Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
All that is being rapidly altered, and I hope it will soon
become a thing of the past.
The last point I have referred to is the question of the sufficiency of
time. And here comes the rub. The teaching of science needs time, as
any other subject; but it needs more time proportionally than other
subjects, for the amount of work obviously done, if the teaching is to
be, as I have said, practical. Work done in a laboratory involves a
good deal of expenditure of time without always an obvious result,
because we do not see anything of that quiet process of soaking the
facts into the mind, which takes place through the organs of the
senses. On this ground there must be ample time given to science
teaching. What that amount of time should be is a point which I need
not discuss now; in fact, it is a point which cannot be settled until
one has made up one's mind about various other questions.
All, then, that I have to ask for, on behalf of the scientific people,
if I may venture to speak for more than myself, is that you should put
scientific teaching into what statesmen call the condition of "the most
favoured nation"; that is to say, that it shall have as large a share
of the time given to education as any other principal subject. You may
say that that is a very vague statement, because the value of the
allotment of time, under those circumstances, depends upon the number
of principal subjects. It is _x_ the time, and an unknown quantity
of principal subjects dividing that, and science taking shares with the
rest. That shows that we cannot deal with this question fully until we
have made up our minds as to what the principal subjects of education
ought to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account