342 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 



Section L.— EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 

 President op the Section: Sir Napier Shaw, M.A., Sc.D., F.E.S. 



TUESDAY, SEFTtlMBER 9. 



The President delivered the following Addrees : — 



Educational Ideals and the Ancient Universities. 



A Presidential Address before the Educational Section of the British Associa- 

 tion is an undertaking that might fairly daunt the bravest of those who are 

 really acquainted with its difficulties ; the vast range and variety of the 

 problems of education ; the enormous amount of effort that is already expended 

 upon them; the torrents of advice and criticism that are offered by those 

 who are familiar with the details of the various curricula, who know how 

 things ought to be done ; if I had had time and capacity to become acquainted 

 with all these things I suppose I must have avoided the duty of making an 

 address. It is, perhaps, the detachment of my present position from any 

 responsibility for details which gives me the courage to recall experiences, now 

 twenty years old, acquired during a lengthy service in various capacities at 

 Cambridge, and matured by twenty years of the consciousness of the dire 

 need of educational discipline and training for those whose business it is to 

 use science in the service of the State. 



With a certain amount of assurance I can even be glad that I am not in 

 touch with the educational controversies of the hour, and confidently trust 

 that my deficiencies will be made good by the contributions, of those who know, 

 to the discussions which will take place in the Section, but the difficulty that 

 I cannot get over just now is that, from the unavoidable circumstances of the 

 present time, a presidential address is a ' back number ' before it is delivered, 

 for the simple reason that, according to tradition, it must be printed in 

 advance. In this particular year there is an almost immeasurable gulf of 

 experience between the time of my appointment in 1917 and the delivery of 

 this address ; the President himself is in many ways a different person from 

 him who undertook the duty of addressing you two years and a half ago. 



At that time I had been a good deal moved by the wearying controversy 

 about the relative merits of classics and science in education, because the 

 physical sciences as taught were such a doleful misrepresentation of the spirit 

 of inquiry about the Universe which has moved men in all ages and is as 

 clamant to-day as ever. The mysteries of the firmament, the midnight sky, 

 the storm and calm, the earthquake and the thunder, the sunshine, the rain- 

 bow and the halo, the intolerable heat and the pitiless cold, the mariner's 

 compass, the aurora and the mirage are still as wonderful as ever to the 

 wayfarer and the seafarer, and even the dweller in towns wants to know more 

 about them. Yet our educational system, as I knew it, passed all these sub- 

 jects by and offered instead the determination of the specific heat of copper, 

 with other things that the specific heat of copper stands for. The same, I 

 believe, is true for many of the most interesting subjects of scholarship in 



