Abstract
JUST before the first movement organised by Lord Roberts there was probably not one thinking person in England who was not ready to vote for an immediate change in all sorts of English methods of doing things. Consequently everybody was willing to listen to the advice of men who had for years been crying in the wilderness and prophesying disaster. Now, however, that we have worried through our military trouble, we shall probably feel so much ashamed of our intense fright as to put aside most of our desire for reform, and even to have less thought of it than before the war began. It is, therefore, the duty of those who have earned the right to a hearing to prevent the nation from sinking down into its sleepy acquiescence with old methods of working; and I am glad to see that Sir Norman Lockyer, in his speech at the Royal Academy dinner, referred to scientific education as a great, necessary line of defence of our country, secondary only to that of our naval and military forces. Again, two articles have appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung (March 10 and 11), which criticise our manufacturing and business and military want of method with an unsparing pen. The German writer and many English writers seem to think that we ought to copy Germany. Nobody can feel more than I do the great necessity which exists for reform; but I think that our reform must be far more thorough than anything which can be regarded as a mere copying of Germany; the methods which we adopt must be English methods, invented by Englishmen for Englishmen. If our methods are to help to lead in the future to a history comparable in glory with the history of the past, there must be a great commonsense reform in education in England from top to toe. My friends, Profs. Ayrton and Armstrong, and I have so often pointed out the deficiencies of England in matters which we have carefully studied here and in foreign countries, that I hardly know whether an idea on this subject is my own or one of theirs; I do know, however, that we preach often on this subject, and that we never seem to be much attended to.
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PERRY, J. England's Neglect of Science . Nature 62, 221–226 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/062221c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/062221c0