A great deal more might be said of the progress of sciences in Catholic colleges, for instance, that a number of colleges have recently installed seismographs for studying earthquakes and similar phenomena. Others are now applying themselves more seriously to astronomy and meteorology. It is apparent that quite a few have now up-to-date engineering schools.

While commending progress in the sciences and studying the details connected therewith, this Department would not like to influence colleges to go to large expense on account of the sciences until conditions and requirements have been studied well. There is no denying the fact that considerable money is needed to fit up laboratories and to equip them with apparatus. there is the added expense of consumption of materials and more or less breakage, especially in chemistry. It would seem doubtful if the sciences can as a rule be put on a paying basis, that is, made to pay for themselves. Where outside professors must be called in, the salaries usually eat up all the tuition and fees apportioned to the scientific department and indeed require much more. Hence there is a great deal of wisdom in those institutions which are progressing slowly but surely in the sciences, adding apparatus now and then as it is secured by donations from persons who are willing to encourage Catholic institutions.

To introduce sciences without getting the best text-books and outlining solid courses of study to be taught by well prepare professors is folly. The time will be wasted. It would be a thousand times better to keep the students writing Latin sentences than to have them taught botany or zoology by one who is unfamiliar with the microscope or the dissecting knife.

SOME DEFECTS IN HIGH SCHOOL CHEMISTRY

AND THEIR SUGGESTED REMEDY

REV. JOSEPH A. MAGUIRE, C. S. C., UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME, NOTRE DAME, IND.

The teaching of high school chemistry like the teaching of all high school sciences is a great and live question to-day and is engrossing the minds of educators. They are trying their best to place these comparatively new subjects and harmonize them with modern conditions in education that they may best serve the needs of the coming generation. I do not hope to say anything new on the subject; all I hope to do is to help point out again some of the defects in the teaching of chemistry in the high schools and suggest some improvement.

We know that all education is for the development of the intellect and the heart, that the boy or girl may have greater power of thought, a stronger grasp of things intellectual, a broader mental vision, that the view of life and its problems may be larger and more sympathetic and that through this greater knowledge the soul may learn to know the workings of the Creator and so comprehend more fully the Creator Himself-that, in the words of the catechism, it may know, love and serve God on earth and be happy with Him in the world to come. Education is not so much for the storing of bare facts; that is not education. Unless studies teach boys and girls more of themselves and their duties towards God and man, they are useless. All of us have gotten bravely over most of our geography, trigonometry and chemistry, but that does not mean that these studies were useless in our lives. If they were rightly studied and rightly taught they have left their indelible mark on our minds and have given us what they could and should of increased mental power. I am not minimizing the purely informational side of education, especially where chemistry is concerned, for

modern life is so interwoven with chemical facts and phenomena that a study of it for its information is or should be a great help. But it must not be allowed to obscure the first reason of education, which is the complete training of the whole being.

And this brings us to the first problem-what should be the aim and scope of chemistry if it is to serve the ends of true education? This may seem an easy question to answer, but the more it is considered the harder it appears. The course of chemistry in high school is like the course of true love-it does not run smoothly. It has been carrying or trying to carry too great a burden. Being an obliging subject, it has endeavored to please everybody with the consequence that it has offended many. With the colleges on one side demanding a certain modicum of chemical knowledge from the prospective freshman before they will consider giving him any credit for work done, and the high school teachers who are divided on just what ought to constitute a high school course in chemistry, the science has been having as hard a time as the man who was saved from shipwreck only to find himself a possible soup-bone for a cannibal surprise party. In the meantime the pupil has been playing the role of Oliver Twist.

I think I may say that the shadow of the college has been the bane of high school chemistry just as it has been of other sciences. In spite of the fact that scarcely five per cent. of all high school pupils go to college and a small percentage of these take courses requiring chemistry, the high school has been shaping its courses on the demands of the college whether they were best for the student or not. Instead of teachers studying their pupils and trying to find out what each needs, they put them through a course of sprouts to fit them to pass college entrance examinations with the result that the boy or girl leaves high school with a hazy idea that chemistry is, as I once heard it defined, a science of loud noises and offensive smells. Not one iota has its study added to the mental growth of the pupil. The facts that have been fed to the helpless student are soon happily forgotten, and as far as chemistry is concerned the child recovers safely and is immune forever after. This is surely not just to the high school pupil nor is it reasonable, for the

work demanded by the college is not always best suited for those who are not able to go to college or do not care to do so. The work should be outlined for the majority.

But I hear some teachers say, what else can we do? Our school is affiliated with such and such a college and we must fit our pupils to pass the entrance examinations else we shall be discredited. The only answer I can give to that is that the sooner the college and high school teachers get together and settle the question the sooner will the pupil get his rights. And goodness knows as far as chemistry is concerned there is a great need of such a harmony meeting, for almost all the larger colleges and universities "pooh pooh" the chemistry taught in high schools. In a recent article in School Science and Mathematics Professor H. L. Geesling, of the Elgin High School, tells us the result of his query to certain colleges regarding this question of credit in high school chemistry. His experience coincides with my own gathered from having personally talked with college teachers or listened to them expressing their opinions publicly. Chicago, Illinois, Wisconsin, among others, do not accept chemistry as taught in high schools. They say it is not taught rightly and therefore must be gone over again. Some of these colleges make a slight concession by shortening by a brief period the usual college course when chemistry has been taken. in the high school, others by adding on a little more advanced work. But none of them give full credit for the work done in the high school. Now this should not be, for it is a waste of time and we have no more right to waste the time of the pupil than he has to waste ours.

And really the college professors are not so much to blame after all. For when you consider the various opinions of teachers of chemistry in high schools you begin to see that there is not any fixed thing called high school chemistry, but that each teacher has an opinion of his own as to what should be taught, and proceeds to teach it. I venture to say that were you to ask twenty-five high school teachers their opinion of what should constitute a course in high school chemistry you would get twentysix different answers. One will say that he believes in accentuating theory, another industrial applications, another descrip

tive work, another laboratory and so on. How then can the dean of chemistry in a college know what to do except make the young freshman the goat and let him repeat his course for safety's sake. Nor am I blaming the high school teacher for his attitude towards chemistry. He has a hard task, for the scierce is only in its youth. It is growing so fast and its point of view changing so often that it is hard to keep within limits and say what is or what is not essential. The method of yesterday is obsolete to-day and the students who come to him this year have different aims from those of a year ago. Modern life has become so complex, its demands so numerous, that it is almost impossible to shape educational work in the high schools to suit all.

This brings me to another point. The high school pupil is expected to learn too much. We are really giving him mental liver complaint from too much gorging with too little digestion. We want him to be a year one alchemist and a nineteen thirteen chemical prodigy. Now there are only six or seven hours in the day and about thirty-six weeks in the school year, therefore he must stop somewhere. Moreover, he is not a Lavoisier, or a Ramsay, or an Ostwald. His mental faculties are just budding and he cannot see relations and depths that an older mind can. And so with scattered energies he rushes through his high school chemistry and succeeds in coming out unhampered but not unharmed. If he has not lost the power of concentration he is a lucky boy. Why should it be necessary to cover the whole subject of chemistry any more than to learn from the beginning of algebra to the end of the calculus? No one is foolish enough to demand this amount of knowledge of the high school pupil in mathematics. Then why should it be required in chemistry? High school chemistry is not expected to make finished analysts or technical chemists and yet judging from some of the courses outlined this is just what is intended. Why give the smallest details of manufacturing processes when even an advanced student must visit a factory in order to understand the steps? Why insist on some of the more difficult theories when even our leaders are still discussing them? The high school is no place for such. If the pupil gets the foundation, learns how the science develops, gets a grip on certain chemical facts, his high school