Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/425

Rh remains to be noticed, and this will bring us naturally to the question of method. A large majority of our American college professors are graduates under the old régime. Having been trained in the old education, by the old methods, they are, consequently, unable to adapt themselves perfectly to the new. In the modern system, modern methods must be used. The old bottles will not hold the new wine. Formerly, instruction was given by lectures and text-book recitations; the student received, but gave nothing; he was placed upon a sort of Procrustean bedstead, and shaped according to a common pattern. The classics and mathematics were established things; the learner must take them as he found them; he was neither permitted to add nor to modify. Routine governed every thing. Differences of capacity, of tastes, and of needs, among a class of students went for nothing; there was so much raw material for the teacher to work up, and he must do it by the clumsiest rule and measure.

The new education is very different. Here we have a variety of subjects to be studied, each one best suited to a particular class of minds. The scholar who proves to be dull in one branch may be brilliant in another. Every branch is continually undergoing the changes attendant upon progress and growth. In each science new questions are continually arising; the higher we go up the mountain the wider our horizon will be. Through these changes the minds of both student and teacher are kept in constant activity; a condition requiring very different treatment from that given in the colleges of thirty years ago.

But the greatest changes in the educational method must be looked for in another direction. No longer are text-books and lectures adequate means of instruction; a new element must be brought in. This is the element of laboratory instruction. The student must not only hear about scientific truths, he must be able to demonstrate them in person. There are tools to be handled as well as books. If botany is to be studied, it must be partly in the field and partly with the microscope; if zoology, then the scalpel must be used; if chemistry or physics, the student must learn to perform his own experiments. Without practice of this sort the instruction will be largely thrown away. It is to science what the exercise of translation is to the study of language, or what the solution of problems is to mathematics. The student must be trained to observe for himself; then to generalize upon his observations. In no other manner can the natural and physical sciences be taught. All other teaching in them is a mere pretense. How many American colleges can boast a "scientific course" in which this method is really employed?

But this necessity again brings a disadvantage to science in very many institutions. A poorly-endowed college cannot afford suitable laboratories and apparatus, any more than it can afford to employ the specialists who are alone competent to manage them. Accordingly,