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SCIENCE 



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



cause it is a pious moral thing to do, but 

 because it produces tangible results. If 

 workmen feel that they have been treated 

 justly, they are happy and take interest in 

 their work; and happy and interested 

 workmen are more efficient than unhappy 

 and rebellious ones. It pays to treat men 

 justly and to seek a justice that is best 

 for all. The scientific spirit always pays 

 when intelligently applied. 



Now it is because the people sense the 

 fact that this expanded and more mature 

 scientific spirit is coming to the front in 

 business and in industry, and because they 

 see that it pays, that the public is demand- 

 ing the development of scientific spirit in 

 the schools. The situation is full of mean- 

 ing for teachers of science. In the first 

 place, it is evident that the public has 

 come to believe in the scientific spirit. The 

 public has tasted of this spirit and is bound 

 to have more. If the present schools will 

 not supply it, the public will either make it 

 themselves in business, or found other 

 schools that can make it. Are not the busi- 

 ness men of Illinois even now trying to 

 have a second set of schools established in 

 the hope of securing just this? Present 

 schools are beginning to have competition. 

 in this development of scientific spirit. 

 Syllabi of facts are no longer the sacred 

 symbols of the faith — it is spreading of 

 itself wherever men are honestly trying to 

 cooperate in work that is significant to 

 them. If we science teachers do not wake 

 up to this situation, our jobs will soon be 

 gone, and the schools may be reduced to 

 the function of teaching the three R's. 



Besides, we science teachers are really 

 rather dull when we allow our individual- 

 ities to be submerged by syllabi and defi- 

 nitions of units. Why do we insist on 

 hiding our light under a bushel of facts 

 and principles of elementary science, all of 

 which can be bought for a dollar and a 



quarter from any one of a dozen enterpris- 

 ing publishers ? ~ And why do we all sup- 

 press our personal enthusiasms and all try 

 to make ourselves up to look each as much 

 like the other as possible, and all as much 

 as possible like forty experiments from the 

 following list ? That we do so is the more 

 surprising when we realize that we are 

 thereby not merely faithless to our trust as 

 guardians of the scientific spirit, but that 

 we are in addition actually making for 

 ourselves a whole lot of tedious and un- 

 necessary work. It is a great deal easier 

 to develop scientific spirit in lively young- 

 sters than it is to suppress their liveliness 

 with an inherently barren and uninterest- 

 ing syllabus. It is vastly more fun for the 

 teacher too, if he will just be himself and 

 let his enthusiasm spread through the class. 

 He will not have to be a slave to examina- 

 tion papers and notebooks if he can get the 

 class to working on problems that are 

 really significant and worth while in their 

 eyes. When he sees a class so absorbed in 

 the things they are doing that they forget 

 when it is time to go to the foot-ball game, 

 he can be perfectly sure that they have ac- 

 quired the scientific spirit and hence need 

 no further examinations. They will then 

 have mastered the syllabus of industrial 

 science. 



That we are rapidly drifting toward 

 such work is shown by the success of those 

 experiments in which boys spend half their 

 time in school and the other half in some 

 shop. The shop lends reality to the school 

 work and makes it seem worth while. But 

 the schools might make their work seem 

 worth while without the shop, if only they 

 would adopt the syllabus of industrial 

 science in place of the syllabi that have 

 been standardized by the authority of 

 official utterance of the committee of ten. 

 Those syllabi belong to the age that trusted 

 in words ; the syllabus of industrial science 



