Teachers, Leaders, and Schools: Essays by John Dewey

Science as Subject-Matter and as Method (1910)

Science as Subject-Matter and as Method (1910) ONE WHO, LIKE MYSELF, CLAIMS no expertness in any branch of natural science can undertake to discuss the teaching of science only at some risk of presumption. At present, however, the gap between those who are scientific specialists and those who are interested in science on account of its significance in life, that is to say, on account of its educational significance, is very great. Therefore I see no other way of promoting that mutual understanding so requisite for educational progress than for all of us frankly to state our own convictions, even if thereby we betray our limitations and trespass where we have no rights save by courtesy. I suppose that I may assume that all who are much interested in securing for the sciences the place that belongs to them in education feel a certain amount of disappointment at the results hitherto attained. The glowing predictions made respecting them have been somewhat chilled by the event. Of course, this relative shortcoming is due in part to the unwillingness of the custodians of educational traditions and ideals to give scientific studies a fair show. Yet in view of the relatively equal opportunity accorded to science to-day compared with its status two generations ago, this cause alone does not explain the unsatisfactory outcome. Considering the opportunities, students have not flocked to the study of science in the numbers predicted, nor has science modified the spirit and purport of all education in a degree commensurate with the claims made for it. The causes for this result are many and complex. I make no pretense of doing more than singling out what seems to me one influential cause, the remedy for which most lies with scientific men themselves. I mean that science has been taught too much as an accumulation of ready-made material with which students are 99 First published in Science, n.s. 31 (1910): 121–27, from an address of the vice-president and chairman of Section L, Education, American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, Boston, 29 December 1909. 100 The School Curriculum to be made familiar, not enough as a method of thinking, an attitude of mind, after the pattern of which mental habits are to be transformed. Among the adherents of a literary education who have contended against the claims of science, Matthew Arnold has, I think, been most discreetly reasonable. He freely admitted the need of men knowing something, knowing a good deal, about the natural conditions of their own lives. Since, so to say, men have to breathe air, it is advisable that they should know something of the constitution of air and of the mechanism of the lungs. Moreover, since the sciences have been developed by human beings, an important part of humanistic culture, of knowing the best that men have said and thought, consists in becoming acquainted with the contributions of the great historic leaders of science. These concessions made, Matthew Arnold insisted that the important thing, the indispensable thing in education, is to become acquainted with human life itself, its art, its literature, its politics, the fluctuations of its career. Such knowledge, he contended, touches more closely our offices and responsibilities as human beings, since these, after all, are to human beings and not to physical things. Such knowledge, moreover, lays hold of the emotions and the imagination and modifies character, while knowledge about things remains an inert possession of speculative intelligence. Those who believe, nevertheless, that the sciences have a part to play in education equal—at the least—to that of literature and language, have perhaps something to learn from this contention. If we regard science and literary culture as just so much subject-matter, is not Mr. Arnold’s contention essentially just? Conceived from this standpoint, knowledge of human affairs couched in personal terms seems more important and more intimately appealing than knowledge of physical things conveyed in impersonal terms. One might well object to Arnold that he ignored the place of natural forces and conditions in human life and thereby created an impossible dualism. But it would not be easy to deny that knowledge of Thermopylae knits itself more readily into the body of emotional images that stir men to action than does the formula for the acceleration of a flying arrow; or that Burns’s poem on the daisy enters more urgently and compellingly into the moving vision of life than does information regarding the...