Einstein, the searcher

by Alexander Moszkowski

"Do you attach greater importance to the technique itself or to the feeling of social relationship with the broad masses of the people which it engenders?"

"Both factors are equally important to me," said Einstein, "and others become added to these which help to justify my wish in this respect. The handiwork need not be used as a means of earning money by the pupil of the secondary school, but it will enlarge and make more solid the foundation on which he will rest as an ethical being. In the first place, the school is not to produce future officials, scholars, lecturers, barristers, and authors, but human beings, not merely mental machines. Prometheus did not begin his education of mankind with astronomy, but by teaching the properties of fire and its practical uses...."

"This brings to my mind another analogy," I continued, "namely, that of the old Meistersinger, who were, all of them, expert smiths, tinkers, or shoemakers, and yet succeeded in building a bridge to the arts. And at bottom, the sciences, too, belong to the category of free arts. Yet, a difficulty seems to me to arise. In demanding a compulsory handicraft, you lay stress on practical use, whereas in your other remarks you declared science in itself as being utterly independent of practice."

"I do this," replied Einstein, "only when I speak of the ultimate aims of pure research, that is, of aims that are visible to only a vanishing minority. It would be a complete misconception of life to uphold this point of view and to expect its regulative effectiveness in cases in which we are dealing only with the preliminaries of science. On the contrary, I maintain that science can be taught much more practically at schools than it is at present when bookwork has the upper hand. For example, to return to the question of mathematical teaching: it seems to me to be almost universally at fault, if only for the reason that it is not built up on what is practically interesting, what appeals directly to the senses, and what can be seized intuitively. Child-minds are fed with definitions instead of being presented with what they can grasp, and they are expected to be able to understand purely conceptual things, although they have had no opportunity given them of arriving at the abstract by way of concrete things. It is very easy to do the latter. The first beginnings should not be taught in the schoolroom at all, but in open Nature. A boy should be shown how a meadow is measured and compared with another. His attention must be directed to the height of a tower, to the length of his shadow at various times, to the corresponding altitude of the sun; by this means he will grasp the mathematical relationships much more rapidly, more surely, and with greater zeal, than if words and chalk-marks are used to instil into him the conceptions of dimensions, of angles, or perchance of some trigonometrical function. What is the actual origin of such branches of science? They are derived from practice, as, for example, when Thales first measured the height of the pyramids with the help of a short rod, which he set up at the ultimate point of the pyramid's shadow. Place a stick in the boy's hand and lead him on to make experiments with it by way of a game, and if he is not quite devoid of sense, he will discover the thing for himself. It will please him to have discovered the height of the tower without having climbed it, and this is the first thrill of the pleasure which he feels later when he learns the geometry of similar triangles and the proportionality of their sides."

"In the matter of physics," pursued Einstein, "the first lessons should contain nothing but what is experimental and interesting to see. A pretty experiment is in itself often more valuable than twenty formulæ extracted from our minds; it is particularly important that a young mind that has yet to find its way about in the world of phenomena should be spared from formulæ altogether. In his physics they play exactly the same weird and fearful part as the figures of dates in Universal History. If the experimenter is ingenious and expert, this subject may be begun as early as in the middle forms, and one may then count on a responsiveness that is rarely observable during the hours of exercise in Latin grammar."

"This leads me," said Einstein, "to speak in this connexion of a means of education that has so far been used only by way of trial in class-teaching, but from an improved application of which I expect fruitful results later. I mean the school cinema. The triumphal march of the cinematograph will be continued into pedagogic regions, and here it will have a chance to make good its wrongs in thousands of picture shows in showing absurd, immoral, and melodramatic subjects. By means of the school-film, supplemented by a simple apparatus for projection, it would be possible firstly to infuse into certain subjects, such as geography, which is at present wound off organ-like in the form of dead descriptions, the pulsating life of a metropolis. And the lines on a map will gain an entirely new complexion in the eyes of the pupil, if he learns, as if during a voyage, what they actually include, and what is to be read between them. An abundance of information is imparted by the film, too, if it gives an accelerated or retarded view of such things as a plant growing, an animal's heart beating, or the wing of an insect moving. The cinema seems to me to have a still more important function in giving pupils an insight into the most important branches of technical industry, a knowledge of which should become common property. Very few hours would suffice to impress permanently on the schoolboy's mind how a power-station, a locomotive, a newspaper, a book, or a coloured illustration is produced, or what takes place in an electrical plant, a glass factory, or a gasworks. And, to return to natural science, many of the rather difficult experiments that cannot be shown by means of school apparatus may be shown with almost as great clearness on a film. Taken all in all, the redeeming word in school-teaching is, for me: an increased appeal to the senses. Wherever it is possible, learning must become living, and this principle will predominate in future reforms of school-teaching."

* * * * * * * *

University study was only touched on lightly during this talk. It has become known that Einstein is a very strong supporter of the principle of free learning, and that he would prefer to dispense entirely with the regular documents of admission which qualify holders to attend lecture courses. This is to be interpreted as meaning that as soon as anyone desirous of furthering his studies has demonstrated his fitness to follow the lecturer's reasoning by showing his ability in class exercises or in the laboratory, he should be admitted immediately. Einstein would not demand the usual certificate of "general education," but only of fitness for the special subject, particularly as, in his own experience, he has frequently found the cleverest people and those with the most definite aims to be prone to one-sidedness. According to this, even the intermediate schools should be authorized to bestow a certificate of fitness to enter on a course in a single definite subject as soon as the pupil has proved himself to have the necessary ability. If he earlier spoke in favour of abolishing the matriculation examination, this is only an indication of his effort to burst open the portals of higher education for every one. Nevertheless, I remarked that, in the course of university work itself, he is not in favour of giving up all regulation concerning the ability of the student—at least, not in the case of those who intend to devote themselves to instruction later. He does not desire an intermediate examination (in the nature of the tentamen physicum of doctors), but he considers it profitable for the future schoolmaster to have an opportunity early in his course to prove his fitness for teaching. In this matter, too, Einstein reveals his affectionate interest in the younger generation, whose development is threatened by nothing so much as by incapable teachers: the sum of these considerations is that the pupil is examined as little as possible, but the teacher so much the more closely. A candidate for the teaching profession, who in the early stages of his academic career fails to show his fitness, his individual facultas docendi, should be removed from the university.

There can be no doubt but that Einstein has a claim to be heard as an authority on these questions. There are few in the realm of the learned in whose faces it is so clearly manifest that they are called to excite a desire for knowledge by means of the living word, and to satisfy this desire. If great audiences assemble around him, if so many foreign academies open their arms to him to make him their own, these are not only signs of a magnetic influence that emanates from the famous discoverer, but they are indications that he is far famed as a teacher with a captivating personality. Let us consider what this signifies in his profession. Philosophers, historians, lawyers, doctors, and theologians have at their disposal innumerable words which they merely need to pronounce to get into immediate contact with their audiences. In Einstein's profession, theoretical physics, man disappears; it leaves no scope for the play of emotion; its implement mathematics—and what an instrument it is!—bristles with formal difficulties, which can be overcome only by means of symbols and by using a language which has no means of displaying eloquence, being devoid of expression, emotion, and regular periods. Yet here we have a physicist, a mathematician, whose first word throws a charm over a great crowd of people, and who extracts from their minds, so to speak, what, in reality, he alone works out before them. He does not adhere closely to written pages, nor to a scheme which has been prepared beforehand in all its details; he develops his subject freely, without the slightest attempt at rhetoric, but with an effect which comes of itself when the audience feels itself swept along by the current. He does not need to deliver his words passionately, as his passion for teaching is so manifest. Even in regions of thought in which usually only formulæ, like glaciers, give an indication of the height, he discovers similes and illustrations with a human appeal, by the aid of which he helps many a one to conquer the mountain sickness of mathematics. His lectures betray two factors that are rarely found present in investigators of abstract subjects; they are temperament and geniality. He never talks as if in a monologue or as if addressing empty space. He always speaks like one who is weaving threads of some idea, and these become spun out in a fascinating way that robs the audience of the sense of time. We all know that no iron curtain marks the close of Einstein's lecture; anyone who is tormented by some difficulty or doubt, or who desires illumination on some point, or has missed some part of the argument, is at liberty to question him. Moreover, Einstein stands firm through the storm of all questions. On the very day on which the above conversation took place he had come straight from a lecture on four-dimensional space, at the conclusion of which a tempest of questions had raged about him. He spoke of it not as of an ordeal that he had survived, but as of a refreshing shower. And such delights abound in his teaching career.

* * * * * * * *