422 



NA TURE 



[September 23, 1922 



attention instead oi quantities to he measured with an 

 accuracy for which the need cannot be seen and by 

 methods which easily become wearisome. The 

 " Investigators " appointed by the Board of Education 

 in 1918 to report upon the papers set in examinations 

 for the First School Certificate were right when they 

 1 pri ed their opinion "that the early teaching of 

 iffered from too great insistence on more 

 or less exact quantitative work, to the neglect of 

 qualitative or very roughly quantitative experiments 

 illustrating fundamental notions." By the prevailing 

 obsession in regard to quantitative work the pupil is 

 made the slave of the machine, and appliances become 

 encumbrances to the development of the human spirit. 



When instruction in science was first introduced into 

 schools its character was determined by insight and 

 conviction rather than by mental needs or interests; 

 so later, when practical work came to be regarded as an 

 essential part of such instruction, its nature and scope 

 represented what certain authorities believed pupils 

 should do, instead of what they were capable of doing 

 with intelligence and purpose. Practical chemistry 

 became drill in the test-tubing operations of qualitative 

 analysis, and the result was so unsatisfactory from the 

 points of view of both science and education that when 

 Prof. Armstrong put forward a scheme of instruction 

 devised by him, in which intelligent experimentation 

 took the place of routine exercises, acknowledgment of 

 its superior educational value could not be withheld, 

 and for thirty years its principles have influenced the 

 greater part of the science teaching in our schools. 



Prof. Armstrong's particular contribution to educa- 

 tional science consisted in the production of detailed 

 schemes of work in which these principles were put into 

 practice. Ideas are relatively cheap, and it needs a 

 master mind to make a coherent story or useful 

 structure from them. This was done in the courses in 

 chemistry outlined in Reports presented to the British 

 Association in 1889 and 1890, and the effect was a 

 complete change in the methods of teaching that 

 subject. " The great mistake," said Prof. Armstrong, 

 " that has been made hitherto is that of attempting to 

 teach the elements of this or that special branch of 

 science ; what we should seek to do is to impart the 

 elements of scientific method and inculcate wisdom, 

 so choosing the material studied as to develop an 

 intelligent appreciation of what is going on in the 

 world." One feature of heuristic instruction empha- 

 sised by its modern advocate, but often neglected, is 

 that which it presents to the teaching of English. 

 Accounts of experiments had to be written out in 

 literary form describing the purpose of the inquiry and 

 the bearing of the results upon the questions raised, 

 and wide reading of original works was encouraged. 

 A few years ago English composition was regarded as a 

 thing apart from written work in science, but this 

 should not be so, and most teachers would now agree 

 with the view expressed by Sir J. J. Thomson's Com- 

 mittee on the Position of Natural Science in the 

 Educational System of Great Britain that " all through 

 the science course the greatest care should be taken to 

 insist on the accurate use of the English language, and 

 the longer the time given to science the greater becomes 

 the responsibility of the teacher in this matter. . . . 

 The conventional jargon of laboratories, which is far 



NO. 2760, VOL. I io] 



too common in much that is written on pure and applied 

 science, is quite out of place in schools." 



When heuristic methods are followed in the spirit in 

 which they were conceived, namely, that of arousing 

 interest in common occurrences, and leading pupils to 

 follow clues as to their cause, as a detective unravels a 

 mystery, there is no doubt as to their success. No one 

 supposes that pupils must find out everything for 

 themselves by practical inquiry, but they can be trained 

 to bring intelligent thought upon simple facts and 

 phenomena, and to devise experiments to test their 

 own explanations of what they themselves have 

 observed. It is impossible, however, to be true to 

 heuristic methods in the teaching of science and at the 

 same time pay addresses to a syllabus. A single 

 question raised by a pupil may take a term or a year 

 to arrive at a reasonable answer, and the time may he 

 well spent in forming habits of independent thinking 

 about evidence obtained at first-hand, but the work 

 cannot also embrace a prescribed range of scientific 

 topics. Yet under existing conditions, in which 

 examinations are used to test attainments, this double 

 duty has to be attempted by even the most enlightened 

 and progressive teachers of school science. There can, 

 indeed, be no profitable training in research methods in 

 school laboratories under the shadow of examination 

 syllabuses. Where there is freedom from such restraint, 

 and individual pupils can be permitted to proceed at 

 their own speeds in inquiries initiated on" their own 

 motives, success is assured, but in few schools are such 

 conditions practicable ; so that, in the main, strict 

 adherence to the heuristic method is a policy of per- 

 fection which mav be aimed at but is rarely reached. 



A necessary condition of the research method of 

 teaching science is that the pupils themselves must 

 consider the problems presented to them as worth 

 solving, and not merely laboratory exercises. More- 

 over, the inquiries undertaken must be such as can 

 lead to clear conclusions when the experimental work 

 is accurately performed. It may be doubted whether 

 the rusting of iron or the study of germination of beans 

 and the growth of seedlings fulfils the first of these 

 conditions, and the common adoption of these subjects 

 of inquiry is due to custom and convenience rather than 

 to recognition of what most pupils consider to be worth 

 their efforts. It needed a Priestley and a Lavoisier to 

 proceed from the rusting of iron to the composition 

 of air and water, and even such an acute investigator 

 as Galileo, though well aware that air has weight, did 

 not understand how this fact explained the working of 

 the common suction pump. 



The mission of school science should not, indeed, be 

 only to provide training in scientific method — valuable 

 as this is to every one. Such training does cultivate 

 painstaking and observant habits, and encourages 

 independent and intelligent reasoning, but it cannot 

 be held in these days that any one subject may be used 

 for the general nourishment of faculties which are 

 thereby rendered more capable of assimilating other 

 subjects. Modern psychology, as well as everyday 

 experience, has disposed of this belief. If the doctrine 

 of transfer of power were psychologically sound, then 

 as good a case could be made out for the classical 

 languages as for science, because they also may be 

 taught so as to develop the power of solving problems 



