Education

Ragged School.

Again, there is a fallacy about Examiners. It is commonly supposed that any one who knows a subject is competent to teach it; and no one seems to doubt that any one who knows a subject is competent to examine in it. I believe both these opinions to be serious mistakes … Examination is an Art, and a difficult one, which has to be learned like all other arts.
— Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895), ‘Universities: Actual and Ideal’, 1874, quoted in Cyril Bibby (ed.) The Essence of T. H. Huxley, Macmillan, 1967, 225.

Speak to the Earth and it will teach thee.
— Holy Bible, Old Testament, Job, 12:8.

Contrast this situation with that in at least the contemporary natural sciences. In these fields the student relies mainly on textbooks until, in his third or fourth year of graduate work, he begins his own research. Many science curricula do not ask even graduate students to read in works not written specially for students…Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible. Given the confidence in their paradigms, which makes this educational technique possible, few scientists would wish to change it.
— Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, 1970, 165.

I told a seemingly sane man that I got my artistic education on the Bowery, and he said ‘Oh, really? So they have a school of fine arts there?’
— Stephen Crane (1870 – 1900) to James Huneker, quoted in Alfred Kazin, An American Procession, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.
— Shirley Hazzard, Coming of Age in Australia, Boyer Lectures, 1984, ABC Books, 1985.

I do not propose to differentiate between Botany and Zoology in this matter, for the distinction is arbitrary. It does not represent anything more than a convenient subdivision of the science of living things.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

My schoolmaster had been a little too crude in his instructions. He had not been a scientific man, but only a teacher of science.
— H. G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866 – 1946), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Heinemann, 1932.

As a schoolboy in London I learnt how sulphuric acid is manufactured, how time is measured at Greenwich, how soap is made, and how glass is blown — entirely from the teacher or the book, although all of these could have been seen at first hand within half an hour of the school. Adam saw the animals in the garden before he named them, but we (as Whitehead has said) named them before we saw them.
— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

The true aim of the teacher must be to impart an appreciation of method and not a knowledge of facts. This is far more readily achieved by concentrating the student’s attention on a small range of phenomena, than by leading him in a rapid and superficial survey over wide fields of knowledge. Personally, I have no recollection of at least 90 per cent of the facts that were taught to me at school, but the notions of method which I derived from my instructor in Greek grammar (the contents of which I have long since forgotten) remain in my mind as the really valuable part of my school equipment for life.
— Karl Pearson (1857 – 1936), The Grammar of Science, Everyman edition, 12n.

I find not any science that doth fitly or properly pertain to the imagination.
— Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning, second book, XI, 3, 1605.

Its so-called equipment is dirty and disorderly beyond description. Its outfit in anatomy consists of a small box of bones and the dried-up, filthy fragments of a single cadaver. A cold and rusty incubator, a single microscope, … and no access to the County Hospital. The school is a disgrace to the state whose laws permit it to exist.
— Abraham Flexner (1866 – 1959), Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), 190, quoted in Blaine Worthen and James Sanders, Educational Evaluation, New York: Longman, 1987, 101.

One wet day, in a Dyak house, when a number of boys and young men were about me, I thought to amuse them with something new, and showed them how to make ‘cat’s cradle’ with a piece of string. Greatly to my surprise, they knew all about it, and more than I did …
— Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), The Malay Archipelago (1869), 68.

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