Biology and Man Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Biology and Man

Our secondary schools today are common schools in the sense that ele mentary schools were common fifty years ago. That is, they enroll somewhat over two thirds of the boys and girls of the age they are designed to serve. In the past our high schools were responsible for special services to boys and girls who were in line for careers in the professions or for leadership in their communities. Today our high schools must furnish guidance, instruction and training of value to everybody. We have tried in this book to introduce a unified science of living things, which we regard as a valuable part of our common heritage.

Like the traditional three R's of our common schools, this introduction opens the way for all, expecting that each will continue as far as he wishes or needs to along particular lines. Some will wish to go further with botany or entomology, for example, or with gardening or breeding, whether as a hobby or as a profession. Some will wish to become nurses or technicians, physicians or administrators, and so will follow their biology in different directions. And some will find that this book will serve as a solid and ample foundation for college work.

These young men and women honestly want to understand the essential facts of personal and social life and the practical implications of these facts for themselves. These students are already on the verge of being the adult workers and voters and policy-makers of their time. They will have to decide scores of issues involving human beings as organisms - organisms that want food and shelter, that want to be well and to prolong their lives, that have to live together without destroying one another. These young men and women want to know more about the human species than they can possibly get out of the specialized subjects that ignore the organic nature of man, and more than they can possibly get out of a biology that ignores the distinctively human characteristics of this particular species - its intellect, its imagination, its inventiveness, its emotions and sentiments, and the very sociality that makes it possible for us to have any science at all.

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