarship in our public schools and younger 
universities. We can thus learn something from the 
classics ; we can profit by their mistakes, knowing 
that it is never so easy to recognise our own as the 
mistakes of others. 
se 

