Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to analyze Tyndall’s conception of the role that science and scientists should play in society, once freed from the restraints of theology; it uses as a means for doing so his participation in the debates over scientific education. The promotion of science in education was a cause to which Tyndall devoted a great deal of his time, and it was arguably the arena in which his vision of how science should influence society gained its clearest expression. If Tyndall shaped the definition and boundaries of his idea of science in the context of his fight against the constraints of theology, with the campaign for scientific education he established his vision for what science should do in society and how it should be implemented, as well as how its practitioners should be trained and where their place should be in a society thoroughly inculcated with science.
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Notes
J. W. Gregory, “Tyndall,” Natural Science 4 (January 1894): 10.
See D. F. Branagan, “Gregory, John Walter (1864–1932),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/33555. Gregory’s article is further discussed in chapter five, in the section entitled “Tyndall’s Reputation in the Decades after His Death.”
T. H. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” The Nineteenth Century 35 (January 1894): 6.
Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892 [1861]).
Herbert Spencer, “The Late Professor Tyndall,” The Fortnightly Review 61 (Febuary 1894): 33.
See D. Thompson, “Contributions to Scientific Education and the Teaching of Science,” in Essays on a Natural Philosopher, ed. W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C Mollan (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 1981), 153.
Royal Institution Archives, RI MS JT/1/HTYP, Typescript Correspondence between Hirst and Tyndall (November 16 1856).
For more on Queenwood, see W. H. Brock, “Queenwood College Revisited,” in Science for All (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996),
article XVII, and Chapter 2 of N. D. McMillan and J. Meehan, John Tyndall: “X”-emplar of Scientific and Technological Education (Dublin: NCEA, 1980), 25–36.
John Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1876), 286–7.
John Tyndall, “An Address to Students” (1868), Fragments of Science, 8th edn, vol. II, (London: Longmans, Green, Inc., 1899), 94.
For background, see Mary Sturt, The Education of the People, originally published in 1967 and republished by Routledge in 2007; also Richard Aldrich, School and Society in Victorian Britain (Epping: College of Preceptors, 1995).
On secondary education and public schools, see T. W. Bamford, Rise of the Public Schools (London: Nelson, 1967);
John Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe (London: Millington, 1977);
John Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800–1870 (London: Longman, 1986) and Secondary Education in England, 1870–1902 (London: Routledge, 1991).
Alexander Bain, Education as a Science (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1879), 359.
James Pillans, “Hints for Improving the Preliminary Stages of a Classical Education,” in Educational Papers (Edinburgh, 1862), 54.
For more information on the various debates and their wider implications, see Frank M. Turner, “Moderns and Ancients,” section III in Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: CUP, 1993);
Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
Lawrence Goldman, “The Social Science Association and Middle-Class Education: Secondary Schooling, Endowments, and Professionalisation in Mid-Victorian Britain,” Chapter 8 in Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 236–61.
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published in 1877, the characters discuss the merits of a classical versus a scientific education at a dinner party, touching on the benefit of learning general laws, the morality of the classics, and the education of women—see Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 456–60. British writers on the subjects of education and science were well known to the novel’s characters: the protagonist Levin reads both works by Spencer (398–400 and 946) and Tyndall’s Heat as a Mode of Motion (113).
See W. H. Brock, “Scientific Education” and “Science for All,” in Science for All, articles X and XIX. See also A. J. Meadows and W. H. Brock, “Topics Fit for Gentlemen: The Problem of Science in the Public School Curriculum,” in ed. Brian Simon and Ian Bradley, The Victorian Public School (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975), 95–114.
See, e.g., J. MacNaughtan, The Address of Professor Tyndall, at the Opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Examined in a Sermon on Christianity and Science (London, 1874), 11;
John Nash Griffin, Atoms, a Lecture in Reply to Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Address (Dublin, 1875), 41. James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Christian, mocked this final line in a poetic parody of Tyndall’s Address: Last, praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong, Ere yet the swift whirl of the atoms has hurried us, ruthless, along, The British Association—like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes, The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs, Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you, Have melted in infinite azure—in English, till all is blue.
See Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882), 641.
Henry Sidgwick, “The Theory of Classical Education,” in Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F. W. Farrar (London: Macmillan and Co., 1867), 128.
Edward Thring, Education and School (Cambridge, 1864), 89.
John Tyndall, Heat as a Mode of Motion, 6th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1880), ix.
John Tyndall, Heat as a Mode of Motion, 1st edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1863), xii.
Quoted in A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan’s, 1945), 51.
Robert Hebert Quick, Essays on Educational Reformers (London, 1868), 245.
See C. E. Lindgren, “Quick, Robert Hebert (1831–1891),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac. uk:2117/view/article/22954.
Edward Thring, Three Letters and Axioms of Education, 3rd edn (Uppingham, 1861), 13.
James Leitch, “Herbert Spencer,” Practical Educationists and Their Systems of Teaching (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1876), 262–3.
Rev. Alexander Raleigh, D. D., Education: The Bill and the Board (London, 1870), 8. See W. B. Lowther, “Raleigh, Alexander (1817–1880),” rev.
R. Tudur Jones, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/23041.
T. H. Huxley, “Science and Morals” (1886), in “Evolution and Ethics” and Other Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 146.
T. H. Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge” (1866), in Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 31–2.
John Tyndall, “Matter and Force” (1867), in Fragments of Science (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1871), 73.
Michael Pupin, From Immigrant to Inventor (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 208.
D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, rev. edn (London: Heinemann, 1972), 93–4.
John Tyndall, “Appendix,” Six Lectures on Light, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 244.
T. H. Huxley, “Universities: Actual and Ideal,” in Science and Education (London: Macmillan and Co., 1893), 223. Huxley’s “emphatic friend” could well have been Tyndall, given his propensity for violent commentary.
John Tyndall, “Physics and Metaphysics,” The Saturday Review 10 (August 4, 1860): 141.
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© 2011 Ursula DeYoung
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DeYoung, U. (2011). Tyndall as Reformer. In: A Vision of Modern Science. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118058_5
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