Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/287

Rh of instruction, within the school system as well as beyond it, and it is only its abuses that are to be deplored. But these have not only crept into the rapidly growing extra-mural work of higher institutions, but even pervade the programs of scientific societies themselves.

With the preferences of an audience which confessedly seeks entertainment one can not well quarrel on the ground that it ought to desire instruction instead; one can only note the appearance of new predilections in the social habits of a people. But against an institution devoted to the advancement of knowledge, or the fostering of an interest in science, protest lodges whenever these aims are lost sight of or subordinated. The past decade has seen a rapidly growing tendency on the part of such societies to allow the presentation of purely illustrative materials to trespass upon the formal discussion of their common subject matter. The change is one which affects the very ideals for which these bodies stand. The science of geology, for example, has perfectly definite aims which are not attained by the photographic reproduction, however copious or admirable, of rock strata and erosion effects, of talus slopes and detritus, of shifts, faults, dykes and lava-flow—though an acquaintance with all these things is essential to the prosecution of its general undertaking. The science of geography, likewise, is no more adequately represented in the flood of charming pictures to which we have grown accustomed in periodicals and platform lectures alike than is a knowledge of the development of any people embodied in the impressions one carries away from those ingenious pageants to which—still as picture lovers—we are turning with equal enthusiasm in the field of history.

In public lecturing and the methods of instruction, as in magazine and book-making, these phenomena have a common significance. They indicate a change in the point of support on which the speaker rests, as well as in the nature of his appeal to the hearer. The new demand is not less strenuous than the old, but it is of a different kind. Instead of requiring a definite constructive activity, stimulated and directed—but never supplanted—by the mind of the speaker, it titillates the imagination with a series of agreeable shocks. The mind is not taxed but appeased; the soi-disant teacher exerts himself to anticipate the moment of flagging attention, and out of an abundant store to supply it at each turn with a novel and pleasurable stimulus. Education and discipline are not attainable by any such process. It is only by thinking that knowledge comes, and thought is a function that can neither be assumed by a deputy nor taken over by any other faculty. Instruction and entertainment, though equally essential to human life, can not be confused as specific aims without the sacrifice of their several values. Every normal individual resents the instruction that is disguised as entertainment; but the ultimate effects of a systematic pretense that entertainment is instruction are no less to be feared.