Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/49

Rh In the United Kingdom we are just beginning to understand the wisdom of Washington's farewell address to his countrymen, when he said: "Promote as an object of primary importance institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened." It was only in 1870 that our Parliament established a system of national primary education. Secondary education is chaotic, and remains unconnected with the state, while the higher education of the universities is only brought at distant intervals under the view of the state. All great countries except England have Ministers of Education, but this country has only ministers who are the managers of primary schools. We are inferior even to smaller countries in the absence of organized state supervision of education. Greece, Portugal, Egypt, and Japan have distinct Ministers of Education, and so also among our colonies have Victoria and New Zealand. Gradually England is gathering materials for the establishment of an efficient education minister. The Department of Science and Art is doing excellent work in diffusing a taste for elementary science among the working-classes. There are now about seventy-eight thousand persons who annually come under the influence of its science classes, while a small number of about two hundred, many of them teachers, receive thorough instruction in science at the excellent school in South Kensington, of which Professor Huxley is the dean. I do not dwell on the work of this Government department, because my object is chiefly to point out how it is that science lags in its progress in the United Kingdom owing to the deficient interest taken in it by the middle and upper classes. The working-classes are being roused from their indifference. They show this by their selection of scientific men as candidates at the next election. Among these are Professors Stuart, Roscoe, Maskelyne, and Rücker. It has its significance that such a humble representative of science as myself received invitations from working-class constituencies in more than a dozen of the leading manufacturing towns. In the next Parliament I do not doubt that a Minister of Education will be created as a nucleus round which the various educational materials may crystallize in a definite form.

—Various Royal Commissions have made inquiries and issued recommendations in regard to our public and endowed schools. The commissions of 1861, 1864, 1868, and 1873 have expressed the strongest disapproval of the condition of our schools, and, so far as science is concerned, their state is much the same as when the Duke of Devonshire's commission in 1873 reported in the following words: "Considering the increasing importance of science to the material interests of the country, we can not but regard its almost total exclusion from the training of the upper and middle classes as little less than a national misfortune." No doubt