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GHAPTER 1 O

Educaiional T/icory and Textbooks

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Ernst Mach gradually devclopcd idcas about education, tcaching, and childrcn to complcmcnt and help popularize his phenomenalism and philosophy of science. He also took an activc part in cducational pol-itics from the middlc i88os into the twentieth ccntury. He eoedited an educational journal, wrotc textbooks for sccondary school students, and helped lead the gymnasium reform movcment of the period. His only speech whilc a member of the Austrian Housc of Peers was to advocatc spending morę moncy on popular adult education.

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Mach did not dcvclop a comprchensive philosophy of education nor write a book cxclusively on the subjcct, but his articlcs, “On Instruc-tion in the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences” (1886), “On Instruction in Hcat Thcory” (1887), and “On the Psychological and Logical Moment in Scicntific Instruction” (1890), and scattcrcd commcnts in his other writtings, givc a cohcrcnt picturc of his basie cducational assumptions and yiews.¹

The primary purposc of education, likc that of science and all hu-man activity, according to Mach, was to help satisfy human "biological nccds” in the most “cconomical" v/ay possiblc. Mach understood “biological nccds” in the collcctivc sense of what best aided the sur-vival and progress of the human spccies on a morał and civilizcd lcvcl.

The spccial purposc of education “was simply the saving of cxperi-

ence.”² That is, education providcd a quick and efficicnt way of learning what many pcoplc know now and what ages of peoplc learned in the past, so that we do not havc to rcly solely on learning by mcans of limited and timcconsuming pcrsonal cxperiencc and trial and error.

But whilc Mach hcld that the purpose of education was “economicaT (in the two senses mentioned abovc), hc insisted that the most "eco-nomical” way of imparting education was quite indircct. Instcad of tcaching the most ‘‘economical" end results of science directly, that is, mathcmatical cąuations and functions, he bclicvcd that it was morę “economical" from a pedagogical point of vicw to begin instruction with visual cxamplcs and imaginativc dcmonstration, slowly cvolving into a historical presentation of the subjcct.³ Only when the student mastered the problem in its concrctc and historical dcvclopmcnt was hc capablc of adcquatcly understanding generał and abstract Solutions to the problem. In other words, the most economical way of learning started with uncconomical understanding (i.c., “images” and “his-tory") and culminatcd after a gradual process in the learning of the most “economical" and valuable knowlcdge possible, the use of mathcmatical functions to describc sensations.

One product of Machs multifaccted “economical" approach to education was his emphasis on always learning for an extrinsic purposc. The only valuc of understanding was what elsc it helpcd to sustain or bring about. Mach rejccted learning for its own sake, for personal pleasurc, and for the mere information gained. He scorncd both curi-osity and won der.⁴ He associated them with an attraction toward the odd and cxceptional, whereas, as one might expcct from a physicist, Mach put morę importance on learning similarities and constancies. Mach both rccommendcd the value of hisiory and was an influential historian himself, but his avcrsion to the odd and singular should in-dicate that he was a historian from need rather than lovc, and that hc found it uncongeninl to work as a serious research or archivc historian.

When Mach advocated tcaching science in a historical way, espc-cially to beginners in science, hc meant tcaching the ideas of earlicr scicntists to show the logical developmcnt of modern theories. Hc did not mcan that the particular actions or thoughts of pardcułar scicntists should be taught or the historical factors that intluenced why thc\ thoughl as they did. Nor was hc overly interested in the actual his

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