A curious cat gets to grips with the refraction of light in droplets inside a milk bottle. She is following in the steps of Ibn Sahl (940-1000), Thomas Harriot (1560-1621) and Willebrord Snellius (1580-1626), each of whom discovered the principles of refraction quite independently of one other.
MOST boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it.
They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own; and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.
Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.
A pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.
Précis
John Stuart Mill expressed his misgivings about the kind of education which buries a child’s natural curiosity and intelligence under a heap of of facts and ‘acceptable’ opinions. He contrasted it with his own home schooling, in which he was given as little direction as possible, and expected to work things out for himself. (54 / 60 words)
