Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/177

Rh of science—as a tried and worthy method of solving certain types of human problems. We may incidentally discover that here and there a pupil is worth directing into a scientific career; but that is a part of the general purpose of the school, and not of the specific purpose of science teaching. Now, if we are to make young people appreciate the service of science it will not be merely by establishing in their minds bonds of association between important inventions and the names of the inventors: it will be by making them feel the downright solidity of thoroughness and accuracy and honesty and clear vision. If we are to make them appreciate the method of science it will not be merely by helping them to memorize concrete facts, rules of procedure and abstract formulas, it will be by making them take part in analytical thinking about real problems until they have arrived at an explicit realization of what constitutes a valid way of thinking about problems.

We can humanize our science teaching by making the pupils realize that we have no final truth; that science, like life, is a constant becoming. This ought to do something to counteract what has been called the "superstition of science"—that attitude which continues the method of the medieval dialectician, but substitutes some new-sounding phrases for the older categories. The person who confounds evolution with the doctrine of natural selection, the one who has nothing to do with ions because these threaten to disrupt the atom which he acquired in his youth—these are among the men and women with closed systems of thought, who may indeed speak of chromosomes and valency, but who never are scientific.

We need science teachers more than ever. These should be first of all teachers. But the usual tests require that they shall be then familiar with reasonably large bodies of information about plants and animals, or about wheels and polarities, or about atoms and reactions. What is needed more than large bodies of information—which any reader can get out of a half-dozen books—is a habit of clear and honest thinking. This is not to say that the quality in question is not desirable in teachers of other subjects. It is simply to say that in the selection of teachers of science this qualification has been too greatly overlooked.