Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/743

Rh appear to answer the purpose tolerably well and is cheaper, which it never is in the long run." In other words, we try to satisfy the public by a show of teaching those subjects which we can not really teach. And so, in the sciences we study books instead of Nature, because books are plenty and cheap, and can be finished quickly, while Nature herself is accessible only to those who want something of her.

The high school would do well not to attempt to give a general view of science. This is possible only in a "Chautauqua course" or in a "school of all sciences." It is better to select some two or three of the number, a physical and a biological science, perhaps, and to spend the available time on these. The choice should depend mainly on the interest or the skill of the teacher. Teach those sciences that you can teach best.

President Hill, of Rochester University, has well said: "Thousands of our youth have studied chemistry without ever seeing an experiment, physics without seeing an air-pump, and astronomy without ever looking through a telescope. A professor of the ancient type maintained that this is a great advantage, like the study of geometry without figures, because it stimulates the imagination. It is an invigoration of stupidity and conceit, sealing the mind to reality by substituting subjective fancies for experimental proofs, and the pretense of knowing for clear ideas. Its effect upon the morals is as pernicious as its effect upon the mind, for it weakens the reverence for truth and engenders the habit of mental trifling."

Even so wise a schoolmaster as Dr. William T. Harris excludes science-teaching (and science-teaching with him means simply giving information about scientific subjects) from the fundamental requirements of education, because the knowledge of nature is not one of the five windows through which the soul looks out on life. These windows, according to Mr. Harris, are reading and writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, and history. The simile is a happy one. The soul, confined in the watch-tower of mediæval education, looks out on the world through these five windows, and they are but windows, for they give no contact with the things themselves. The study of nature throws wide open the doors, and lets the soul out to the fields and woods. It brings that contact with God through his works which has been, through all the ages, the inspiration of the poets and prophets, as well as of those long-despised apostles of truth whom we call men of science.

A second difficulty is this: Our towns will not pay for teachers enough to do the work as it should be done, and of the few teachers we have the people make no demand for thorough preparation. Very few of them are broadly educated or have had any