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What Kind of Education?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Gavin Ardley
Affiliation:
University of Auckland, New Zealand

Extract

The old controversy between the classical education in the humanities and the modern kind of education in the sciences is frequently before us in these times. Russia is rapidly gaining ascendancy in scientific achievement; England and the United States of America are urged to meet the challenge by increasing the pressure of a scientific training for all capable of it. Is such a policy really desirable? From one point of view it might seem merely a matter of changing the subjects to be studied at school and university. Instead of the talented youth reading Plato and Thucydides, he is to be directed to the Infini-tesimal Calculus and the Quantum Theory of Radiation. The former studies, the argument would run, are agreeable but barren; the latter are austere but fruitful.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1960

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References

page 155 note 1 The only exception to this dictum is in astronomy. There we observe a strong element of regularity in the natural state. Astronomy needed no Galilean revolution to be an exact science, and has in fact been so since the earliest times.