SCIENCE TEACHING IN ENGLAND. 
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pride ourselves, it is on being a “practical people.” The 
“ practical man ” is a great factor in our public and also in 
our educational life. Nor can we affect surprise at this. 
Your practical man has usually very clear ideas; they may 
be limited, but they are not indistinct. He sees his way 
marked out before him, and follows it unerringly. The chances 
are he has attained wealth, and nowhere is wealth more 
deified than here. The man who has attained his own ends 
so successfully must surely be the man to strike out the best 
path for others. All this is very plausible, and hence the 
practical man largely has his own way.* 
Now, I do not hesitate, as an educationalist, to say that, 
in matters of education, the so-called practical man is a grave 
danger. It is true that he, in common with all teachers, 
looks upon education as a means of fitting the youngster for 
the battle of life. He says the youngster will have such and 
such things to do hereafter ; fit him for diem. But if he had 
his way entirely, his “fitted” youngster would be but a 
machine. “ Oh,” he says, “ what’s the good of teaching him 
so and so ? Teach him something that will be useful,” for 
your practical man is nothing if he is not utilitarian. To the 
practical man we owe all that is unhealthy in the current 
demand for technical education. To him the boy is simply 
a machine to do work of some kind or other, and every extra 
wheel or band beyond those that are necessary detract from 
the value of the machine. 
But is this an ideal of education ? God forbid that this 
earth should be peopled by piece workers without a thought 
or hope beyond their tiny sphere of labour. How much 
better is his than the ignorance of the countryman, whose 
soul’s loftiest flights never carry him out of reach of the 
aroma of his pig-stye ? No, I cannot help thinking that in 
our craving for the useful, we risk losing sight of the 
educational. Without forgetting other principles, ought we 
to throw away what surely is the most fundamental of all, 
that the value of a subject for educational purposes should be 
gauged by its educational value ? It sounds almost like a 
* That I may not be mistaken as to the sort of man I refer to, let 
me quote from the “ Arabian Nights,” Lane’s Edition, 1877, Yol. I., 
p. 141. The Second Royal Mendicant, describes how, having been 
robbed of all he possessed, he found himself destitute in the city of 
his father’s greatest enemy. A kindly tailor takes pity on him, feeds 
and clothes him, and then asks him: “ Dost thou not know any trade 
by which to make gain ? ” I answered, “ I am acquainted with the 
law, a student of sciences, a writer, and an arithmetician.” “ Thy 
occupation,” he said, “is profitless in our country; there is no one in 
our city acquainted with science or writing, but only with getting money .” 
