Abstract
THE schoolmasters of the present day may be divided into two categories: those who teach and those who hear lessons; the latter class, unfortunately for the next generation, being by far the more numerous. The mischief done to the community generally by the shortcomings of inefficient teachers is too well known to every one who has pierced below the surface of the great question of middle-class education. The difficulties, however, that beset a science teacher in his endeavours to force scientific truths into the unwilling and unprepared minds of boys, who have been subjected to the sway of these same lesson-hearers, can only be realised by those who have gone through the task. The case of a senior science class, which has been under my charge for some months past, will illustrate my meaning most fully. It consists of about a dozen boys, whose ages range between fourteen and seventeen years, and they receive twice a week an hour's instruction on chemistry and physics. The class may be divided into two distinct portions by a perfectly sharp line. Four of the boys have had the advantage of six or seven years' training under the principal of the school, who is not only a ripe scholar, but also an efficient teacher—a very rare collocation in these days. The rest have simply learnt lessons all their lives. The four boys who have been taught are as mentally distinct from the others, as if they were different species of the same genus. The first four are bright, attentive, wide-awake—I know of no other term to express exactly what I mean-logical, and clear-headed; they can fairly follow a chain of scientific reasoning, and reproduce it afterwards link by link; they have a certain power of induction and deduction, although of course, being new to science, this power is necessarily only just awakened; they can connect and correlate facts and ideas, they can enumerate a series of phenomena in logical sequence; in a word, although their industry and application are far from colossal, the task of teaching them the truths of natural science is a comparatively easy one. The other boys, as I have said before, almost form a distinct mental species. They cannot understand the possibility of learning anything without the aid of a book, and the idea of finding out anything for themselves has never entered their heads. Still they are far from stupid boys, being all possessed of good average brains; yet their faculties have not merely been allowed to remain undeveloped, but they have been utterly entangled, stunted, and stultified by what Dr. Frankland would call their “previous school contamination.” These boys, it must be understood, are the sons of parents belonging to the upper stratum of the middle class, and have mostly been to schools conducted by university men with honourable initials appended to their names—men, in fact, who are scholars but emphatically no teachers. Their great fault is a total want of mental method, without which the greatest brain is as nought. They are at home in Virgil and Horace, some of them are fair Greek scholars; they have “been through” Euclid, and can work moderately difficult algebraical problems in a certain mechanical fashion; they are well acquainted with the leading facts of English history, and know the exact position and population of Adrianople; but as far as real mental power goes, any poor boy, who has been in a National school for three years, would beat them hollow.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
QUIN, C. Science for Children . Nature 1, 209–210 (1869). https://doi.org/10.1038/001209a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001209a0