The English sociologist Herbert Spencer was perhaps the most important popularizer of science and philosophy in the 19th century. Presenting a theory of evolution prior to Charles Darwin's ``On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'', Spencer argued that all of life, including education, should take its essential lessons from the findings of the sciences. In ``Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical'' (1860) he insisted that the answer to the question "What knowledge is of most worth?" is the knowledge that the study of science provides.

While the educational methodology Spencer advocated was a version of the sense realism espoused by reformers from Ratke and Comenius down to Pestalozzi, Spencer himself was a social conservative. For him, the value of science lies not in its possibilities for making a better world but in the ways science teaches man to adjust to an environment that is not susceptible to human engineering. Spencer's advocacy of the study of science was an inspiration to the American Edward Livingston Youmans and others who argued that a scientific education could provide a culture for modern times superior to that of classical education.

Excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica without permission.