Scientific Instruction in Elementary Schools

Abstract

WHAT is to be brought under the new Act in our elementary schools? The never-ending permutations and combinations of the three R. 's, attendant on Mr. Lowe's Revised Code of Education, will, doubtless, soon be at an end, or at least limited in number. What improvement will come? What encouragement will Government give to Science teaching? Under the Revised Code it well-nigh disappeared, or, if it lingered on in some few spots, became almost worthless, per se, owing to its necessarily disconnected and unsystematic nature. We say it disappeared, which implies that it once had a footing; it certainly had, and was to some considerable extent followed out in very many of our elementary schools. The Committee of Council encouraged it, not only by simply recognising it, which they have not done of late years, but by making special reduced rates to assist the teacher in experimental lessons. Ten or twelve years ago educational periodicals teemed with hints on the subject, and specimen lessons were frequently inserted at full length; books for the use of teachers were written by scientific men; the teaching of “common things,” though not altogether scientific in its way, yet showed the general opinion of competent persons in the matter. Why has all this been allowed to die out? We know schools at the present time where the apparatus liberally granted by Government, in days long gone by, has been carefully locked up in the cabinet for years, waiting for more enlightened times to return. We do not say that the Committee of Council on Education has positively prohibited all scientific instruction in our elementary schools; of course, they have done no such thing directly, but, indirectly, they have prevented it:—(1) by not recognising it as formerly; (2) by discontinuing grants of apparatus; (3) by making the examination in reading, writing, and arithmetic so rigid as virtually to confine the attention of the master to these three subjects. The examination of the boys in these schools has, in fact, been proportionally much more severe than that of candidates for the Civil Service, and at the same time more so than that of the pupil teacher placed over them. Hence the teacher has hardly dared to venture on giving time to other subjects with the value of which he was at the same time well acquainted.