hat the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now
slowly taking place by her agency. She is teaching the world that
the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not
authority; she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is
creating a firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and
physical laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aim of
an intelligent being.

But of all this your old stereotyped system of education takes no note.
Physical science, its methods, its problems, and its difficulties, will
meet the poorest boy at every turn, and yet we educate him in such a
manner that he shall enter the world as ignorant of the existence of the
methods and facts of science as the day he was born. The modern world
is full of artillery; and we turn out our children to do battle in it,
equipped with the shield and sword of an ancient gladiator.

Posterity will cry shame on us if we do not remedy this deplorable state
of things. Nay, if we live twenty years longer, our own consciences will
cry shame on us.

It is my firm conviction that the only way to remedy it is, to make the
elements of physical science an integral part of primary education. I
have endeavoured to show you how that may be done for that branch of
science which it is my business to pursue; and I can but add, that I
should look upon the day when every schoolmaster throughout this land
was a centre of genuine, however rudimentary, scientific knowledge, as
an epoch in the history of the country.

But let me entreat you to remember my last words. Addressing myself to
you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is
a sham and a delusion--what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors,
that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal
acquaintance with the facts, be they few or many. [2]

[Footnote 1: A Lecture delivered at the South Kensington Museum in
1861.]

[Footnote 2: It has been suggested to me that these words may be
taken to imply a discouragement on my part of any sort of scientific
instruction which does not give an acquaintance with the facts at first
hand. But this is not my meaning. The ideal of scientific teaching is,
no doubt, a system by which the scholar sees every fact for himself, and
the teacher supplies only the explanations. Circumstances, however, do
not often allow of the attainment of that ideal, and we m