516 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 1006 



men that, turn and twist as they may, they 

 are always face to face with three mighty 

 facts. These are: (1) That the present 

 age is an age of machines, with a new set 

 of ideals of its own; (2) That the schools 

 are still too much under the influence of 

 the ideals of a grammatical, maehineless 

 age which is now rapidly passing away; 

 and (3) That not only industry, but also 

 the public at large, is demanding a new 

 type of schools whose graduates shall feel 

 at home in and be able to cope successfully 

 with this modem world of machines. 



Now facts are facts, whether we like 

 them or not; and it is a hopeful sign of 

 growth that schoolmen are no longer try- 

 ing to obscure these three great facts by 

 devout longings for the will-o'-the-wisp of 

 culture for its own sake. "We schoolmen 

 have reached the point where we are seri- 

 ously trying to harmonize these relatively 

 new facts with the rest of our knowledge. 

 Such, at least, is my attitude in trying to 

 define what, in the presence of these facts, 

 science might do to help the schools to 

 usher in a new era of real industrial educa- 

 tion. 



That we are all trying to find out what 

 industrial science may mean is proof that 

 we are all pretty well agreed that the work 

 now done under the name of science in 

 most schools can not fairly be called indus- 

 trial science. Whether that work may 

 justly be called science or not is another 

 question, and one about which there have 

 been and still are perfectly honest differ- 

 ences of- opinion. But this is not the topic 

 under discussion. The problem before us 

 is: What is industrial science? and I as- 

 sume that aU are ready to agree that few, 

 if any, have yet defined it in action; i. e., 

 that few, if any, of the present school 

 courses in science can be classed under that 

 head. For the sake of definiteness, this 

 problem will fii"st be discussed for the spe- 



cial case of physics. The conclusions 

 reached are equally valid for the other 

 sciences. 



Current courses in physics do not meet 

 the demand for industrial physics because 

 the leading ideas on which most of the 

 elementary work in physics is based are 

 fundamentally different from those re- 

 quired by industrial physics. Current 

 courses in elementary physics have been 

 planned by students of advanced physics 

 under the spell of a very one-sided appre- 

 ciation of what the essential elements of 

 physics are. For when a student under- 

 takes to grapple with such works as New- 

 ton's "Principia," or Maxwell's "Elec- 

 tricity and Magnetism, ' ' he finds it no easy 

 task merely to follow the argument and to 

 reproduce the results. Hence he naturally 

 acquires a great admiration for the intel- 

 lectual genius of the men who created 

 such works. He knows, moreover, that his 

 academic success depends on his ability to 

 reproduce these works as intellectual feats 

 only. When he himself becomes a teacher 

 of elementary physics, he very naturally 

 falls into the habit of presenting physics 

 as a series of intellectual feats — of facts 

 and demonstrations and theories and 

 nothing more. Hence current courses have 

 been framed and many text-books have 

 been written with the sole purpose of teach- 

 ing the laws and principles of elementary 

 physics as coldly intellectual propositions. 



As teachers of elementary physics we 

 have thus been filled with a zeal to impart 

 to others the principles that have cost us 

 so much labor. We have tried to get 

 beginners — mere infants in physics — to 

 repeat Newton's laws of motion with some 

 show of intelligence as to their meaning; 

 we have had them figure coefficients of res- 

 titution, although none of us ever met one 

 in real life. We have even let them specu- 

 late about atomic magnets and ether and 



