SCIENCE IN SCHOOLS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10003, 26 March 1910, Page 4

SCIENCE IN SCHOOLS.

In a recent address, Professor Armstrong said that the men most competent to take 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 Farrar. then a classical master at 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 the supreme value of a classical education. The professor quoted Osborne and Dartmouth as examples of curriculum from which classics were omitted, and he said he believed the plan of the two naval colleges would ultimately be 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 maßter can make it. A new race of masters was required, broad minded practical men. The poverty of science teaching is due partly to contemptible equipment, partly to poor discipline, and the "general feeling'' carefully instilled by the form master that science atter 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 • existence of university professors who prefer ability to apply a formula to a sound grip of general principles, or intensive cultivation of a small patch of booklearning to a rougher, but more real, knowledge obtained by individual effort at chinking things out. A science may be just as sterile and pedantic as a language if it is taught in the same way. And, of course, the converse is true also.