|
SAT Reading Comprehension Test 1 10 mins - 7 questions The extract is taken from a book written sixty years ago by a British scientist in which he considers the relationship between science and society. The pioneers of the teaching of science imagined that itsintroduction into education would remove the conventionality,artificiality, and backward-lookingness which were characteristic;of classical studies, but they were gravely disappointed. So, too, in5 their time had the humanists thought that the study of the classical authors in the original would banish at once the dull pedantry andsuperstition of mediaeval scholasticism. The professional schoolmaster was a match for both of them, and has almost managed to make the understanding of chemical reactions as dull 10 and as dogmatic an affair as the reading of Virgils Aeneid. The chief claim for the use of science in education is that it teaches a child something about the actual universe in which he is living, in making him acquainted with the results of scientific15 discovery, and at the same time teaches him how to think logically and inductively by studying scientific method. A certain limited success has been reached in the first of these aims, but practicallynone at all in the second. Those privileged members of thecommunity who have been through a secondary or public school 20 education may be expected to know something about the elementary physics and chemistry of a hundred years ago, but they probably know hardly more than any bright boy can pick up from an interest in wireless or scientific hobbies out of school hours. | 
