226 NA T URE STUDY RE VIE W [9 :7— Oct. , 1913 



Second and' Fourth Classes : lo.oo to 10.20. — Reading or telling 



stories. 



10.20 to 10.40. — Nature-study lesson 



10.40 to 11.35. — Individual plot 

 work. 



11.35 to 12.00. — Work on borders 

 and sample plots. 



12.00 to 12.30. — Inspection and cler- 

 ical work. 

 — From Pamphlet of Information, Board of Ed., Phila. 



Editorial 



The term Nature-Study has come to have a very definite mean- 

 ing. The layman as distinct from the scientist goes out to spend 

 his holiday or his vacation in fields and woods. His amateur 

 observations, his appreciative study of the things about him is in 

 the spirit of nature-study. But, in school parlance, the term has 

 come to have a still more restricted significance. It is the subject 

 matter dealt with in a particular school period in the daily or 

 weekly school program. Nature-Study must perform, therefore, a 

 definite scholastic function, must help fulfil the ends of education. 

 Now the nature study both of the amateur and of the school-boy 

 leads on to science if long pursued. It is a sort of selected science 

 stripped of forbidding technicalities, pregnant with human inter- 

 ests, aesthetic pleasures and moral import. It must do for the 

 child in school, in so far as it is possible, what science helps to 

 accomplish for the more mature student. It must drill him in the 

 method of and habituate him to independent thinking, widen his 

 sympathies, sensitize his conscience, fit him for social responsibili- 

 ties. 



Nature-Study should not be carelessly given a place in the 

 curriculum nor taught without a realization of the responsibilities 

 assumed. The teacher should be aware of what she is trying to do, 

 should move in its accomplishment with no uncertainty and should 

 test out her results to assure herself that she is doing what she sets 

 out to do in her teaching. In this, as in other topics, it is to be 

 feared that the teacher is prone to acquire facility in the subject 



