212 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



the ordinary pupil seems to me still to suffer from too much formalism, 

 and too great a regard for, and belief in, experimental work in the 

 "laboratory. Too much practical work in the laboratory is impossible 

 for the boy or girl to whom science is going to be a profession, but it is 

 fatally easy to attach too much importance to the laboratory if the whole 

 of scientific education is to be limited by what the pupil can illustrate in 

 those laboratory experiments that he has time and ability to perform. 

 May I refer to the Presidential Address given to the Education Section by 

 Sir Eichard Gregory at Hull in 1922, in which he says ' the essential 

 mission of school science is to prepare pupils for civilised citizenship by 

 revealing to them something of the beauty and the power of the world in 

 which they live,' and again, ' reading or teaching for interest, or to learn 

 how physical science is daily extending the power of man, receives little 

 attention.' The whole tenor of his address was a plea for the expansion of 

 scientific instruction in this humanising spirit, an end which can, I believe, 

 best be brought about by dealing with elementary science in relation to 

 plant and animal life, to agriculture, and the food supply of the world. 



I will not weary you with details of suggestions of what I think school 

 curricula might be. I only want at this stage to make the suggestion 

 that for the average pupil, who will make little or no vocational use of his 

 knowledge later in life, science should be approached from the plant and 

 animal ends, that is, from the point of view of the environment of each of us, 

 and developed into an elementary knowledge of the employment of plant 

 and animal by man for his subsistence, of the means whereby these plants 

 and animals are made to satisfy man's ever-increasing needs, and last, but 

 by no means least, some slight knowledge of how this country obtains its 

 food supply. A development of this kind would not mean the introduction 

 of another subject into a curriculum already overcrowded, if it meant 

 that elementary science for the normal boy consisted of this work. 

 Naturally as the subject developed the applications of science to other 

 industries would find their place, and would form part of a coherent whole, 

 but the central idea would remain. 



What now is the part which the Universities must play in a scheme of 

 this sort ? They should provide courses which would aim at giving their 

 students, and these will represent the specialists in the subject, a general 

 knowledge of what agriculture has meant in the past, is meaning to-day, 

 and must mean in the future. To accomplish this, as I see it, some 

 knowledge of technical processes is necessary, some contact with the soil 

 is desirable, and some study of practical agricultural methods is essential, 

 but let us be quite clear that this is only a small part of the whole study, 

 which will demand far deeper inquiry and far wider reading than is usual 

 among students of agriculture in the Universities. So far as I know, no 

 University has had an end of this kind in view in framing its agricultural 

 curriculum. The curriculum at Cambridge is largely a modern develop- 

 ment of the older methods adapted to suit the needs of that University, 

 and to train men to become managers of land. We, in Oxford, have had 

 that view in mind also, but we have I think gone farther towards developing 

 a course of study along the lines I have indicated. An undergraduate at 

 Oxford may take for his final examination in Agriculture three subjects, 

 (1) Agriculture from the practical and technical side, (2) Economic Theory 



