_An Address to the Schoolmasters of Boston, delivered
February 4, 1878._
I felt a great reluctance at accepting the invitation of your excellent
superintendent to address you on this occasion; for, although I could
claim an unusually long experience in presenting the elements of
physical science to college students, I was fully conscious that I knew
little of the conditions under which such subjects must be studied, if
at all, in the elementary schools, and was therefore in danger of
appearing in a capacity which I should most sedulously shun, that of a
babbler about impracticable theories of education. It is very easy to
criticize another man's labor, and such criticisms, however plausible,
do the grossest injustice when, as is often the case, they leave out of
view the necessary conditions and limitations under which the work must
be done. While, however, I felt most keenly my incapacity to deal with
many of the practical problems which you have to solve, yet, on
consideration, I concluded that it was my duty under the circumstances
to state as clearly and forcibly as I could the very definite opinions
which I had formed on the subject you are discussing, knowing that you
will only give such weight to these opinions as your mature judgment can
allow. In stating the results of my experience, I can not avoid a
certain personal element, which would be wholly inexcusable were it not
that the facts, as I think you will admit, form the basis of my
argument.
I am a Boston boy, born in this immediate neighborhood, and fitted for
college at the "Latin School." It so happened that, while I was very
unsuccessfully endeavoring to commit to memory, in the old school-house
on School Street, Andrews and Stoddard's Latin grammar, not one word of
which I could understand, the "Lowell Institute" lectures were opened at
the "Odeon" on Congress Street. At those lectures I got my first taste
of real knowledge, and that taste awakened an appetite which has never
yet been satisfied. As a boy, I eagerly sought the small amount of
popular science which the English literature of that day afforded; and I
can now distinctly recall almost every page of Mrs. Marcet's
"Conversations on Chemistry," which was the first book on my science
that I ever read. More to the point than this, a boy's pertinacity,
favored by a kind father's indulgence, found the means of repeating, in
a small way, most of the experiments first seen at the Lowell Institute
lecture; and thus it came to pass that, before I entered college, I had
acquired a real, available knowledge of the facts of chemistry;
although, with much labor and intense weariness, I had gained only a
formal knowledge of those subjects which were then regarded as the only
essential preparation for the college course. In college, my attention
was almost exclusively devoted to other studies--for, in my day at
Cambridge, chemistry was one of the lost arts. But when, the year after
I graduated, I was most unexpectedly called upon to give my first course
of lectures, the only laboratory in which I had worked was the shed of
my father's house on Winthrop Place, and the only apparatus at my
command was what this boy's laboratory contained. With these simple
tools, or, as I should rather say, because they were so simple, I gained
that measure of success which determined my subsequent career.
I feel that I owe you a constant apology for these personal details, and
I should not be guilty of them did I not believe that they establish two
points more conclusively than I could prove them in any other way.
First, that it is perfectly possible for a child before fifteen years
of age to acquire a real and living knowledge of the fundamental facts
of nature on which physical science is based. Secondly, that this
knowledge can be effectually gained by the use of the simplest tools.
Let me add that this is not a question of natural endowments or special
aptitudes, for every one who has studied from the love of knowledge has
had the same experience; and I do not believe that, if my first taste of
real knowledge had been of history, nay, I will even say, of philology,
instead of chemistry, the circumstance would have materially influenced
my success in life, however different the direction into which it might
have turned my study. My early tastes were utterly at variance with all
my surroundings and all my inheritances, and were simply determined by
the accident which first satisfied that natural thirst for knowledge
which every child experiences to a greater or less degree--a desire most
rudely repressed in our usual methods of teaching.
My bitter experience as a pupil in the Boston Latin School and my
subsequent more fortunate experience of thirty years as a teacher in
Harvard College have impressed me most profoundly with the conviction
that the only way to arouse and sustain a love for knowledge in children
is to cultivate their perceptive faculties. To present the rudiments of
knowledge to immature minds in an abstract form, whether the subject be
grammar or physical science, is, in my judgment, not only culpable
folly, but also downright wrong. And, if, to those who have been
accustomed to the long established routine of our public school, my
opinions may appear revolutionary and extreme, I am, nevertheless, sure
that they would receive the universal assent of the men whom all would
recognize as the foremost scientific teachers of the world. I can well
remember that when, many years ago, the late Professor Agassiz declared
in my hearing that he would have no text-books used in his museum, I
thought his plan of pure object-teaching chimerical in the extreme, and
yet experience has not only convinced me of the wisdom of his judgment
in regard to the teaching of natural history, but brought me to a
similar conclusion in regard to the elementary teaching both of natural
philosophy and of chemistry.
Allow me then to express my firm persuasion that it is not only useless
but injurious to the education of young minds to present to them at the
outset any department of physical science as a body of definitions,
principles, laws, or theories; and that in elementary schools only such
facts should be taught as can be verified by the experience of the
pupil, or by such simple experiments as the pupils can try for
themselves. The usual method of committing by heart the words of a
school-book, and repeating them at the dictation of a teacher, may
afford a good exercise for the memory, but it is absurd to regard such a
task as a lesson in physical science, and this kind of study can be
spent with vastly greater profit on the spelling-book.
There is one department of physical science which has been taught in
this absurd way in our schools from time immemorial. I refer, of course,
to the study of geography, and I leave for you to judge whether the
result is worth the one hundredth part of the toil and drudgery spent in
obtaining it. Let us suppose that your child is able to give you the
names of all the rivers, bays, and capes from Greenland to Patagonia,
how much more does that child know of the structure and social relations
of this globe on which its lot has been cast than it did before this
senseless feat was attempted, a feat, moreover, to which only a child's
memory would be equal? And, when you turn to your own experience, what
is the outcome of all the time and labor spent on geography? Is it not
solely just that portion of your knowledge which, in spite of the
system, was direct object-teaching--the images you insensibly acquired
from the maps and pictures in the school-books?
But there is a very different way of teaching geography, by which the
study may be made a pleasure, not a task. The teacher does not begin
with abstract definitions of rivers, and bays, and oceans, which convey
no definite meaning to a child, but with Charles River, Boston Harbor,
and the Atlantic Ocean, which are to him real things, however imperfect
his conceptions of their extent. The child is first shown, not a map of
the globe, which he can not by any possibility understand, but a map of
a very limited region around his own home. He is taught how to find the
north and south, the east and west directions. He is encouraged to make
excursions to verify the map, or to add to its details, and such
excursions may be made to have for him all the zest of voyages of
discovery; and when thus the rudiments of geographical science have been
mastered, not in technical terms, but in substance, then the teacher may
begin to expand the horizon of the pupil's knowledge, judiciously
omitting details in proportion as distance increases, until at length
the general survey embraces the globe. Of course, such teaching as this
can only be given orally with the help of proper apparatus, such as wall
maps, and globes, and photographs. It must take the interrogative form,
and the questions should be directed to bring out the child's already
acquired knowledge, and to lead him to observe facts which had hitherto
escaped his notice. What a child reads in a book, or even what you tell
him, is never one half learnt, unless his interest is aroused. But what
a child observes for himself he never forgets, and when you have thus
aroused his interest you can associate a large number of facts with one
observation, and these all crystallize in his memory around this
nucleus.
This is no mere theory, no untried method which I am advocating. So far
from it, I am describing the precise method which has been used for many
years in Germany, where the science of education is far better
understood than with us, and where economy both of time and labor in
teaching is most carefully studied. If our school committees could
attend and understand a single exercise in geography, such as are daily
given in the elementary schools of Prussia, I am sure that at least one
form of child torture would soon disappear from the primary schools of
this country. Indeed, I already see evidence of a growing public opinion
on this subject, an effect which I trace in no small measure to the
influence of the Department of Education of the Exhibition at
Philadelphia in 1876.
That which is true of geography applies with still greater force to such
subjects as physics and chemistry, since the abstract conceptions which
these sciences involve are more abstruse, and the language by which the
conceptions are expressed or defined far less plain than is the case
with the older and more descriptive branch of knowledge. Hence, as
sciences, properly so called, that is, as philosophical systems, they
have no place whatever in elementary education. But, underlying these
systems, there is a great multitude of phenomena which a child can be
led to observe and apprehend as readily as the facts of geography. Take
that subject--mechanics--which our ordinary school-books very
philosophically but most unpractically place at the beginning of what
they call "Natural" Philosophy. How many of the fundamental facts of
this difficult subject can be made familiar to a child? Select, as an
example, Newton's "First Law of Motion." Suppose you make a boy memorize
the ordinary rule, "Every body continues in a state of rest or of
uniform motion in a straight line until acted upon by some external
force," how much will he know about it? Suppose you make him do a lot of
problems involving distances, velocities, and times, will he know any
more about it? But ask him, "Can you pitch a ball as well as your
playmate?" and he answers at once, "No; John is stronger than I am." And
then, if again you ask, "Can you catch John's ball?" he will probably
reply, "Of course, not! It requires a boy as strong as John to catch his
balls." And thus, by a few well-directed questions, you would bring that
boy to learn a lesson which he would never forget, and which he would
recall every time he played base-ball; namely, that John's swift balls
could not be set in motion without an expenditure of a definite amount
of muscular effort, and could not be stopped without the exertion of an
equal amount of what, after a while, you could get him to call _force_.
From the ball you would naturally pass to the railroad train or the
steamboat, and I should not wonder if, with a little patience, you could
bring even a boy to understand that motion can not be maintained against
a resistance, in other words, that work can not be done without a
constant expenditure of muscular effort, or of some other source of
power; and it is a fond hope of mine that by the time these boys grow
into men our intelligent New England community might become so far
educated in the elementary principles of mechanics that no
self-sustained motors, nor other mechanical nostrums which claim to have
superseded the primeval curse--if that law was a curse, which compels
man to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow--will receive the
sanction of our respectable journals; and then--if they have not
previously learned the lesson by dire experience--we may hope to
persuade our people of the parallel and equally elementary principle of
political economy, that value can not be legislated into rags.
But, my friends, our subject gives no occasion for banter, and presents
aspects too serious to be treated lightly or in jests. As inhabitants of
a not over-fruitful land, and, therefore, members of a community which
must excel, if at all, solely by its enterprise and intelligence, we
have a duty to our children which we can not avoid, if we would, and for
which we shall be held responsible by our posterity. These children are
entering life surrounded not only by all the wonders and glories of
nature, but, also, by giant conditions, which, whether stationed on
their path as a blessing or a curse, will inevitably strike if their
behests are not obeyed. So far as science has been able to define these
giant forms, it is our duty, as it is our privilege, to point them out
to those we are bound to protect and guide; and in many cases it is in
our power to change the curse into a blessing, and to transform the
destructive demon into a guardian angel. After that command of language
which the necessities of civilized life imperatively require, there is
no acquisition which we can give our children that will exert so
important an influence on their material welfare as a knowledge of the
laws of nature, under which they must live and to which they must
conform; and throughout whose universal dominion the only question is
whether men shall grovel as ignorant slaves or shall rule as intelligent
servants. Yes; rule by obeying. "Ich Dien"; for only under that motto,
which, five hundred years ago, the great Black Prince bore so
victoriously through the fields of Cressy and Poitiers, can man ever
rule in Nature's kingdom.
I regard it, therefore, as the highest duty and the most enlightened
self-interest of a community like this to provide the best means for the
instruction of its children in the elements of physical science; and I
was, therefore, most anxious to do all in my power to second the
enlightened efforts of your eminent Superintendent in this direction.
You must remember, however, that the best tools are worthless in
themselves, and can secure no valuable results unless judiciously used.
Indeed, there is danger in too many tools, and I have a great horror of
that array of brass-work which is usually miscalled "philosophical"
apparatus. The greater part of this is, in my opinion, a mere hindrance
to the teacher, because it at once erects a barrier between the scholar
and the simple facts of nature, and the child inevitably associates with
the phenomenon illustrated some legerdemain, and looks on your
experiments very much as he would on the exhibition of a Houdin or a
Signor Blitz. The secret of success in teaching physical science is to
use the simplest and most familiar means to illustrate your point.
When a very young man I was favored with an introduction to Michael
Faraday, and had the privilege of attending a portion of a course of
lectures which this noble man was then in the habit of giving every
Christmas season to a juvenile auditory at the Royal Institution of
London. As a boy, I had become familiar with lectures on chemistry at
the Lowell Institute, where they did not lack the pomp of circumstance
or the display of apparatus, and I had come to associate these elements
with the conditions of success in lectures of this kind. What, then, was
my surprise to find Faraday, the acknowledged leader of the world in his
science, and who had every means of illustration at his command, using
the plainest language and the simplest tools. When, in my youthful
admiration at the result, I expressed, after one of the lectures, my
surprise at the simplicity of the means employed, the great master
replied: "That is the whole secret of interesting these young people. I
always use the simplest means, but I never leave a point not
illustrated. If I mention the force of gravitation I take up a stone and
let it drop." At this distance of time, I can not be sure that I quote
his exact language, but the lesson and the illustration I could not
forget; and to this lesson, more than to any other one thing, I owe
whatever success I have had as a teacher of physical science.
I repeat, therefore, it is not only useless but injurious in the
education of young minds to present any department of physical science
as a body of definitions, principles, laws, or theories; and that in
elementary schools such facts only should be taught as can be verified
either by the experience of the pupils or by the simplest experiments,
which the pupils can repeat by themselves; and now, after this
discussion, I add, that the teacher must depend on his own ingenuity for
his experiments, and on his intercourse with his pupils for his
instruction.
But you will tell me all this involves grave difficulties, and
conditions incompatible with our ordinary school life. I freely admit
the difficulties, but I am none the less sure that, unless science can
be taught on the principles I have endeavored to illustrate, it had
better not be taught at all. I know very well that the proper teaching
of physical science is wholly incompatible with our usual school
methods. But this only proves to me that these methods ought to be
changed, and I am persuaded that the changes required will benefit the
literary and classical as well as the scientific courses of study. For
do not the same general principles apply to the acquisition of knowledge
in all subjects? And when a child's perceptive faculties have been duly
stimulated, and his intelligence fully awakened, he will find interest
in grammar, in literature, or in history, as well as in science.
In repelling the reproach of narrowness, to which our elective system at
Cambridge undoubtedly frequently leads, how often have I urged the
self-evident proposition that to arouse a love of study in any subject,
I care not how subordinate its importance or how limited its scope, is
to take the first step toward making your man a scholar; while to fail
to gain his interest in any study is to lose the whole end of
education--and what is true of the man is still more true of the child.
Classical culture on the one hand and scientific culture on the other
are excellent things, but, if your boy can not be made to take an
interest either in classics or in science, how plain it is that such
treasures are not for him, and, in the absence of the one condition
which can give value to any study, how idle and inconsequent all
questions in regard to the relative merits of these studies appear! On
the other hand, a love of study once gained, all studies are alike good.
And as with the pupil, so with the teacher. No teaching is of any real
value that does not come directly from the intelligence, and heart of
the teacher, and thus appeals to the intelligence and heart of the
pupil. It, of course, implies more acquisition, and it requires far more
energy to teach from one's own knowledge than to teach from a book, but
then, just in proportion to the difficulties overcome, does the teacher
raise his profession and ennoble himself. There is no nobler service
than the life of a true teacher; but the mere task-master has no right
to the teacher's name, and can never attain the teacher's reward.