"We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study"
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Wilson is doing something slippery and very Wilsonian here: praising science as knowledge while warning against science as habit of mind. The line isn’t an anti-science rant; it’s an anxiety about a culture that imports the laboratory’s authority into every room in the house and then pretends that’s just “good thinking.” His distinction between “place” and “preponderance in method” matters. He can concede that schools may not teach enough actual science, yet still argue that the prestige of scientific procedure - measurement, classification, controlled skepticism - has started to dominate fields where its promises are thinner: ethics, politics, literature, history.
The intent is partly defensive. As a late-19th/early-20th-century reform-minded academic turned politician, Wilson lived inside the era’s worship of expertise, efficiency, and “scientific” administration. Progressive politics loved the idea that social problems could be engineered away with the right data and the right bureau. Wilson’s warning reads like a brake tap on that momentum: when method becomes preponderant, it turns into ideology. You stop asking what education is for and start asking what can be quantified.
The subtext is also about authority. Scientific method carries a rhetorical weapon: it can make value judgments sound like neutral findings. Wilson is alert to how that can flatten the humanities into pseudo-labs, rewarding technique over judgment, and substituting procedure for wisdom. It’s an argument for plural ways of knowing - not romantic anti-modernism, but a reminder that democracy needs interpretation, moral reasoning, and historical sense as much as it needs instruments and statistics.
The intent is partly defensive. As a late-19th/early-20th-century reform-minded academic turned politician, Wilson lived inside the era’s worship of expertise, efficiency, and “scientific” administration. Progressive politics loved the idea that social problems could be engineered away with the right data and the right bureau. Wilson’s warning reads like a brake tap on that momentum: when method becomes preponderant, it turns into ideology. You stop asking what education is for and start asking what can be quantified.
The subtext is also about authority. Scientific method carries a rhetorical weapon: it can make value judgments sound like neutral findings. Wilson is alert to how that can flatten the humanities into pseudo-labs, rewarding technique over judgment, and substituting procedure for wisdom. It’s an argument for plural ways of knowing - not romantic anti-modernism, but a reminder that democracy needs interpretation, moral reasoning, and historical sense as much as it needs instruments and statistics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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