Mabch 5, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



365 



a deeper grasp of facts, a keener sense of 

 their significance. Unless educated men 

 meet upon such common basis and interest, 

 education, instead of bringing our re- 

 sources to bear most effectively on the 

 conscious purpose of society, tends to de- 

 tach disciplined minds from each other and 

 from a common object. The high school 

 comes too soon to do this; the professional 

 school too late. A vague sense of this ob- 

 ligation the college stiU betrays in cling- 

 ing to catchwords like "broad," "liberal," 

 "training for citizenship," "training for 

 character." But one can lay one's hands 

 on nothing definite in the curriculum that 

 is actually calculated to make for breadth, 

 liberality or citizenship. The subjects are 

 not there; the treatment is distinctly 

 hostile. At best, special, not general, indi- 

 vidual, not basic, needs dictate the compo- 

 sition of the student's course of study. 

 Now, without a curriculum organized and 

 presented with this clearly conceived object 

 in view, what reason is there to believe 

 that the student possesses either the in- 

 telligence or the impulse to construct for 

 himself a discipline from which he will 

 emerge with the necessary comprehension 

 and disposition? He lacks the requisite 

 knowledge, purpose and intelligence; and 

 as a democratic society aims to realize not 

 instinctive, but rational ideals, it would be 

 strange indeed if every boy who had read 

 Csesar and studied algebra already felt the 

 sure ethical and speculative solicitude which 

 it is precisely the task and difficulty of 

 education to develop within him. That is 

 a matter which a society endeavoring to 

 realize conscious ideals through its own 

 corporate action does not leave to the dis- 

 cretion of the individual boy. Of course, 

 it will prize the will or instinct, if he 

 chances to possess it; it will set about 

 creating it, however, if he doesn't. Such 

 training is in the highest sense formative, 

 cultural, human. It suggests a field of 



college pedagogy which will be opened up 

 for settlement and cultivation when the 

 outposts of research are withdrawn to 

 their own proper territory, just as a second- 

 ary school pedagogy will become possible 

 when the college vacates its mechanical and 

 unintelligent control. Contemplating this 

 broad general outlook or basis for all col- 

 lege students, regardless of the special 

 activities which as individuals they may 

 pursue. Professor Mann has recently 

 sketched a college treatment of science that 

 falls in completely with this view : 



It would seem, then, that for the normal non- 

 specialist the present instruction in laboratory 

 science, with its wealth of exactness and technical 

 detail, is a misfit. What is needed for these gen- 

 eral students in college is a discussion of the 

 bearing of science on the history and present 

 forms of social and economic life, with no labo- 

 ratory work of the present sort, rather than the 

 customary re-hash of a subject-matter from which 

 the juice should already have been pressed. In 

 other words, the college course in science should 

 try to give to the student who seeks breadth and 

 culture a new and enlarged view of the value and 

 the bearing of science in human life, rather than 

 to fill him with a more detailed and more highly 

 specialized mass of information, which, at his age, 

 ordinarily interests him but little and arouses his 

 enthusiasm even less. 



Looked at from this point of view, a course in 

 science in college would be very different from any 

 now given there. If the science were physics, the 

 proposed course might begin with a discussion of 

 the steam engine. Attention should be given to 

 the social and economic changes conditioned by 

 or closely connected with the development of the 

 steam engine, and of its application to manufac- 

 ture and transportation. When the steam engine 

 was finished, electricity might be taken up in the 

 same way. The electric telegraph and the dynamo 

 and the telephone have certainly affected economic 

 and social life in a powerful way, and played an 

 important part in bringing about present condi- 

 tions. The entire subject of electricity could 

 easily be brought, if desired, into a discussion of 

 the subject from this point of view. Practical 

 appliances like those just mentioned should not, 

 however, receive all of the attention of the class. 

 The achievements in pure science must not be 

 neglected. Thus the Copernican system of astron- 



