Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/174

170 by details in the lesson. Many of the questions are unanswerable in the form given, or in the present stage of our knowledge, or in the present state of the teacher's knowledge. How many teachers say frankly and unequivocally "I don't know"? I have failed to observe that science teachers are less given to that pedantic way of saying "I don't know" which the unsophisticated can not always interpret to mean just that. Here are a few of the questions that I have heard pupils ask of their science teachers without getting a direct answer, or the information that the teacher could not supply the answer, or a reference to some other source of information: Why does magnetism act only on certain kinds of metals? What makes roots and shoots respond to gravity in opposite senses? Why does not a grape-seed germinate inside the grape, where there is plenty of water? Why do sodium and potassium produce different colored flames? Any one can extend the list indefinitely. Many teachers have a favorite way of deferring these troublesome questions to "the next time" in the hope of gaining time for informing themselves—let us hope; or in the expectation that the question will be lost in the shuffle before next time. But the children are either clever enough to see through the trick, or unconsciously absorb the method of indirection to reenforce the lessons they have already learned from the iceman and the grocer.

Where science teachers come in contact with administrative activities, I have found them just as ready to accept the conventional evasions of the strict letter of the law for the purpose of achieving desired ends, as other teachers. And, on the other hand, I have found them just as ready to resort to the strict letter of the law for the purpose of evading the responsibility of making decisions or of taking initiative, as teachers of other subjects.

Teachers of biology—a subject that is supposed to be particularly saturated with the concepts of evolution, which postulate the principle of constant change—are among the most reactionary of my acquaintances. I know personally, more or less intimately, over three hundred teachers in high schools; about a third of these are science teachers. Of these science teachers only about a dozen have ever expressed any ideas that would indicate radically progressive notions in matters social, political, ethical, theological or educational; and more than that number have expressed attitudes that would be considered not merely "conservative," but positively regressive in each realm of thought.

The progressive teachers of my acquaintance are predominantly teachers of English and of mathematics. Even in matters purely technical, the majority of the science teachers that I know are either ignorant of the newer ideas about evolution, or extremely suspicious of anything that threatens to undermine the safe and sane doctrines that they acquired as students in college. They are temperamentally static and