L._EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 215 



as definitely as Mr. Eliot Howard has shown to be the. behaviour- 

 routine of birds in woods and fields. You may, therefore, have a 

 teaclier of physics who has taken an honours degree and yet knows 

 less of plant or animal life than a child in an elementary school where 

 Nature Study is wisely taught; and, on the other hand, there are 

 teachers of natural history altogether unacquainted with the influence of 

 physical and chemical conditions upon the observations they describe 

 or the conclusions they reach. Natural science as a single subject no 

 longer exists either in school or university, and with its division and 

 sub-division has come a corresponding limitation of interest. No man 

 can now be considered as having received a liberal education if he knows 

 nothing of the scientific thought around him, but it is equally true that 

 no man of science is scientifically educated unless his range of intel- 

 lectual vision embraces the outstanding facts and principles of all the 

 main branches of natural knowledge. It cannot reasonably be sug- 

 gested that this general knowledge of science should be acquired by 

 all if teachers of science themselves do not possess it. During the past 

 thirty years or so there has been far too much boundary-marking of 

 science teaching in school on account of the specialised qualifications 

 of the teachers. What is wanted is less attention to the conventional 

 division of science into separate compartments designed by examining 

 bodies, and more to the whole field of Nature and the scientific activities 

 by which man has transformed the world; and no teacher of school 

 science should be unwilling or unqualified to impart such instruction 

 to his pupils. 



Where such teachers do exist, however, they are compelled by the 

 exigencies of examinations to conform to syllabuses of which the 

 boundary lines are no more natural than those which mark political 

 divisions of countries on a map of the world. All that can be said in 

 favour of the delimitation of territory is that it is convenient ; the 

 examiner knows what the scope of his questions may be, and teachers 

 the limits of the field they are expected to survey with their pupils. 

 While, therefore, it may be believed that a general course of science is 

 best suited to the needs of pupils up to the age of about sixteen years, 

 examining authorities recognise no course of this character, and very 

 few schools include it in the curriculum. Expressed in other words, 

 the proximate or ultimate end of the instruction is not education but 

 examination, not the revealing of wide prospects because of the stimulus 

 and interest to be derived from them, but the study of an arbitrary 

 group of topics prescribed because knowledge of them can be readily 

 tested. It may be urged that this is the only practicable plan to adopt 

 if a science course is to have a defined shape, and not, like much that 

 passes for Nature Study, merely odds and ends about Nature, without 

 articulation or purpose. Acceptance of this view, however, carries 

 with it the acknowledgment that expediency rather than principle has 

 to determine the scope and character of school science, which is equiva- 

 lent to saying that science has no secure place in educational theory. 

 I prefer to believe that a school coui'so of general science can be 

 constructed which is largely informative and at the same time truly 

 educational, but it must provide what is best adapted to enlarge the 



