July 28, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



97 



to see disturbed. No two persons might agree 

 as to exactly what these approved findings are, 

 but so long as a notion is familiar it is assumed 

 that it will not do any particular harm. Now, 

 new knowledge, if taken seriously, is very 

 likely to prove an indictment of those very 

 ideas which are dearest to the ill-informed. So 

 in order to avoid inconvenient discussion the 

 doctrine has become popular that so-called 

 'controversial" matters should be carefully ex- 

 cluded from both the schools and colleges. 

 This means, when stated in a bald form, that 

 instruction which might stir religious preju- 

 dice, no matter how unintelligent, business, po- 

 litical or racial prejudice, or violate the proprie- 

 ties, must be avoided. College presidents, school 

 superintendents, text-book writers and their 

 publishers are at present almost helpless in this 

 situation. Teaching must be made as little dis- 

 turbing as possible, when its chief function 

 should be to stimulate thought and furnish new 

 and reconstructive ideas. The plight of the 

 directors of education is indeed pitiable. Col- 

 lege presidents have to sit up late at night 

 reconciling the noble doctrine of freedom of 

 teaching with the practical necessity of dodging 

 controversial questions — for at all costs nothing 

 must happen to arouse the resentment of timid 

 parents and donors. Like Milton, the college 

 head can not endure the humiliating imputa- 

 tion that his teachers are under the wardship of 

 an overweening fist; and yet he is constantly 

 haunted by the nightmare of the fist which 

 will refuse to write any more checks to the 

 order of the institution if an instructor is 

 carelessly charged with Bolshevism or with 

 teachings tending to immorality, sedition or 

 irreligion. And what is perhaps still worse 

 the religious, moral or patriotic critics rarely 

 take the trouble to find out what an instructor 

 or text-book writer whom they attack really has 

 said or believes. This scandalous state of 

 affairs is too little understood. Those best 

 informed about it are for various reasons dis- 

 inclined to tell all they know. Those who plan 

 out courses of study and write Ijooks for the 

 schools are not free but must often make very 

 humiliating terms with unintelligence. 



Fifty years ago Matthew Arnold descrilied 

 education as "the getting to know on all mattei-s 



which concern us the best which has been 

 thought and said in the world; and through 

 this knowledge turning a stream of fresh and 

 free thought upon our stock notions and 

 habits." This ideal would be accepted by most 

 educators, but how very far are we from realiz- 

 ing it in practice. Teachers and text-book 

 writers can not proceed directly toward this 

 goal as they conceive it. They must hedge and 

 suppress, compromise and extenuate, lest the 

 authentic things now known which it concerns 

 boys and girls to learn should unluckily start 

 them thinking. For this might rouse the ap- 

 prehension of some defender of the social and 

 moral order, some professional patriot or some 

 adherent of the Mosaic authorship of the 

 Pentateuch. The politicians in the Kentucky 

 legislature think themselves competent to decide 

 whether the state should grant funds to any 

 institution in which man's animal extraction 

 is taught; the politicians in the New York 

 legislature have provided that no one shall 

 teach in the schools of the state who is known 

 at any time to have expressed any distrust of 

 our institutions. 



Now nothing could be more diametrically 

 opposed to the cultivation of a scientific frame 

 of mind. Education should be largely devoted 

 to the issues upon which the young as they 

 grow up should be in a position to form an 

 opinion. They should understand that scientific 

 advance has greatly altered, and promises still 

 further to alter, our environment, and our no- 

 tions of ourselves and, consequently, the expe- 

 diency of existing institutions of moral, social 

 and industrial standards. We should have a 

 dynamic education to fit a dynamic world. The 

 world should not be presented to students as 

 happily standardized but urgently demanding 

 readjustment. How are they to be more intelli- 

 gent than their predecessors if they are trained 

 to an utterly unscientific confidence in ancient 

 notions, let us say of race, heredity and sex, 

 now being so fundamentally revised. 



VI 



Supposing it be conceded that one at least 

 of the objects of a general education is to help 

 the young to become acquainted with the best 

 that is now known or guessed about mankind 



