From that time the world may be said to have belonged to science, now no longer based merely on observation but on experiment. But, alas! how slowly has it percolated into our universities.
The first organized endeavor to teach science in schools was naturally made in Germany (Prussia), where, in 1747 (nearly a century and a half ago), Realschulen were first started; they were taken over by the Government in 1832, and completely reorganized in 1859, this step being demanded by the growth of industry and the spread of the modern spirit. Eleven hours a week were given to natural science in these schools forty years ago.
Teaching the Teachers.—Until the year 1762 the Jesuits had the education of France almost entirely in their hands, and when, therefore, their expulsion was decreed in that year, it was only a necessary step to create an institution to teach the future teachers of France. Here, then, we had the École Normale in theory; but it was a long time before this theory was carried into practice, and very probably it would never have been had not Rolland d'Erceville made it his duty for more than twenty years, by numerous publications, among which is especially to be mentioned his Plan d'Education, printed in 1783, to point out not merely the utility but the absolute necessity for some institution of the kind. As generally happens in such cases, this exertion was not lost, for in 1794 it was decreed that an École Normale should be opened at Paris, "ou seront appelés de toutes les parties de la République, des citoyens déjà instruits dans les sciences utiles, pour apprendre, sous les professeurs les plus habiles dans tous les genres, l'art d'enseigner."
To follow these courses in the art of teaching, one potential schoolmaster was to be sent to Paris by every district containing twenty thousand inhabitants. Fourteen or fifteen hundred young men therefore arrived in Paris, and in 1795 the courses of the school were opened first of all in the amphitheater of the Museum of Natural History. The professors were chosen from among the most celebrated men of France, the sciences being represented by Lagrange, Laplace, Haüry, Monge, Daubenton, and Berthollet.
While there was this enormous progress abroad, represented especially by the teaching of science in Germany and the teaching of the teachers in France, things slumbered and slept in Britain. We had our coal and our iron, our material capital, and no one troubled about our mental capital, least of all the universities, which had become, according to Matthew Arnold (who was not likely to overstate matters), mere hauts lycées, and "had lost the very idea of a real university";[43] and since our political leaders generally came from the universities, little more was to be expected from them.
Many who have attempted to deal with the history of education have failed to give sufficient prominence to the tremendous difference there must necessarily have been in scientific requirements before and after the introduction of steam power.
It is to the discredit of our country that we, who gave the perfected steam engine, the iron ship, and the locomotive to the world, should have been the last to feel the next wave of intellectual progress.
All we did at the beginning of the century was to found mechanics' institutions. They knew better in Prussia, "a bleeding and lacerated mass";[44] after Jena (1806), King Frederick William III and his councilors, disciples of Kant, founded the University of Berlin, "to supply the loss of territory by intellectual effort." Among the universal poverty money was found for the Universities of Königsberg and Breslau, and Bonn was founded in 1818. As a result of this policy, carried on persistently and continuously by successive ministers, aided by wise councilors, many of them the products of this policy, such a state of things was brought about that not many years ago M. Ferdinand Lot, one of the most distinguished educationists of France, accorded to Germany "a supremacy in science comparable to the supremacy of England at sea."
But this position has not been obtained merely by founding new universities. To Germany we owe the perfecting of the methods of teaching science.
I have shown that it was in Germany that we find the first organized science teaching in schools. About the year 1825 that country made another tremendous stride. Liebig demonstrated that science teaching, to be of value, whether in the school or the university, must consist to a greater or less extent in practical work, and the more the better; that book work was next to useless.