Science Made Easy: a Series of Familiar Lectures on the Elements of Scientific Knowledge most Required in Daily Life

Abstract

THESE thin clearly printed quartos represent a remarkable experiment; an attempt to diffuse good teaching without good teachers, and to reproduce first-rate popular lectures without the need of multiplying skilled lecturers to deliver them. The author, Mr. Twining, constructed in 1856 an Economic Museum at Twickenham, which exhibited illustrations of scientific knowledge as applicable to the concerns of daily life. After fifteen years of continuous improvement this collection was destroyed by fire; but the experience gained in working it strongly impressed upon its author the conviction that the level of popular culture in this country is below the point at which intelligent appreciation of the simplest scientific object becomes possible; since his fine museum, with its methodical classification, its careful explanatory labelling, and the oral instruction of its active curator, failed to convey knowledge to the mass of visitors, to whom the very alphabet of science was unknown, and whose minds were untrained to the reception of the simplest truths. It is a bold thing for one man to enter on the task of educating a people; but Mr. Twining's enthusiasm was equal to the attempt. Precluded himself from lecturing, he prepared carefully-written lectures, founded on his Twickenham experience, and entrusted them to others to deliver. The swimming bath of East Lambeth, dry and unused in the winter, was fitted up as a lecture-room, and a course of five lectures was there delivered to attentive audiences of more than a thousand persons. Demands for their repetition arose from all parts of London; and during the last nine seasons they have been delivered in various mission-rooms, institutes, and clubs of the working-classes to crowded and eager hearers. Uneducated learners, however respectfully attentive, yet carrying away from a lecture ideas crude and disjointed, may lapse within a few days into their original ignorance; Mr. Twining therefore began early to test his audiences by a system of examinations, so modified as to meet the inexperience of candidates and the elementary character of the teaching. Examination programmes were issued, containing a full set of possible questions on the course, from ten to fourteen being allotted to each lecture, with the understanding that from every one of these groups two questions would be selected by the examiner; while a preliminary examination “of a friendly kind” struck off all who were clearly incapable of presenting themselves with any prospect of success. Under these limitations we are told that a large number of candidates have obtained prizes and certificates at successive examinations, their papers showing that they had grasped and could reproduce intelligently a fair amount of the teaching which they had received.

Science Made Easy: a Series of Familiar Lectures on the Elements of Scientific Knowledge most Required in Daily Life.

By Thomas Twining. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.)