Doncaster & Education
Apathy towards Scientific Side
The Respectable Pursuit of Backing Horses
Defective Training System in Schools
The scientific aspect of education was the subject before the Doncaster Scientific Society last week, and in the course of an admirable disquisition, Mr. G. Grace, principal of the Doncaster Technical School, said that when he came to Doncaster six years ago he was struck by the attitude of many people towards him, and with the evidence that there had, apparently, never been a serious attempt to teach science as part of education in the town.
He had been appointed, admittedly, to undertake the introduction of scientific education into the town, and he could not help feeling that there lingered in the minds of some of the townspeople, with whom he soon came in contact, the idea that science was something which made a man extremely wicked, and that all scientific students were supposed to be iconoclasts. Indeed, he was not quite sure that, as a teacher of science, he was not expected to garnish his conversation with strange, uncouth Latin names, and ponderous, unwieldly sentences.
It was somewhat of a surprise to him, later, when he found that there was actually a scientific society in Doncaster, and that a faithful few met together in a dingy, badly and very unscientifically ventilated, back room, up a still more dingy alley – behind the Police Station, and were the proud possessors of a museum, no one had seen, somewhere in an unknown corner of the same building.
The fact was conveyed to him in the same tone that he would have been told of the meetings of some peculiar and obscure religious or political sect, of unorthodox tendencies; and plainly implied that the members were not very respectable people and of unconventional habits and no particular moment.
One thing was very clear, that the Scientific Society had made no real impression on the mind of the town at large. The average Doncastrian classed science, phrenology, fortune-telling, weather prophecy, and astrology in one dishonoured breath as, for instance, the noble art of making money, or horse racing, or even the respectable and respected pursuit of getting your friends to back the winner to their financial disaster but your own gain.
Coming to the substance of his subject, Mr. Grace said he chose it because, although he was, as they know, interested in general branches of scientific knowledge, he had always felt more interested in the use which could be made of them in training minds and making life more interesting than in mere heaping together of knowledge, on, as it used to be called, “Knowledge for knowledge sake.”
We gave a brief summary of Mr. Grace’s address in our issue of last week, and in supplementation we may add that in dealing with the subject of the cultivation of the senses, he said that men were prone to wrong beliefs, because of inaccurate training, yet no attempt was made to develop correct seeing and hearing. There was in schools a system of too much poring over books, not sufficient moving about, nor, of the handling of things. No system of education was scientific that did not systematically cultivate the senses. Ordinary school training was still too clerical and literary – not practical enough. “it is just here,” continued the speaker, “where I think that the study of a subject like chemistry or physics can provide, even in its earliest stages, mental training such as can be obtained from no other subject. I will not call this science teaching, for in its earliest stages it should rather be common knowledge than teaching. But whatever it is called, it must be practical.
The children should actually handle the things they are learning about, try the facts for themselves, not simply be told about them; and this common knowledge, chemistry or whatever it is called, if properly arranged, can provide training in very many of the mental processes which we are anxious to strengthen, observation by eye, ear, hand, and even smell, memory, sight, sound and feeling; memory of form and texture, logical reasoning from observation, the formation of theories and generalization. Enthusiasm, perseverance, honesty, and truthfulness, unbiased search for truth, and imagination are all brought into play in connection with facts at first hand, and provide a training which cannot be obtained from books, nor, I believe, in any other way.
And yet, in our schools today, because the first schools were to train clerks or clerics, and their training consisted of book-learning, and because the language of learned men was Latin, our secondary schools still to-day devote far more time to teaching languages and book-lore than they do to teaching first-hand facts, and our primary schools, which were modelled in imitation of grammar schools, devote nearly all their time to purely literary work. Fortunately, Dame Nature steps in, and when the child comes out of school, tired of learning by rote things which are only words to him, she runs against him with hard facts and keeps up the education which has been suspended during school hours.
It is no use saying that schoolmasters should alter this. The fact is schoolmasters cannot. So long as, in the minds of parents, education consists in the abundance of useless knowledge, so long must the schoolmaster spend his days in driving this useless knowledge into unwilling pupils. It will be only when parents realise that education should not be making scholars, but making healthy men and healthy women, and insist on the thorough overhauling of the whole of school life, from the point of view, that there can be much real improvement. Besides we schoolmasters have had fals4 ideals drilled into us so thoroughly, we have been in the scholastic treadmill, doing the same tasks day after day, week after week, so long that we have become incapable of doing any fresh thinking on the subject at all. Our very existence depends upon turning out scholars with certain conventional acquirement, and we are quite incapable of bettering our ways.”
G. Grace.
[This report is from “The Doncaster Gazette 18.10.1909]