smith] nature-study and high-school chemistry 195 



hand knowledge of common things seem to be ends difficult of 

 accomplishment. At least if we take the product of the schools as a 

 whole, their attainments in the latter direction, for example, are 

 woefully small. The present prodigious ignorance of many school 

 and even, college pupils of the simplest qualities of familiar materials 

 is positively startling, even to those who have frequent occasion to 

 encounter it. If the lower schools, to use the words of the Commit- 

 tee of Nine, 1 could " train children to see, to think, to talk, to write, 

 or, in more general terms, first to get knowledge by thoughtful obser- 

 vation of real things, and then to express it natural'y and correctly." 

 a task which would not seem to be beyond their scope or powers, 

 they would elevate their pupils to a plane upon which much better 

 advantage could be taken of the instruction offered in ihe secondary- 

 schools. As yet this work has not been recognized as constituting 

 part of the regular course of every school and it is given with success 

 only in a few cases where the teachers happen to be especially 

 interested in nature work. 



The material selected for nature-study should be "obvious (entering 

 into the experience of the pupil), important and interesting." The 

 initial step should be from the child's own interest. If a starting 

 point of this kind can be found, much more real good can be accom- 

 plished than by any schematically prearranged outline of work. For 

 example, some of the children observe the excavation for the base- 

 ment of a new building near the school and notice that below the sand 

 there is a layer of blue clay. It occurs to them to ask the teacher 

 whether plants would grow in that as they do in ordinary soil. At 

 her suggestion they get some empty tomato cans, till them with sand, 

 clay, gravel, and black soil respectively, and plant seeds in each, in 

 order to find out for themselves the answer to their own question. 

 ( Hher experiments in response to other questions may follow naturally 

 and a good deal of knowledge be gained without anyone having real- 

 ized that this was study at all. The period spent in making and dis- 

 cussing experiments like these will be the most popular of the day and 

 the eagerness of the pupils to see how the experiments are progressing 

 will give the teacher an opportunity ready-made which her utmost 

 efforts could hardly call forth in connection with arithmetic or 

 English. 



Although the work should never be without plan, the same enthu- 



1 Committee of Nine of the New York State Science Teachers Assn. < 1 -> > 



