Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/127

Rh allied to scientific or, at least, educational work and partly with politics, and pre-eminently tributary to the public good and to scientific methods of administration was his work as President of the Civil Service Inquiry Commission of 1874, which resulted in the production of the elaborate scheme for the reorganization of the civil service, under the operation of which the British departmental administration has attained its present condition of high integrity and efficiency.

Pertinently to Sir Lyon Playfair's work in these lines, Lord Rayleigh, ex-president, said, in presenting him as its presiding officer to the Association at Aberdeen: "As a general rule, I should think that the desertion of active scientific work for politics was a step in the wrong direction; but, when one considers the valuable work done by Sir Lyon Playfair, the lucid manner in which he teaches our rather uninstructive legislators, the great influence he commands, and the valuable services he has rendered on many occasions, I feel that there are exceptions to the rule."

Professor Playfair's efforts have been unceasingly directed to promoting the improvement of the standards of education, and the adoption of more thorough and practical methods and objects in the teaching of the elementary and higher schools. Presiding at a meeting of a school-teachers' association in 1875, he referred to the subject of compulsory education, which was gradually becoming universal in the country, but which, he said, would be pure tyranny unless the education in the schools was increased and its quality raised. Quantity was all very good, but, unless quality accompanied it, there was not much gained. "If it was to be said that children of thirteen or fourteen years of age were merely to receive the same education as children of eight years of age, compulsory education would be but tyranny. Therefore, compulsory education involved higher education."

Of the direction toward which that increased and higher education should be pointed he made a clear and forcible statement in his address before the Educational Section of the Social Science Congress at Newcastle in 1870, when, having remarked that, "under our present system of elementary teaching, no knowledge whatever bearing on the life-work of the people reaches them by our system of state education," and that "the mere tools of education are put into the hands of children during their school-time without any effort being made to teach them to use the tools for any profitable purpose whatever, so they get rusty or are thrown away altogether," he unfolded his own views of the methods that should be pursued. "Books," he said, "ought only to be accessories, not principals. The pupil must be brought in face of the facts through experiment and demonstration. He should pull the plant to pieces and see how it is constructed. lie must vex the electric cylinder till it yields him its sparks. He must apply with his own hand the magnet to the needle. He must see water broken up into its constituent parts, and witness the violence