MAY 13. 1910] 



SCIENCE 



729 



•i WHAT fiPECIALIZATIOX BAH DOyE FOR 

 PHYSICS TEACHiyO ' 



In his presidential address before the 

 British Association last summer Sir J. J. 

 Thomson, speaking of overspecialization at 

 Cambridge University, said: 



Premature specialization injures the student by 

 depriving him of adequate literary culture. . . . 

 It retards the progress of science by tending to 

 isolate one science from another. The boundaries 

 between the sciences are arbitrary, and tend to 

 disappear as science progresses. The principles 

 of one science often find most striking and sug- 

 gestive illustrations in the phenomena of another. 



It is time to inquire whether early 

 specialization among uudergraduates in 

 American colleges is unfitting them both 

 for research and for teaching. The theory 

 still prevails in college that it is good to 

 know more than one thing, otherwise there 

 would be no minors, but minors, according 

 to our closely difterentiated scheme, are 

 little else than divisions of the major sub- 

 ject. The result appears to be that we are 

 producing graduates whose outlook is too 

 limited to enable them to carry on a piece 

 of original research. They become re- 

 search assistants with little prospect of 

 ever being very successful at independent 

 work. 



L. H. Baekeland in Science, Vol. 25, p. 

 845, says: 



I challenge you to name any truly great man 

 who was merely a specialist. . . . One-sided pur- 

 suits are apt to make us very narrow-minded. . . . 

 Overspecialized science is apt to degenerate into 

 a mere hobby where all conception of true pro- 

 portions and harmony are lost. 



The evil of early specialization is par- 

 ticularly apparent when we consider the 

 cause of education— especially that within 

 the college walls. Not only has the regime 

 signally failed to qualify young men for 

 teaching, but there has grown up along 

 with it a distaste for and even a disrespect 



'Read before sections B and L, Boston, Decem- 

 ber 31, 1909. 



for teaching. There are about 150,000 

 undergraduate students who annually con- 

 tract with the colleges of the land for in- 

 struction, but no one seems to want to 

 teach them. The colleges announce a fuU 

 staff of instructors — the title still remains 

 —but it is difficult to find a college in- 

 structor, educated within the last ten 

 or fifteen years, who makes it his chief in- 

 terest to teach or who likes to acknowledge 

 that it is his chief business. "When asked 

 what he is doing he tries to think of 

 some little piece of research, however in- 

 significant, and he shows impatience and 

 evident embarrassment if obliged to say 

 that he is engaged chiefly in teaching. 



President Hadley of Yale, speaking at 

 Johns Hopkins University, February 22, 

 1909, on "The Danger of Overspecializa- 

 tion," said: 



It is not enough to discover truth, we must 

 make it known among the citizens of this self- 

 governing commonwealth. The college is ceasing 

 to have the influence which it ought to have upon 

 the world. 



From the New York Times, December 

 20, 1909 : 



President Lowell, of Harvard, has expressed 

 himself as heartily in favor of bringing the 

 college course nearer to the practical concerns of 

 the community. " A university," he says, "' to 

 be of any great value, must grow out of the 

 community in which it lives and must be in 

 absolute touch with the community, doing all the 

 good it can and doing what the community needs. 

 Any institution which is not in absolutely close 

 touch with the community about it is doomed to 

 wither and die." 



New York state, which is tj'pical, has 

 about 800 high schools and probably there 

 are not a dozen teachers outside of New 

 York City who are employed in these 

 high schools to teach physics alone. Still, 

 when a young man goes to college with the 

 intention of fitting himself to teach in one 

 of those high schools he is compelled to 



