The place of biology in modern education. Address by Sir Edward Salisbury, C. B. E. , D.Sc., LL.D., V. P. R. S., at the opening of the new Hatherly Biological Laboratories, Exeter, on 23 April 1953

Abstract

It is my privilege today to declare open, for your use, these new laboratories that will provide the University College with a fitting environment in which the subject of biology can be effectively taught. It is one of the achievements of the modern advance in knowledge that the unity of all subjects is becoming more and more manifest and just as the context of biology has itself become so vastly augmented so its implications for the other branches of science have been proportionately enhanced. ‘If one member suffers all the other members suffer with it’ is fully applicable to the intellectual field, and the direct benefits that will follow from your own improved conditions will, I have no doubt, be indirectly no less beneficial to the University College as a whole. But if the maximum good is to accrue from your efforts and from the material improvement of your circumstances, biology must take its proper place not so much as a special discipline, but as part of that liberal education that constitutes an essential element in a cultured mind. Nevertheless to do this I venture to suggest that a new orientation in our approach to the study of botany and zoology is requisite. In the teaching of biology, and indeed of most subjects, in the curricula of schools and universities alike, there has, in the past, been far too great a tendency to mistake the imparting of mere information for the inculcation of knowledge. We devote far too much attention to the collection of bricks and far too little attention to the vision of the buildings into which they ought to be constructed. This tends to develop a community of the well informed rather than men and women of wisdom. The bricks are regarded as important in themselves and even brickbats, the half truths, which are often substitutes for the bricks, become the missiles of controversy instead of the elements of constructive achievemen t through which the superstructure of a richly ornamented life and useful citizenship can be built up. Many men and women, when they go out into the world of achievement, have a mental equipment that is comparable to a dump rather than to an edifice.