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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 724 



plan of instruction be adopted. Here, in 

 order to economize time for more important 

 work, the effort should be made to give the 

 student the necessary manual skill as 

 rapidly as possible, by giving him detailed 

 instruction and showing him by example 

 the little artifices that make the expert 

 manipulator. The engineer, architect or 

 chemist must have a good technique, and 

 we can not afford to neglect it; but one of 

 our problems is to reduce the time needed 

 for its acquirement to its lowest limit. 



Summing up now this discussion of the 

 question of imparting knowledge, I would 

 advise especially: 



1. That we take care not to include in 

 our courses more than the average student 

 can properly assimilate. 



2. That we keep in close touch with the 

 actual knowledge and mental development 

 of the student; that to this end we intro- 

 duce recitations and invite individual con- 

 ferences as far as possible; and that we 

 inform ourselves more fully in regard to 

 the work which is done in courses related 

 to our own. 



3. That we discourage the habit of 

 memorizing and of working in a thought- 

 less, mechanical way in the laboratories 

 and drawing-rooms by close personal con- 

 tact with the student and by appropriate 

 modifications of our courses and of the 

 examinations upon them. 



I come now to the other more important 

 and more difficult task of giving the stu- 

 dent the mental training upon which the 

 power of handling new undertakings and 

 solving new problems depends. In com- 

 parison with this the imparting of knowl- 

 edge is an insignificant matter. One of 

 our professors has given an apt illustration 

 of the true function of the institute. It 

 should be, he says, a gymnasium where the 

 faculties are exercised and developed, and 

 not a boarding-house where the students 

 are crammed with facts. We want our 



young men to acquire the power of solving 

 problems; and this, like any other faculty, 

 can only be developed by constant exercise 

 of it. Therefore, we must make problems 

 one of the main features of our courses — 

 problems in the broadest sense, not merely 

 numerical applications of principles. 

 Class-room and drawing-room and labora- 

 tory work alike must consist largely in the 

 solution of problems. 



This matter of problems seems to me of 

 so much importance that I would like to 

 consider it with you in some detail. 



First a few words as to the character of 

 our problems. In the lower schools the 

 questions given out for solution are well 

 called ' ' examples ' ' : that is, a teacher does 

 a problem in a certain way, as an example ; 

 and the students learn by imitation to do 

 others like it. Of course, for our purposes 

 this kind of problem-solving is of scarcely 

 any value. We must avoid problems 

 which are only pattern-work and those 

 which are simply the substitution of 

 numerical values in formulas. One of our 

 professors who makes problems a large 

 part of his course told me of the student 

 who came to him with the complaint that 

 he couldn't do his problems because each 

 one was different from the others, well 

 showing the kind of problem-work to which 

 he had been accustomed. 



There are two classes of problems that 

 are essential to our work— the kind that 

 develop logical thinking or reasoning 

 power and the kind that develop imagina- 

 tive thinking or the power of planning and 

 originating. For each of these two kinds 

 of problems we should try to make better 

 provision; but the latter kind needs, I be- 

 lieve, special development at the institute. 

 For example, we ought to a greater extent 

 require in our laboratories that the stu- 

 dents plan out their own experiments. 

 Students should be told what apparatus is 

 available and what results are wanted, and 



