FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[185]In their examination of the causes of unemployment in York, based not on economists’ hypotheses, but on a close study of the real facts in each individual case (Unemployment: a Social Study, London, 1911), Seebohm Rowntree and Mr. Bruno Lasker have come to the conclusion that the chief cause of unemployment is that young people, after having left the school (where they learn no trade), find employment in such professions as greengrocer boy, newspaper boy, and the like, which represent “a blind alley.” When they reach the age of eighteen or twenty, they must leave, because the wages are a boy’s wages,—and they know no trade whatever![186]Unfortunately, I must already say “admitted” instead of “admits.” With the reaction which began after 1881, under the reign of Alexander III., this school was “reformed”; that means that all the spirit and the system of the school were destroyed.[187]Manual Training: the Solution of Social and Industrial Problems.By Ch. H. Ham. London: Blackie & Son, 1886. I can add that like results were achieved also at the KrasnoufimskRealschule, in the province of Orenburg, especially with regard to agriculture and agricultural machinery. The achievements of the school, however, are so interesting that they deserve more than a short mention.[188]It is evident that the Gordon’s College industrial department is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I cannot help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools.[189]What this school is now, I don’t know. In the first years of Alexander III.’s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good institutions of the early part of the reign of Alexander II. But the system was not lost. It was carried over to America.[190]To those readers who are really interested in the education of children, M. Leray, the French translator of this book, recommended a series of excellent little works “conceived,” he wrote, “in the very spirit of the ideas developed in this chapter. Their leading principle is that ‘in order to be soundly educative, all teaching must be objective, especially at the outset,’ and that ‘systematical abstraction, if it be introduced into the teaching without an objective (concrete) preparation, is noxious.’” M. Leray meant the series of initiations published by the French publishers, Hachette:Initiation mathématique, by C. A. Laisant, a book completed by theInitiateur mathématique, which is a game with small cubes, very ingenious and giving in a concrete form the proofs of arithmetics, the metric system, algebra and geometry;Initiation astronomique, by C. Flammarion;Initiation chimique, by Georges Darzens;Initiation à la mécanique, by Ch. Ed. Guillaume; andInitiation zoologique, by E. Brucker. The authors of these works had—it would not be just not to mention it—predecessors in Jean Mace’sL’Arithmétique du grand-papa, and René Leblanc, “whose excellent manual,Les Sciences physiques à l’Ecole primaire”—M. Leray says that from his own experience upon pupils from eleven to thirteen years old—“gives even to the dullest children the taste or even the passion for physical experiment.”[191]Take, for instance, the description of Atwood’s machine in any course of elementary physics. You will find very great attention paid to the wheels on which the axle of the pulley is made to lie; hollow boxes, plates and rings, the clock, and other accessories will be mentioned before one word is said upon the leading idea of the machine, which is to slacken the motion of a falling body by making a falling body of small weight move a heavier body which is in the state of inertia, gravity acting on it in two opposite directions. That was the inventor’s idea; and if it is made clear, the pupils see at once that to suspend two bodies of equal weight over a pulley, and to make them move by adding a small weight to one of them, is one of the means (and a good one) for slackening the motion during the falling; they see that the friction of the pulley must be reduced to a minimum, either by using the two pairs of wheels, which so much puzzle the text-book makers, or by any other means; that the clock is a luxury, and the “plates and rings” are mere accessories: in short, that Atwood’s idea can be realised with the wheel of a clock fastened, as a pulley, to a wall, or on the top of a broomstick secured in a vertical position. In this case the pupils will understand theideaof the machine and of its inventor, and they will accustom themselves to separate the leading idea from the accessories; while in the other case they merely look with curiosity at the tricks performed by the teacher with a complicated machine, and the few who finally understand it spend a quantity of time in the effort. In reality, allapparatus used to illustrate the fundamental laws of physics ought to be made by the children themselves.[192]The sale of the pupils’ work was not insignificant, especially when they reached the higher classes, and made steam-engines. Therefore the Moscow school, when I knew it, was one of the cheapest in the world. It gave boarding and education at a very low fee. But imagine such a school connected with a farm school, which grows food and exchanges it at its cost price. What will be the cost of education then?[193]In an otherwise also remarkable memoir on the Arctic Regions.[194]The rate of progress in the recently so popular Glacial Period question was strikingly slow. Already Venetz in 1821 and Esmarck in 1823 had explained the erratic phenomena by the glaciation of Europe. Agassiz came forth with the glaciation of the Alps, the Jura mountains, and Scotland, about 1840; and five years later, Guyot had published his maps of the routes followed by Alpine boulders. But forty-two years elapsed after Venetz wrote before one geologist of mark (Lyell) dared timidly to accept his theory, even to a limited extent—the most interesting fact being that Guyot’s maps, considered as irrelevant in 1845, were recognised as conclusive after 1863. Even now—more than half a century after Agassiz’s first work—Agassiz’s views are not yet either refuted or generally accepted. So also Forbes’s views upon the plasticity of ice. Let me add, by the way, that the whole polemics as to the viscosity of ice is a striking instance of how facts, scientific terms, and experimental methods quite familiar to building engineers, were ignored by those who took part in the polemics. If these facts, terms and methods were taken into account, the polemics would not have raged for years with no result. Like instances, to show how science suffers from a want of acquaintance with facts and methods of experimenting both well known to engineers, florists, cattle-breeders, and so on, could be produced in numbers.[195]Chemistry is, to a great extent, an exception to the rule. Is it not because the chemist is to such an extent a manual worker? Besides, during the last ten years we see a decided revival in scientific inventiveness, especially in physics—that is, in a branch in which the engineer and the man of science meet so much together.[196]I leave on purpose these lines as they were in the first edition. All these desiderata are already accomplished facts.[197]The same remark ought to be made as regards the sociologists, and still more so the economists. What are most of them, including the socialists, doing, but studying chiefly the books previously written and the systems, instead of studying thefactsof the economical life of the nations, and the thousands of attempts at giving to agriculture and industry new forms of organisation and new methods, which are now made everywhere in Europe and America?

[185]In their examination of the causes of unemployment in York, based not on economists’ hypotheses, but on a close study of the real facts in each individual case (Unemployment: a Social Study, London, 1911), Seebohm Rowntree and Mr. Bruno Lasker have come to the conclusion that the chief cause of unemployment is that young people, after having left the school (where they learn no trade), find employment in such professions as greengrocer boy, newspaper boy, and the like, which represent “a blind alley.” When they reach the age of eighteen or twenty, they must leave, because the wages are a boy’s wages,—and they know no trade whatever!

[186]Unfortunately, I must already say “admitted” instead of “admits.” With the reaction which began after 1881, under the reign of Alexander III., this school was “reformed”; that means that all the spirit and the system of the school were destroyed.

[187]Manual Training: the Solution of Social and Industrial Problems.By Ch. H. Ham. London: Blackie & Son, 1886. I can add that like results were achieved also at the KrasnoufimskRealschule, in the province of Orenburg, especially with regard to agriculture and agricultural machinery. The achievements of the school, however, are so interesting that they deserve more than a short mention.

[188]It is evident that the Gordon’s College industrial department is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I cannot help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools.

[189]What this school is now, I don’t know. In the first years of Alexander III.’s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good institutions of the early part of the reign of Alexander II. But the system was not lost. It was carried over to America.

[190]To those readers who are really interested in the education of children, M. Leray, the French translator of this book, recommended a series of excellent little works “conceived,” he wrote, “in the very spirit of the ideas developed in this chapter. Their leading principle is that ‘in order to be soundly educative, all teaching must be objective, especially at the outset,’ and that ‘systematical abstraction, if it be introduced into the teaching without an objective (concrete) preparation, is noxious.’” M. Leray meant the series of initiations published by the French publishers, Hachette:Initiation mathématique, by C. A. Laisant, a book completed by theInitiateur mathématique, which is a game with small cubes, very ingenious and giving in a concrete form the proofs of arithmetics, the metric system, algebra and geometry;Initiation astronomique, by C. Flammarion;Initiation chimique, by Georges Darzens;Initiation à la mécanique, by Ch. Ed. Guillaume; andInitiation zoologique, by E. Brucker. The authors of these works had—it would not be just not to mention it—predecessors in Jean Mace’sL’Arithmétique du grand-papa, and René Leblanc, “whose excellent manual,Les Sciences physiques à l’Ecole primaire”—M. Leray says that from his own experience upon pupils from eleven to thirteen years old—“gives even to the dullest children the taste or even the passion for physical experiment.”

[191]Take, for instance, the description of Atwood’s machine in any course of elementary physics. You will find very great attention paid to the wheels on which the axle of the pulley is made to lie; hollow boxes, plates and rings, the clock, and other accessories will be mentioned before one word is said upon the leading idea of the machine, which is to slacken the motion of a falling body by making a falling body of small weight move a heavier body which is in the state of inertia, gravity acting on it in two opposite directions. That was the inventor’s idea; and if it is made clear, the pupils see at once that to suspend two bodies of equal weight over a pulley, and to make them move by adding a small weight to one of them, is one of the means (and a good one) for slackening the motion during the falling; they see that the friction of the pulley must be reduced to a minimum, either by using the two pairs of wheels, which so much puzzle the text-book makers, or by any other means; that the clock is a luxury, and the “plates and rings” are mere accessories: in short, that Atwood’s idea can be realised with the wheel of a clock fastened, as a pulley, to a wall, or on the top of a broomstick secured in a vertical position. In this case the pupils will understand theideaof the machine and of its inventor, and they will accustom themselves to separate the leading idea from the accessories; while in the other case they merely look with curiosity at the tricks performed by the teacher with a complicated machine, and the few who finally understand it spend a quantity of time in the effort. In reality, allapparatus used to illustrate the fundamental laws of physics ought to be made by the children themselves.

[192]The sale of the pupils’ work was not insignificant, especially when they reached the higher classes, and made steam-engines. Therefore the Moscow school, when I knew it, was one of the cheapest in the world. It gave boarding and education at a very low fee. But imagine such a school connected with a farm school, which grows food and exchanges it at its cost price. What will be the cost of education then?

[193]In an otherwise also remarkable memoir on the Arctic Regions.

[194]The rate of progress in the recently so popular Glacial Period question was strikingly slow. Already Venetz in 1821 and Esmarck in 1823 had explained the erratic phenomena by the glaciation of Europe. Agassiz came forth with the glaciation of the Alps, the Jura mountains, and Scotland, about 1840; and five years later, Guyot had published his maps of the routes followed by Alpine boulders. But forty-two years elapsed after Venetz wrote before one geologist of mark (Lyell) dared timidly to accept his theory, even to a limited extent—the most interesting fact being that Guyot’s maps, considered as irrelevant in 1845, were recognised as conclusive after 1863. Even now—more than half a century after Agassiz’s first work—Agassiz’s views are not yet either refuted or generally accepted. So also Forbes’s views upon the plasticity of ice. Let me add, by the way, that the whole polemics as to the viscosity of ice is a striking instance of how facts, scientific terms, and experimental methods quite familiar to building engineers, were ignored by those who took part in the polemics. If these facts, terms and methods were taken into account, the polemics would not have raged for years with no result. Like instances, to show how science suffers from a want of acquaintance with facts and methods of experimenting both well known to engineers, florists, cattle-breeders, and so on, could be produced in numbers.

[195]Chemistry is, to a great extent, an exception to the rule. Is it not because the chemist is to such an extent a manual worker? Besides, during the last ten years we see a decided revival in scientific inventiveness, especially in physics—that is, in a branch in which the engineer and the man of science meet so much together.

[196]I leave on purpose these lines as they were in the first edition. All these desiderata are already accomplished facts.

[197]The same remark ought to be made as regards the sociologists, and still more so the economists. What are most of them, including the socialists, doing, but studying chiefly the books previously written and the systems, instead of studying thefactsof the economical life of the nations, and the thousands of attempts at giving to agriculture and industry new forms of organisation and new methods, which are now made everywhere in Europe and America?

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