44 
Review . 
ELEMENTARY LECTURING WITH THE 
HELP OF SCHEDULES. 
ELEMENTARY NOTES ON STRUCTURAL BOTANY, by A. H. 
Church (12 lectures), Oxford Botanical Memoirs, No. 4., Oxford Univ. Press, 
1919. Price 2s. net. 
ELEMENTARY NOTES ON THE REPRODUCTION OF ANGIO- 
SPERMS, by A. H. Church (10 lectures), Ibid, No. 5., 1919. Price 2s. net. 
HE method of teaching science by means of formal lectures 
followed by practical work in the laboratory, leaves much 
to be desired, especially in the case of elementary students. The 
fundamental criticism of this method from the standpoint of 
educational psychology is of course that the student is put into a 
passive and receptive instead of an active, critical, and executive 
frame of mind. He sits still and has information poured into him, 
and the active working of hisown mind, without which real education 
is impossible, is apt to be at a minimum. And this unfortunate 
attitude, which is more or less forced on the student by the method of 
instruction in the lecture room, is only partially bettered by the 
cutting, inspection and drawing of sections which still forms the 
mainstay of the laboratory regime. Nevertheless the practical 
convenience of the method, especially to the teacher, is so great, 
that it still maintains itself in full vigour. 
We are not concerned, at the moment, with suggesting 
alternatives, or with trying to determine the legitimate function of 
the lecture in teaching. But accepting the lecture system as an 
integral part of the method of instruction, it is clear that if the 
student takes his primary information solely or mainly from the 
lips of his lecturers, and records or tries to record what he hears in 
his notebook, he runs a grave risk both of failing to get his 
information accurate and of missing a large part of the real value 
of viva voce teaching. There’s many a slip ’twixt the lecturer and 
the notebook, defective hearing, defective mechanism in the process 
of translating what is heard into what is written, slips in writing, 
and finally the failure to record what the lecturer says from lack of 
time. Any lecturer may convince himself that these failures of 
mechanism are very real by the simple process of inspecting his 
students’ notebooks. As a method of communicating information 
the lecture is indeed largely a relic of mediaevalism, of a time 
before the printing press made possible the accurate multiplication 
of copies of what a man has to impart. 
