Adaptation comes through the habit-forming experiences of stimulus and response. The very process of adaptation, therefore, tends toward fixity and to destroy adaptability. It is thus the task of education, as it is of life, to replace the native, inexperienced and physiological plasticity of youth with some product of experience which shall be able to revise habits in the interest of new situations. The adaptability of the experienced person must be psychical and acquired. It must be in the realm of appreciation, attitude, choice, self-direction—a realm superior to habit.
In this human task of securing adaptation and retaining adaptiveness the life sciences have high rank. In addition to furnishing the very conception itself that we have been trying to phrase, they give illustrations of all the historic occasions, kinds, and modes of adaptation; in lacking the exactness of the mathematical and physical sciences they furnish precisely the degree of uncertainty and openness of opportunity and of mental state which the act of living itself demands. In other words the science of life is, if properly presented, the most normal possible introduction to the very practical art of living. Because of the parallel meaning of education and life in securing progressive adaptation to the essential influential forces of the universe, an appreciative study of biology introduces directly to the purposes and methods of human education.
Chief Aims of Biology as a College Subject
Why study biology in college?
While students differ in the details of their purposes in life, all must learn to make the broad adjustments to the physical conditions of life; to the problems of food and nutrition; to other organisms, helpful and hurtful; to the internal impulses, tendencies, and appetites; to the various necessary human contacts and relations; to the great body of knowledge important to life, which human beings have got together; to the prevailing philosophical interpretations of the universe and of life; and to the pragmatic organizations, conventions, and controls which human society has instituted. In addition to these, some students of biology are going into various careers, each demanding special adjustments which biology may aid notably. Such are medicine and its related specialties, professional agricultural courses, and biological research of all kinds.
An extended examination of college catalogs shows some consciousness of these facts on the part of teachers of biology. The following needs are formally recognized in the prospectuses: (1) The disciplinary and cultural needs of the general student; (2) the needs of those preparing for medicine or other professional courses; and (3) the needs of the people proposing to specialize in botany and zoölogy. These aims are usually mentioned in the order given here; but an examination of the character of the courses often reveals the fact that the actual organization of the department is determined by an exact reversal of this order,—that most of the attention is given, even in the beginning courses, to the task of preparing students to take advanced work in the subject. The theory of the departments is usually better than their practice.
In what follows these are the underlying assumptions,—which seem without need of argument: (1) The general human needs should have the first place in organizing the courses in biology; (2) the introductory courses should not be constructed primarily as the first round in the ladder of biological or professional specialization, but for the general purposes of human life; (3) the preparation needed by teachers of biology for secondary schools is more nearly like that needful for the general student than that suited to the specialist in the subject; and (4) the later courses may more and more be concerned with the special ends of professional and vocational preparation.
General Aims of Biology in Education
What are the general adaptive contributions of biology to human nature? What are the results in the individual which biology should aim to bring to every student? There are four classes of personal possessions, important in human adaptation, to which biology ministers in a conspicuous way: information and knowledge; ability and skills; habits; and attitudes, appreciations, and ideals. These four universal aims of education are doubtless closely related and actually inseparable, but it is worth while to consider them apart for the sake of clearness.