Abstract
IN the period of more than sixty years during which I have watched the progress of education in this country, no feature seems to me to stand out more prominently in that progress than the entrance and establishment of science in a recognised place in the tuition of our public schools. At the beginning of the period the teaching of even the rudiments of a knowledge of nature formed no part of the ordinary curriculum of study. Here and there, indeed, there might be found an enlightened headmaster or other teacher who, impressed with the profound interest and the great educational value of the natural sciences, contrived to find time amid his other duties to discourse to his pupils on that subject, and sought to rouse in them an appreciation of the infinite beauty, the endless variety, the ordered harmony, and the strange mystery of the world in which they lived. He might try to gain their attention by performing a few simple experiments illustrative of some of the fundamental principles of physics or chemistry, or by disclosing to their young eyes some of the marvels which they might discover for themselves among the plants and animals of the countryside. Such broad-minded instructors, however, were rare, and were far ahead of their time.
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Science Teaching in Public Schools 1 . Nature 90, 555–557 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/090555b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/090555b0