148 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 970 



his principal work in life may be " buttressed " 

 and made more effective by a course in steam 

 engineering, for instance, that goes no further 

 than the second stage mentioned above. It is 

 sufficient if he knows the forms of steam appa- 

 ratus and the general principles underlying 

 their construction without ever applying these 

 principles to design or investigation. On the 

 other hand, the steam engineer and civil engi- 

 neer are rounded out and their work made 

 more effective by a course in the forms and 

 characteristics of electrical machinery with- 

 out going into the rigid application of the 

 fundamental principles involved. It thus ap- 

 pears that we may with good logic stop at 

 either the first or descriptive stage or at the 

 end of the second or experimental stage of a 

 given line of instruction, provided wc properly 

 interpret the effect; but for fullest mental de- 

 velopment and ability to make practical use 

 of the theory involved the process must be 

 continued through the phase of thorough 

 mathematical application. 



What is true of the college is true also of 

 the secondary school. When we have fully 

 developed our secondary school system we shall 

 have several, if not many kinds of such schools. 

 The preparation of the few going to engineer- 

 ing colleges will be conducted more and more 

 along the lines of general or humanistic 

 studies. They will study fewer courses and 

 will study them more thoroughly. For the 

 many going out into the world from the high 

 school we shall have, as before stated, several 

 kinds of schools all with vocational direction 

 and some of them plain trade schools. Each 

 one of these schools will have a central course 

 or courses carried as far as possible through 

 the third stage, and these central courses will 

 be strengthened and buttressed by other prac- 

 tical or scientific courses that will be stopped 

 not later than the end of the second stage. 

 Some of these central courses will be very 

 practical and some more mathematically sci- 

 entific than we may perhaps imagine. For 

 industry tends to become more scientific and 

 as a consequence more mathematical. If one 

 doubts this he should look carefully into the 

 mathematical work involved in reducing to 



workable form, Mr. W. F. Taylor's" experi- 

 ments in the very practical study of the laws 

 underlying the cutting of metals. It required 

 high mathematical attainment to solve what 

 might seem at first to be a simple prac- 

 tical problem, and to-day many workmen in this 

 country are doing such extremely practical 

 work as setting the cutting speeds and feeds 

 of machine tools by means of slide-rules the 

 mathematical basis of which is far beyond 

 their conception. And these same general ob- 

 servations and principles will apply through- 

 out the entire range of vocational education. 

 This, I believe, is the true interpretation of 

 this new movement. 



There is a place for courses much more prac- 

 tical and more attractive to the student than 

 those built solely along mathematical lines. 

 But do not let us delude ourselves that this idea 

 constitutes a complete new educational scheme. 

 In this connection it is well for us to remember 

 the history of some of the educational reform 

 movements we have already witnessed. When 

 we tore away from the old classical form of 

 education it was firmly believed that we could 

 build up an educational edifice that would 

 give as good, if not better results, not only as 

 regards mental development, but as regards 

 general training and outlook on life. It is 

 interesting to note that the engineering col- 

 leges, that have benefited by this separation as 

 much if not more than any other form of edu- 

 cational activity, long ago realized that we can 

 not profitably throw away human experience 

 and have already begun to swing back and 

 more and more to build their work on the hu- 

 manities as a sure foundation. When the 

 broadly elective system was brought forward 

 it was heralded as the final solution of educa- 

 tional problems, but already we have evalu- 

 ated its influence and adopted it partially, 

 only, in the form of elective groups of study. 

 And so this new movement in science teaching 

 can not disregard human experience. No 

 power of concentration and no mental develop- 

 ment worth while can ever come about ex- 

 cept by hard and unremitting toil. We may 



" See Trans. American Society of Mechanical 

 Engineers, Vol. 28. 



