Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/721

Rh grade, to five very simple questions forming an examination paper set for candidates for admission to a free stenographic class at the Cooper Institute. These damsels were asked, among other things, to state how many motions the earth has, and how much time each occupies; also what causes the change of seasons. These things had been fully explained to them, as was supposed, at school; and all, or nearly all, had in point of fact retained some shreds of the phraseology in which the explanations had been conveyed. Here are some examples of the answers to the question as to the motions of the earth:

"One motion. One year. The motion of sun round the earth."

"Two motions. Night, Day, twelve hours for each."

"Four motions, it revolves on its axis around once a year, and the four motions cause the seasons spring, summer, fall, and winter."

"The revolution of the earth on its axis, and the inclination of 23 per cent of its poles to the plane of its orbit."

"Two motions, day and night. The sun causes the earth to move around its axis every twenty-four hours."

"Two, Regular and Circular, twelve hours for each."

"If the earth would not be round, the sun and moon could not go round the earth. Sun takes twenty-four hours. Moon takes twenty-four hours. Stars at night."

We can not afford more space to this rubbish. Suffice it to say that our contemporary prints the answers given to the several questions by fifty-six of the candidates, and that they all display the most deplorable ignorance and confusion.

The problems of how science shall be taught in the public schools, or indeed whether it shall be brought into them at all, depend for their solution upon having the right kind of teachers. They need to realize the utter ignorance of the child-mind as it comes for instruction to the public school, and to understand how to build up in that mind a fabric of real and coherent knowledge. Let us turn children out of the public schools ignorant, if need be, of many things that are taught to them now; but let this idea at least be rooted in their minds, that this world is made up of real things; and this further idea, that words are worse than useless unless they can be applied in the most definite manner to well-understood objects of sense or of thought. What a blessing it would be if we could inspire the rising generation with a real horror of vague and meaningless language! It would mean nothing less than an intellectual revolution in the world—or at least in our considerable portion of it.

there should arise a class of men who were able to distinguish, promptly and invariably, genuine things from imitations, facts from falsehoods, and truth from error, they would have an almost inconceivable advantage in the struggle of life. The tricks of impostors would never deceive them; the bubbles of visionaries would never delude them; they would never be misled by the sophistries of shallow theorists; never be enslaved by baseless superstitions. Such wisdom is so unlike what the world has ever known that the idea savors of Utopia or the millennium, and to express it seems almost childish. Yet it is a fact that some progress toward this ideal has been made—some increase of the power of recognizing truth has been gained. A class of men has arisen whose pursuit of health is not hampered by the delusion that disease is a punishment for lapses from religion, who do not waste their money on schemes for getting more power out of a machine than is put into it, who do not accept every statement that is put to them with rhetorical vehemence and defective evidence. This superior discernment—far from perfect, but the best that man has ever had—