348 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1346 



major subject we have given him all the free- 

 doni it is safe to give him. 



It is CTirioiis how far we are from the idea 

 that a university exists primarily to develop 

 this power of creative thought in its students. 

 If our teaching is to develop this power, we 

 much change the focus of our work. Hereto- 

 fore we have had vaguely in mind as our 

 focus a text-book or an instructor. But in- 

 stead of a tyrannical text-book or the in- 

 structor's somewhat egotistical presentation of 

 ideas in his lectures, instead even of his 

 charming and stimulating personality, we 

 must chose as the focus for our teaching the 

 student and his problems. Every student has 

 all sorts of problems more or less consciously 

 in mind when he comes to a university. The 

 laboratories books and instructors should exist 

 as aids in the solution of those. Before he 

 has gone far in his investigations, if labora- 

 tory, library and instructor are adequate, they 

 will have led him out toward several other 

 departments of the university, and a con- 

 tinuously increasing number of other problems 

 will be tempting him on. 



The lecture, the quiz, the laboratory manual, 

 the text-book must be tools for the student 

 rather than guides. The logical order under- 

 lying the text-book and lecture is that of a 

 person with many years experience in a sub- 

 ject. The student approaches the subject in 

 quite a different way, touching it at only a 

 few, possibly unrelated, points. The logic of 

 another, more experienced mind lacks signifi- 

 cance for him. He needs to evolve his own 

 orderly arrangement of the subject. That is 

 all he can, as yet, comprehend. The labora- 

 tory manual, with its arbitrarily selected ex- 

 periments, is similarly objectionable; it starts 

 not with the student's problems, but with im- 

 posed problems. No lecture, or text-book, or 

 laboratory manual exactly fits any one's needs. 

 The quiz as at present conducted, instead of 

 being used even as Socrates used it to lead up 

 to some definite idea, or instead of its being, 

 as it ought to be, a frank give and take be- 

 tween coworkers, has become merely insulting. 



In place of these must be substituted the 

 laboratory, reference books, private consulta- 



tion with the instructor, group discussions, and 

 an occasional supplementary lecture. This 

 means merely that the university exists for 

 the student, be he called student or instructor, 

 twenty years old or seventy, modest scientist 

 or titled grandee. It means that the older 

 student is to see that the younger student has 

 what he needs to work with, that he can find 

 the reference books he needs, that he has 

 access to the more complete experince of this 

 elder whenever his problem seems to require 

 experience greater than he has at his own 

 command. It means that instead of memo- 

 rizing facts for possible future use, the stu- 

 dent is already at his life business of solving 

 problems, the business he began, by the way, 

 in the cradle. The group discussion will, of 

 course, be based on the problems that have 

 arisen in the laboratory, will be reports of 

 laboratory work, and will relate the knowledge 

 gained there with other sciences or other 

 aspects of the same science. And now and 

 then, there may be a lecture by a visiting 

 scientist on his specialty. There is, of course, 

 gain rather than loss in the instructor's re- 

 porting from time to time his own research 

 work, or some particular interest, or biblio- 

 graphic suggestions, just as the other students 

 do. Such reports will give the younger stu- 

 dents greater acquaintance with the instruc- 

 tor's point of view than they could get, per- 

 haps, merely through conversations. But in 

 such reports the instructor takes his place as 

 a fellow student, not as a superior. Labora- 

 tory, reference books, a more experienced 

 scientist to consult, occasional exchange of 

 ideas with groups of fellow workers, these are 

 all our incipient scientists need. 



For three years the experiment was made 

 in a scientific department of one of our 

 middle western universities of teaching by the 

 method just suggested, so far as that could be 

 done under the conditions that exist in every 

 university at present. All the courses in the 

 department were so conducted, the students 

 ranging in rank from freshmen to graduates, 

 and numbering usually about twenty to the 

 course. 



At the beginning of each course there were 



