SCIENCE IN SCHOOLS.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12754, 29 March 1910, Page 4

SCIENCE IN SCHOOLS.

In a recent address, Profes.'.or Armstrong said that the^men most competent to tako charge of schools would soon be science masters. The literary man- in charge of- a school would before long be an anachronism.' What was the nature of the broadening influence on the mind of a classical education? He quoted Dean Fa rear, then a classical masterat Harrow, upon the: "humiliating and heavy yoke" of Greek and Latin. Professor Armstrong said that schoolmasters were mainly affected by the vice of indetermination, if not by cowardice. It was time we put an end to the farce of proclaiming tho 'supreme value of _ a classical education. The professor quoted Osborne and Dartmouth as examples of curriculum from which classics wore omitted, and he, said he believed the plan of tlie two naval colleges would ■ ultimately bo generally followed. At'the same time, the professor was. severe in his denunciation of what passes for science teaching in the schools of to-day. It is usually made as sterile- as imaginative incapacity "of. the master can make.it. A new race of masters was requiied, broad-minded practical men. The .poverty of science teaching is due -partly to contemptible equipment, partly to poor discipline and tho" ■ "general feeling" carefully instilled by the form master that science after all. does not matter much alongside Latin prose; but its main cause lies with science masters, who fail to make their work scientific, and their failure is partly excused by .the v existence of university professors who prefer ability to apply a formula to a second grip of general principles, or intensive cultivation bf a small patch of book-learning to a rougher, but more real, knowledge obtained by individual effort as. thinking things out. . A science may be just as sterilo and pedantic as a language if it is taught in the same way. And, of course, the converse is true also.