ste attendant upon studying matter whose meaning
is only symbolic. Since the mass of pupils are never going to become
scientific specialists, it is much more important that they should get
some insight into what scientific method means than that they should
copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have
reached. Students will not go so far, perhaps, in the "ground covered,"
but they will be sure and intelligent as far as they do go. And it is
safe to say that the few who go on to be scientific experts will have
a better preparation than if they had been swamped with a large mass of
purely technical and symbolically stated information. In fact, those
who do become successful men of science are those who by their own power
manage to avoid the pitfalls of a traditional scholastic introduction
into it.

The contrast between the expectations of the men who a generation or
two ago strove, against great odds, to secure a place for science
in education, and the result generally achieved is painful. Herbert
Spencer, inquiring what knowledge is of most worth, concluded that
from all points of view scientific knowledge is most valuable. But
his argument unconsciously assumed that scientific knowledge could be
communicated in a ready-made form. Passing over the methods by which the
subject matter of our ordinary activities is transmuted into scientific
form, it ignored the method by which alone science is science.
Instruction has too often proceeded upon an analogous plan. But there is
no magic attached to material stated in technically correct scientific
form. When learned in this condition it remains a body of inert
information. Moreover its form of statement removes it further from
fruitful contact with everyday experiences than does the mode of
statement proper to literature. Nevertheless that the claims made for
instruction in science were unjustifiable does not follow. For material
so taught is not science to the pupil.

Contact with things and laboratory exercises, while a great improvement
upon textbooks arranged upon the deductive plan, do not of themselves
suffice to meet the need. While they are an indispensable portion
of scientific method, they do not as a matter of course constitute
scientific method. Physical materials may be manipulated with scientific
apparatus, but the materials may be disassociated in themselves and in
the ways in which they are handled, from the materials and processes