Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/202

190 be admitted to the colleges was right and just; but that low standards should be set up for badly-prepared students, either male or female, was never intended by the advocates of the new departure.

We now see that the general low character of our scientific courses of study may be traced to two distinct causes: first, to the crudeness due to the novelty of the subject; and, second, to the competition for students. With the latter cause we have in the present paper little to do, save to distinctly recognize its baneful action. The former is the one to be particularly discussed.

When courses of study in science were first proposed, our colleges were controlled almost exclusively by men of classical training and bias—men wholly outside of scientific life, unacquainted with scientific work, the scientific method, or the scientific spirit. Upon these men devolved at first the organization of the new courses. With them, study was mainly a matter of book-work; such as recitations and written exercises, aided by an occasional lecture. Laboratory or experimental instruction was rarely thought of, save when a professor exhibited a few specimens upon his lecture-table, or performed some showy experiment. Students went to the professor of chemistry much as they would go to see a conjurer; expecting to be stunned, dazzled, and delighted, but dreaming of no real study except an occasional recitation and the cram for examinations at the end of a term. Mental discipline from such study was out of the question; real scholarship had nothing to do with it; systematic research on the part of either student or professor was almost unheard of. The study of science consisted in empirically memorizing a few disconnected facts, without reference to their mutual relations, or to the growth of any specific department of knowledge. This was the rule; but, fortunately, there were some exceptions. In a few of the larger colleges a better state of things existed—a state which was by no means perfection, but one which afforded a starting-point for healthy growth and improvement. In these colleges the scientific work was controlled by distinctively scientific men, and under their guidance the adverse influences were in part at least overcome. From such centres the scientific spirit has spread; and, now that the early crudeness has worn away, we are able to see clearly what a scientific course of study ought to be, and in what quarters our greater deficiencies lie.

Now, the problem before us is easily stated. It is to devise a course of study in which language is subordinate to the natural and physical sciences, and which shall be fully equal in requirements for admission and in subsequent mental training to the old-fashioned classical curriculum. In such a course the student must receive as solid and systematic a training as was ever furnished by a study of the classics; and for less than this no diploma should be granted. Of course, it is to be understood that the two systems of education cannot lead to identical results: each is in certain respects superior to the other; the equality