Education In Arts And Sciences

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29324, 1 October 1960, Page 3

Education In Arts And Sciences

< Sir,—What Mr Dugdale regarded as •‘an unsubstantiated attack on science” .was not an attack on science at all. May I remind him that my list of compulsory subjects, to be done to Sixth Form level, included mathematics or science—the alternative for the benefit of those who have no aptitude for mathematics at this level. My list, I notice, is much the same as Professor Messel’s, reported in yesterday’s issue. As for Mr Dugdale’s charge that my comments on science spring from ignorance, if he cares to call at the Public Library, he will find that the charge is groundless.—Yours, etc., G. H. DUGGAN, S.M. September 30, 1960. Sir, —Mr Dugdale’s last letter hints at amnesia to join his selfstyled “objectivity mania." The original quarrel was not “that there had been an unsubstantiated attack on science,” but that two correspondents, in discussing subject specialisation in schools, had been “subjective” and relied on what he celled ’‘mere assertion.” Yet the single lonely non-general-ised positive argument advanced by Mr Dugdale was “I doubt the existence of . . . because I cannot envisage.” He is indignant! when quoted to the sense that objective data solves all problems, and yet earlier (September 25) asked for any problems in which other methods of approach could be used. An answer was the spectacular failure of behaviourism. This was not just the fall of a theory. It was the failure of a whole style of approach in a field to which exclusive objectivity was grossly unsuited.—Yours, etc..

FODIOR. September 30, 1960. [This correspondence may now cease.—Ed., “The Press.”]