Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
I am not saying this without full practical justification for the
statement. For the last eighteen years we have had in England a system
of elementary science teaching carried out under the auspices of the
Science and Art Department, by which elementary scientific instruction
is made readily accessible to the scholars of all the elementary
schools in the country. Commencing with small beginnings, carefully
developed and improved, that system now brings up for examination as
many as seven thousand scholars in the subject of human physiology
alone. I can say that, out of that number, a large proportion have
acquired a fair amount of substantial knowledge; and that no
inconsiderable percentage show as good an acquaintance with human
physiology as used to be exhibited by the average candidates for
medical degrees in the University of London, when I was first an
examiner there twenty years ago; and quite as much knowledge as is
possessed by the ordinary student of medicine at the present day. I am
justified, therefore, in looking forward to the time when the student
who proposes to devote himself to medicine will come, not absolutely
raw and inexperienced as he is at present, but in a certain state of
preparation for further study; and I look to the university to help him
still further forward in that stage of preparation, through the
organisation of its biological department. Here the student will find
means of acquainting himself with the phenomena of life in their
broadest acceptation. He will study not botany and zoology, which, as I
have said, would take him too far away from his ultimate goal; but, by
duly arranged instruction, combined with work in the laboratory upon
the leading types of animal and vegetable life, he will lay a broad,
and at the same time solid, foundation of biological knowledge; he will
come to his medical studies with a comprehension of the great truths of
morphology and of physiology, with his hands trained to dissect and his
eyes taught to see. I have no hesitation in saying that such
preparation is worth a full year added on to the medical curriculum. In
other words, it will set free that much time for attention to those
studies which bear directly upon the student's most grave and serious
duties as a medical practitioner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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