Bill's School and Mine: A Collection of Essays on Education

by William S. Franklin

In spanische Stiefeln eingeschnuert."

In a recent article [4] on the distinction between the liberal and technical in education, my friend and colleague, Professor Percy Hughes, says that in speaking of an education as liberal we thereby associate it with liberalism in politics, in philosophy and theology, and in men's personal relations with each other. In each case liberalism seems fundamentally, to denote freedom, and liberalism in education is the freedom of development in each individual of that character and personality which is his true nature. All this I accept in the spirit of an optimist, assuming men's true natures to be good, but I do not, and I am sure that Professor Hughes does not, consider that technical education, unless it be inexcusably harsh and narrow, is illiberal; nor that liberal education, unless it be inexcusably soft and vague, is wholly non-technical. The liberal and the technical are not two kinds of education, each complete in itself. Indeed, Professor Hughes speaks of liberal education, not as a category, but as a condition which makes for freedom of development of personality and character.

It seems to me, however, that there are phases of education which have but little to do with personality, and I call to your attention this definition of liberalism in education, in order that I may turn sharply away from it as a partial definition which, to a great extent, excludes the physical sciences. Indeed, I wish to speak of a condition in education which is the antithesis of freedom. I wish to explain the teaching of elementary physical science as a mode of constraint, as an impressed constructive discipline without which no freedom is possible in our dealings with physical things. I wish to characterize the study of elementary physical science as a reorganization of the workaday mind of a young man as complete as the pupation of an insect; and I wish to emphasize the necessity of exacting constraint as the essential condition of this reorganization.

There is a kind of salamander, the axolotl, which lives a tadpole-like youth and never changes to the adult form unless a stress of dry weather annihilates his watery world; but he lives always and reproduces his kind as a tadpole, and a very funny-looking tadpole he is, with his lungs hanging like feathery tassels from the sides of his head. When the aquatic home of the axolotl dries up, he quickly develops a pair of internal lungs, lops off his tassels and embarks on a new mode of life on land. So it is with our young men who are to develop beyond the tadpole stage, they must meet with quick and responsive inward growth that new and increasing "stress of dryness," as many are wont to call our modern age of science and organized industry.

Stress of dryness! Indeed no flow of humor is to be found in the detached impersonalities of the sciences, and if we are to understand the characteristics of physical science we must turn our attention to things which lead inevitably to an exacting and rigid mathematical philosophy. It certainly is presumptive to tell a reader that he must turn his attention to such a thing, but there is no other way; the best we can do is to choose the simplest path. Let us therefore consider the familiar phenomena of motion.

The most prominent aspect of all phenomena is motion. In that realm of nature which is not of man's devising [5] motion is universal. In the other realm of nature, the realm of things devised, motion is no less prominent. Every purpose of our practical life is accomplished by movements of the body and by directed movements of tools and mechanisms, such as the swing of scythe and flail, and the studied movements of planer and lathe from which are evolved the strong-armed steam shovel and the deft-fingered loom.

The laws of motion. Every one has a sense of the absurdity of the idea of reducing the more complicated phenomena of nature to an orderly system of mechanical law. To speak of motion is to call to mind first of all the phenomena that are associated with the excessively complicated, incessantly changing, turbulent and tumbling motion of wind and water. These phenomena have always had the most insistent appeal to us, they have confronted us everywhere and always, and life is an unending contest with their fortuitous diversity, which rises only too often to irresistible sweeps of destruction in fire and flood, and in irresistible crash of collision and collapse where all things mingle in one dread fluid confusion! The laws of motion! Consider the awful complexity of a disastrous tornado or the dreadful confusion of a railway wreck, and understand that what we call the laws of motion, although they have a great deal to do with the ways in which we think, have very little to do with the phenomena of nature. The laws of motion! There is indeed a touch of arrogance in such a phrase with its unwarranted suggestion of completeness and universality, and yet the ideas which constitute the laws of motion have an almost unlimited extent of legitimate range, and these ideas must be possessed with a perfect precision if one is to acquire any solid knowledge whatever of the phenomena of motion. The necessity of precise ideas. Herein lies the impossibility of compromise and the necessity of coercion and constraint; one must think so and so, there is no other way. And yet there is always a conflict in the mind of even the most willing student because of the constraint which precise ideas place upon our vivid and primitively adequate sense of physical things; and this conflict is perennial but it is by no means a one-sided conflict between mere crudity and refinement, for refinement ignores many things. Indeed, precise ideas not only help to form [6] our sense of the world in which we live but they inhibit sense as well, and their rigid and unchallenged rule would be indeed a stress of dryness.

The laws of motion. We return again and yet again to the subject, for one is not to be deterred therefrom by any concession of inadequacy, no, nor by any degree of respect for the vivid youthful sense of those things which to suit our narrow purpose must be stripped completely bare. It is unfortunate, however, that the most familiar type of motion, the flowing of water or the blowing of the wind, is bewilderingly useless as a basis for the establishment of the simple and precise ideas which are called the "laws of motion," and which are the most important of the fundamental principles of physics. These ideas have in fact grown out of the study of the simple phenomena which are associated with the motion of bodies in bulk without perceptible change of form, the motion of rigid bodies, so called.

Before narrowing down the scope of the discussion, however, let us illustrate a very general application of the simplest idea of motion, the idea of velocity. Every one has, no doubt, an idea of what is meant by the velocity of the wind; and a sailor, having what he calls a ten-knot wind, knows that he can manage his boat with a certain spread of canvas and that he can accomplish a certain portion of his voyage in a given time; but an experienced sailor, although he speaks glibly of a ten-knot wind, belies his speech by taking wise precaution against every conceivable emergency. He knows that a ten-knot wind is by no means a sure or a simple thing with its incessant blasts and whirls; and a sensitive anemometer, having more regard for minutiae than any sailor, usually registers in every wind a number of almost complete but excessively irregular stops and starts every minute and variations of direction that sweep around half the horizon!

Wer will was Lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben