1903] Attwood Educational Value of Nature Study. 195 



child study is a department of Nature Study. If life is the adjust- 

 ment to environment, it is evident that the life and the development 

 of the child are promoted by causing it to be in harmonious rela- 

 tionship with its environment, in other words, by directing- it in 

 Nature Study. 



The aim of Nature Study is to unite the inner intellectual 

 world of the child with its outer physical world, for only through 

 this unity can the highest good be attained. The effort which the 

 young student of nature makes to relate, to group, to unify, is the 

 same in kind, differing only in degree, as that of the highest 

 scientific and philosophical research. " The better the child 

 realizes 'that school is out-of-doors as well as in the schoolroom, 

 in plant and animal and stone, in cloud and sunset and waterfall, 

 as well as in book, the more complete will be the unity between 

 his physical and intellectual world. The more his aature study is 

 correlated with, and made a basis for, his language work, draw- 

 ing, reading and literature, the more will the unifying tendency of 

 the mind be satisfied." 



In the foregoing paragraph an effort has been made to show 

 that Nature Study is in harmony with the ideals of the New 

 Education (i) in its efforts to lead to the acquisition of first-hand 

 knowledge by an intimacy with things, (2) in its emphasis of the 

 causal as contrasted with the fact idea, (3) in its endeavor to pre- 

 sent a subject congenial to the learner, and (4) in its regarding 

 the child as the all-important fact in education. 



Before proceeding further it may be well to give in the form 

 of definitions the conception which some educationists have of this 

 subject. 



L. H. Bailey calls it "nature sympathy." It is "teaching 

 the youth to see and to know the nearest thing at hand to the end 

 that his lite may be fuller and richer " Clifton F. Hodge defines 

 it as, " Learning those things in nature that are best worth know- 

 ing, to the end of doing those things that make life most worth 

 livmg." It is " a new element in education which has for its 

 object the cultivation of the child's intelligent interest in his out- 

 of-door environment," writes Anna B. Comstock. Longfellow 



