Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/176

172 a rule, they leave no room for individual initiative or independence of thought. The teachings of history, so far as the facts are concerned, must also be more or less arbitrary and authoritative. But history teaching and language teaching, and even mathematics teaching, are rapidly becoming humanized in a modern, scientific sense.

The teaching of science, introduced into the schools in comparatively recent times, has been too much influenced by the methods of the older teachers of the older subjects. While the other subjects have felt the influence of the scientific age, the science teachers have failed to develop the possibilities of their own material. Science teaching needs indeed to be humanized, but not by being assimilated to the mechanical, formal teaching of the older school disciplines, but along the lines of its peculiar possibilities. We must not expect general discipline from special work in science; but we must turn to general application the special ideas and principles of science.

We can humanize our science teaching by relating it to the idea of human achievement. Achievement in science is an essential part of human history, and a very significant part. It can be made to appeal to the imagination and to stir the emotions quite as effectively, and to as good purpose, as achievement in other directions. The history teacher may be obliged to neglect this side of his history—at any rate, he generally does neglect it. But the science teacher can not afford to detach the great ideas which he wishes to impart from the animal species in the course of whose evolution these ideas emerged. We can humanize our science teaching by making clear the idea, and making it impressive, that human progress, as illustrated by the growth of science, depends upon most intimate kinds of cooperation; by making the pupils feel the interdependence of the living of all lands, by making them feel our dependence also upon those who have gone before. High-school girls and boys can appreciate the fact that the reason why one carried on the shoulders of another sees farther than the latter is not necessarily the superior optical apparatus of the first.

We can humanize our science teaching by making clear in the thought of the pupil the idea that the progress of science consists of a successive refinement of hypotheses; by teaching them to appreciate the difference between hypothesis and fact, on the one hand, and between fact and conclusion, on the other. We can teach an appreciation of the value of facts as the only sound basis for judgment, and we may hope to establish the habit of searching for facts during the suspension of judgment.

We can humanize science teaching by giving up the attempt to make scientists out of high-school students; that is not our function. It is our business not to make scientists, but to make as many children as possible appreciate first the service of science, and second the method