. Science . ciences and an in-crease in the humanities is not so certain. Itis quite possible that this decline in the en-rolment in these subjects is explained by theshift of students with scientific interests toother subjects like botany, agriculture, do-mestic science, et cetera. Or it is conceivablethat while the enrolment may decline, thelength of time devoted to each subject is so in- 1 Report of U. S. Commissioner of Education,1913, Chap, v., The Status of Secondary Edu-cation. 2 The Drift in Secondary Education, WillardJ. Fisher, Science, November 1, 1912, N. S., , No. 931. F
. Science . ciences and an in-crease in the humanities is not so certain. Itis quite possible that this decline in the en-rolment in these subjects is explained by theshift of students with scientific interests toother subjects like botany, agriculture, do-mestic science, et cetera. Or it is conceivablethat while the enrolment may decline, thelength of time devoted to each subject is so in- 1 Report of U. S. Commissioner of Education,1913, Chap, v., The Status of Secondary Edu-cation. 2 The Drift in Secondary Education, WillardJ. Fisher, Science, November 1, 1912, N. S., , No. 931. Febeuakt 12, 1915] SCIENCE 233 creased that the total time devoted to it by allstudents remains a fairly constant the data for the sciences, theclassics, the mathematics, the history and theEnglish in the table from -which Mr. Fisherobtained his data, namely, the Summaries,on p. 1141 of the Commissioner of Educa-tions Eeport for 1910, we get the graphshown in Fig. 1 of this article. The lines. Fig. 1. Diagram shows percentage of totalHgh-sehool enrollment in XT. S. taking courses inmathematics —^x—; foreign languages —o—;science —; classics ; history , and Eng-lish 0 0 0. Data from tabulation, page 1,141, Ee-port U. S. Commissioner of Education, mm. =: per cent. show the percentage of students taking thesevarious subjects during the period of yearsfrom 1890 to 1910, inclusive. As far as thesciences, as a whole, go, it is evident that thedata show that the enrolment in the sci-ences has increased much more rapidly thanthe enrolment in the classics and more rapidlythan anything else in the tabulation except the English. I am aware that this conclusion isprobably as unjustifiable as Mr. Fishers be-cause the data for the sciences are incompleteand the apparently erratic rise of the scienceline is due to the continued introduction ofnew data. Botany, zoology, agriculture anddomestic science are apparently only of suffi-cient importance in recent
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