Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/50

42 there are exceptional cases and some brilliant examples of improvement since these words were written, but generally throughout the country teaching in science is a name rather than a reality. The Technical Commission which reported last year can only point to three schools in Great Britain in which science is fully and adequately taught. While the commission gives us the consolation that England is still in advance as an industrial nation, it warns us that foreign nations, which were not long ago far behind, are now making more rapid progress than this country, and will soon pass it in the race of competition unless we give increased attention to science in public education, A few of the large towns, notably Manchester, Bradford, Huddersfield, and Birmingham, are doing so. The working-classes are now receiving better instruction in science than the middle classes. The competition of actual life asserts its own conditions, for the children of the latter find increasing difficulty in obtaining employment. The cause of this lies in the fact that the schools for the middle classes have not yet adapted themselves to the needs of modern life. It is true that many of the endowed schools have been put under new schemes, but, as there is no public supervision or inspection of them, we have no knowledge as to whether they have prospered or slipped back. Many corporate schools have arisen, some of them, like Clifton, Cheltenham, and Marlborough Colleges, doing excellent educational work, though as regards all of them the public have no rights, and can not enforce guarantees for efficiency. A return just issued, on the motion of Sir John Lubbock, shows a lamentable deficiency in science teaching in a great proportion of the endowed schools. While twelve to sixteen hours per week are devoted to classics, two to three hours are considered ample for science in a large proportion of the schools. In Scotland there are only six schools in the return which give more than two hours to science weekly, while in many schools its teaching is wholly omitted. Every other part of the kingdom stands in a better position than Scotland in relation to the science of its endowed schools. The old traditions of education stick as firmly to schools as a limpet does to a rock; though I do the limpet injustice, for it does make excursions to seek pastures new. Are we to give up in despair because an exclusive system of classical education has resisted the assaults of such cultivated authors as Milton, Montaigne, Cowley, and Locke? There was once an enlightened Emperor of China, Chi Hwangti, who knew that his country was kept back by its exclusive devotion to the classics of Confucius and Mencius. He invited five hundred of the teachers to bring their copies of these authors to Peking, and, after giving a great banquet in their honor, he buried alive the professors along with their manuscripts in a deep pit. But Confucius and Mencius still reign supreme. I advocate milder measures, and depend for their adoption on the force of public opinion. The needs of modern life will force schools to adapt themselves to a