the gathering C P Snowstorm . by John Wren-Lewis . the following story is popular in educational circles : in a university when a lecturer enters and says good morning no-one looks up from his newspaper . in a College of advanced technology when a lecturer enters and says good morning , everyone writes it down . a few years ago I heard this story told to illustrate the difference within a university between the undergraduates reading humanities and those reading science . there has been a subtle shift in the frontier of educational snobbery . science , as such , was once considered the preserve of dull , unsophisticated people ; but the scientists staged a successful protest against this . men like Dr Bronowski and Sir Charles Snow showed they could perfectly well compete with the literary men on their own ground . one Oxford scientist , the late Sir Francis Simon , went so far as to say that if a scientist was as ignorant of history as most humanities men today are of science , he would have to believe that Napoleon preceded Julius Caesar . since then we have heard little about uncultured scientists in the Universities . it is admitted that the search for scientific truth may be a genuine aspect of culture , and the current fashion is to praise scientists for their broadmindedness rather than call them illiterate . today it is the technologist who is the object of humorous deprecation . this shows that we have not really begun to solve the problem of the two cultures . for the technologist , the applied scientist whose aim is to find know how for making things or working things , is actually more in tune with the spirit of science as we use the term today than the dedicated seeker after truth who works on pure research . I do not mean there is anything wrong with pure research : I mean science works because it has abandoned the classical idea that seeking truth means grasping theoretical principles underlying experience . the point was very well made a few years ago in the BBC Reith lectures by the American scientist Robert Oppenheimer . a scientist who discovers some new physical effect , he said , is often far more concerned with how he can use it to measure other things than he is with understanding the effect itself . in other words , modern science finds truth , not in theories as such , but in the act of testing theories against experience . this is the essence of the experimental method . the common idea of science is still that it uses experiment to prove theories , but this has been shown long ago by the philosophers to be a logical impossibility . there is always the chance that some result may turn up tomorrow which disproves the same theory - and modern science is built on the acceptance of this fact . the whole reason why modern science is inherently progressive , where classical natural philosophy was not , is that the scientific revolution abandoned treating theory as truth and regarded it merely as a tentative formula for doing things - with the implication ( utterly alien from classical culture ) that it is by handling the world that we live and know . this is of immense importance for the whole problem of scientific education . educators continually bewail the fact that science students have to absorb so much that they have no time left over to gain any insight at all into other subjects . it is often suggested that industry is demanding the creation of a race of technical robots , who have to know so much in a specialised field that they are forced to drop learning anything else from sixteen or earlier . this is a gross libel on technology , however : the real reason for the overcrowding of science curricula lies elsewhere . the narrow man , the man who knows little outside his own field of science and nothing at all outside science itself , is virtually useless in industry - not just because he finds it hard to communicate with or manage other people ( which is important enough ) but also because he is a bad technologist . to give an example from my own recent experience : a recent British invention in the field of scientific instruments was made because a scientist interested in crystallography was also a yachtsman , and saw an analogy which no one had seen before between the crystal-measuring instrument and the sailor &apos;s sextant . again , a technique for identifying chemicals was neglected for decades until a chemist who was also a lawyer got down to presenting it to the chemical world as if he were presenting a brief . this sort of thing is happening all the time in applied sciences , and on the negative side , inventions are held up time and again because scientists are not sufficiently men of the world - silicones and penicillin are examples . the scientists whom industry needs are not people ground down into a narrow specialism : they are people trained in certain basic methods , who apart from this have as broad an outlook and as much flexibility of mind as possible . the main reason why scientists are not being trained like this , in my view , is that the British educational system is still geared to the classical idea of truth . it has been said , rather unkindly , that a teacher of classics is like the curator of a provincial museum - his only job is to rearrange the exhibits . no doubt this is a libel , but the classical outlook in education certainly assumes that learning means the mastery of an intellectual system . in other words , because our educational system is still dominated by the classical outlook , for all its acceptance of the sciences , it is not adapted to the teaching of inherently progressive subjects . hence curricula inevitably become overcrowded . our error is not in training scientists who are unaware of the classical outlook : it is in training them in all sorts of assumptions which are still unconsciously derived from it . what we need , to produce scientists who are also human , is something far more fundamental than a departmental committee on syllabus revision on which schoolmasters and industrialists as well as university dons are represented ( although that would be a practical first step which is already long overdue ) . we need a radical revolution in our whole outlook . we need to recognise that what happened to our civilisation in the scientific revolution was something which has implications far beyond the realm of technics . scientists themselves often do not understand this , because their training has so often been dominated by classical assumptions . hence when they try to make bridges across the gulf between the two cultures by starting from their side by writing histories of scientific thought , they often lose their readers in masses of anecdotes without giving any real feel of science at all . it is a common characteristic of historians of science , for example , that they never treat Galileo &apos;s ecclesiastical detractors as anything more than frightened obscurantists whereas in truth it was perfectly reasonable to refuse to look through his telescope if you assumed - as mankind has almost universally done until the scientific revolution - that experience is probably unreliable . Galileo was actually making a choice of interest with very practical consequences , as Brecht &apos;s play brought out , and our whole civilisation is the heir to that choice . understanding science means understanding that choice - understanding that once it has been decided to manipulate the world instead of just contemplating it , your basic concepts are bound to be matter and energy , since your concern is with stuff and pushing stuff about - yet there is no ultimate distinction between the two , so that matter and energy must prove ultimately interconvertible . at the same time there will be two primary practical results of science - the discovery of how materials produce their effects on us and how energy can be stored and controlled . an approach to understanding science along these lines would put applied science in its proper perspective and it might even go some way towards providing a simplified basis for teaching science to scientists themselves . but the most important point to be grasped is that the revolution in interest which Galileo made is one which can and should spread to the whole of culture , and until it does our civilisation will remain schizoid . defenders of classical culture are apt to argue that science and technology , which are concerned with means , ought properly always to be subordinate to the arts , the humanities and religion , which are concerned with ends . but this misses the most vital thing about the issue between the two cultures . so long as the artistic and humanitarian aspects of our culture are dominated by the classical outlook , with its radical distrust of experience , they are bound to seem static and powerless in comparison with science and technology , which derive their authority from reference to experience , or enhancement of it . so it is useless trying to humanise scientific education merely by grafting on a few arts or humanities to school or university science curricula , for the atmospheres of the two cultures are even less easily mixed than oil and water . we need a revolution in outlook in the arts and humanities themselves . this is the real point , I believe , that people like Snow are getting at when they ask for scientists to have more part in government . this is not only a matter of the government being able to appreciate technical issues : it is much more fundamentally a matter of attitude of mind . those who have absorbed the atmosphere of scientific culture find those outside it alarming because they appear to be willing to attach more validity to their fundamental myths than to evidence . what the new men want - and will have , sooner or later - is a public system which bases authority always on declared evidence that the good of persons is demonstrably being served . the world and the Church . by Phyllis Graham . learning to be a parent . considering the publicity given to the problem of juvenile delinquency , it is astonishing that so little has been done to remedy its chief cause - the bad home . one would have thought that common sense , let alone Christianity , would have shown it was impossible to teach a mother to care properly for her children by removing them from her and sending her to prison ; but this is still the most usual way of dealing with women accused of persistent neglect . even on economic grounds this method of treatment stands condemned . the average cost of keeping a mother in prison is &amp;pound;7 a week , and of a child in a local authority home &amp;pound;7 10 s . contrast this with the fees of &amp;pound;4 for the mother and &amp;pound;2 10 s for each child charged at St Mary &apos;s mothercraft training centre , Dundee . thus a family of a mother and four children will cost the country &amp;pound;37 a week when separated , and only &amp;pound;14 if kept together at St Mary &apos;s . but there is more to it than this . efforts have been made by the royal Scottish society for the prevention of cruelty to children to secure training in mothercraft in Greenock Prison . this may sound excellent in theory but to those who have intimate experience of the type of mother usually brought before the court on a charge of child neglect it is mockery . a survey of cases admitted to English training homes showed that 27 per cent were feeble-minded or worse . these mothers can not be taught in a vacuum . only by the most patient showing from hour to hour how to meet the needs of their own children can they be expected to learn anything . Sheriff Christie of Dundee wrote in 1957 : it is , I think , the universal experience that mothers who neglect their children do so , in the main , not through wickedness but through incapacity and inefficiency . the foundation of St Mary &apos;s opened a new chapter in dealing with these unfortunate families ; it has brought new hope to many for whom adversity has been too much and it has taken the whole problem out of the province of the criminal law where no satisfactory solution was possible . 