DISCUSSIONS 53 



stories thrown in to add flavor; and the investigating spirit of the pupils is 

 snuffed out as soon as its presence is detected. 



While these defects are fairly well-known to the readers of The Review, 

 and to those responsible for the training of teachers, it is doubtful if the 

 methods advocated by Dr. Hornaday will mend matters in the least. As a 

 matter of fact, his methods are being tried unsuccessfully by hundreds of teach- 

 ers who think more of the name and place of the animal or plant in the great 

 system of nature than they do about its relations to us, and its value as a 

 working force in the economy of nature, and who thinks more of the subject- 

 matter than they do of the pupils under their charge. 



If nature-study stands for anything pedagogicallv it stands for natural 

 study, i. e., a method or means of developing mental power in the pupil by 

 begetting an attitude of inquiry into the meaning of the things of nature so 

 that the truth is discovered through the exercise of the activities of the pupil. 

 Dr. Hornaday 's insistence on book-study and classification will defeat the 

 very object of nature-study. We want more of the spirit of the old field- 

 naturalists and less of that of the modern systematists. We want the child 

 to find out for himself the values of the great organic forces of nature. The 

 method must be that of the investigator. Books are valuable, even indispens- 

 able, but they must be kept in their place. The studv of books and pic- 

 tures instead of the forces themselves is fundamentally wrong. 



Dr. Hornaday has evidently in mind as he writes the children of the 

 great cities, where, he says, there is "no life about their homes." Unfort- 

 unate are those children who live in tenement houses where the front view 

 is the hard walls on the opposite side of the street, and the rear view is the 

 dull laundry yard of unknown or unfriendly neighbors; but have they not 

 parks with trees, flowers, grass, birds, squirrels, insects and other living things 

 that are worthy of study ? There is a greater need in large cities for a 

 sympathetic study by the school children of every available plant and animal 

 form. In rural districts, on the other hand, where organic life forms so 

 prominent a part of the child's environment it would be subversive of the 

 natural order of things to make classification the basis and mainstay of his 

 study of nature. 



Unfortunate indeed, arc the children with a teacher who "marshals facts 

 by the thousand and places them in empty minds" without any effort on the 

 part of the children, under the impression that such is nature-study. It 

 would be far better to use the time in studying books and pictures, but we 

 should be careful not to call this kind of studv nature-study. 



W e, as teachers, must realize that the value of knowledge and education 

 depends as much, even more, on the way the truth is taught or learned as on 



