January 28, 1910] 



■SCIENCE 



123 



turn from multiplicity of detail to general 

 laws, we find indeed that the laws of science 

 are universal, but we also find that for edu- 

 cational purposes their universality means 

 abstractness and remoteness. The condi- 

 tions, the interests, the ends of conduct 

 are irredeemably concrete and specific. 

 We do not live in a medium of universal 

 principles, but by means of adapta- 

 tions, through concessions and compro- 

 mises, struggling as best we may to enlarge 

 the range of a concrete here and now. So 

 far as acquaintance is concerned, it is the 

 individualized and the humanly limited 

 that helps, not the bare universal and the 

 inexhaustibly multifarious. 



These considerations are highly theoret- 

 ical. But they have very practical coun- 

 terparts in school procedure. One of the 

 most serious difficulties that confronts the 

 educator who wants in good faith to do 

 something worth while with the sciences is 

 their number, and the indefinite bulk of 

 the material in each. At times, it seems as 

 if the educational availability of science 

 were breaking down because of its own 

 sheer mass. There is ait once so much of 

 science and so many sciences that educators 

 oscillate, helpless, between arbitrary selec- 

 tion and teaching a little of everything. 

 If any questions this statement, let him 

 consider in elementary education the for- 

 tunes of nature-study for the last two 

 decades. 



Is there anything on earth, or in the 

 waters under the earth or in the heavens 

 above, that distracted teachers have not 

 resorted to 1 Visit schools where they have 

 taken nature study conscientiously. This 

 school moves with zealous bustle from 

 leaves to flowers, from flowers to minerals, 

 from minerals to stars, from stars to the 

 raw materials of industry, thence back to 

 leaves and stones. At another school you 

 find children energetically striving to keep 



up with what is happily termed the "roll- 

 ing year." They chart the records of 

 barometer and thermometer; they plot 

 changes and velocities of the winds; they 

 exhaust the possibilities of colored crayons 

 to denote the ratio of sunshine and cloud 

 in successive days and weeks; they keep 

 records of the changing heights of the sun 's 

 shadows ; they do sums in amounts of rain- 

 falls and atmospheric humidities— and at 

 the end, the rolling year, like the rolling 

 stone, gathers little moss. 



Is it any wonder that after a while teach- 

 ers yearn for the limitations of the good 

 old-fashioned studies— for English gram- 

 mar, where the parts of speech may sink 

 as low as seven but never rise above nine; 

 for test-book geography, with its strictly 

 inexpansive number of continents ; even for 

 the war campaigns and the lists of rulers 

 in history since they can not be stretched 

 beyond a certain point, and for "memory 

 gems" in literature, since a single book 

 will contain the "Poems Every Child 

 Should Know." 



There are many who do not believe it 

 amounts to much one way or the other what 

 children do in science in the elementary 

 school. I do not agree, for upon the whole, 

 I believe the attitude toward the study of 

 science is, and should be, fixed during the 

 earlier years of life. But in any case, how 

 far does the situation in the secondary 

 schools differ from that just described? 

 Any one who has followed the disctissions of 

 college faculties for the last twenty-five 

 years concerning entrance requirements in 

 science, will be able to testify that the situ- 

 ation has been one of highly unstable equi- 

 librium between the claims of a little of a 

 great many sciences, a good deal (compara- 

 tively) of one, a combination of one biolog- 

 ical and one exact science, and the arbitrary 

 option of the pupil of one, two or three out 

 of a list of six or seven specified sciences. 



