NATURALISTIC STUDIES IN THE EDUCATION OF THE CITIZEN III

is now faced. One is failure to anticipate the dire penalties we
may pay for the misuse of science. Complacent acceptance of
its prostitution to destructive ends and ignorance of the con-
structive alternatives which existing knowledge places at our
disposal will have disastrous consequences for all of us, if the
helplessness and horror of modern war is canalized in a revolt
against science, a repudiation of the benefits which science can
confer and a retreat to a lower level of civilized living.

In contradistinction to purely static emphasis on the place of
science in everyday life to-day, education for citizenship demands
a knowledge of how science is misused, how we fail to make the
fullest use of science for our social well-being, and, in short, a
vision of what human life could be if we planned all our resources
intelligently. It calls for understanding of the way in which social
agencies foster new discoveries and their useful application. In
addition it must reinforce confidence in rational endeavour by
emphasizing the role of advancing scientific knowledge in the
growth of social institutions. This aspect of the cultural claims
of science is perhaps least often stated, and there is a peculiar
need to state it at the present time. A growing disposition among
the adolescent generation to rate rational persuasion and educa-
tional methods as exploded liberal superstitions compels us to
ask whether western democracy has devised an educational
system capable of ensuring its own continuance.

The content of the present curriculum of humanistic studies
discloses a sufficiently obvious reason for failure. The teaching
of history presents the record of human life as a babel of emo-
tional phrase-making and a panorama of commercial under-
takings to the success or failure of which technical progress makes
no explicit contribution. If he discusses why the Great Naviga-
tions took place when they did, the last thing which the historian
generally thinks of asking is what kind of knowledge is needed
to steer cargoes over long-distance westerly courses. There are, to
be sure, honourable exceptions such as Professor Clark of Oxford.
Unfortunately, his interests are not shared by his colleagues,
many of whom seem lately to have gravitated away from