THE 



NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



DEVOTED PRIMARILY TO ALL SCIENTIFIC STUDTES OF NATURE IN 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 



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Editorial 



Two recent papers published by the General Educational Board 

 are of sufficient importance in the teaching of science to deserve 

 editorial comment in this Review. The first is entitled " Changes 

 Needed in American Secondary Education," by Charles W. Eliot; 

 the second is "A Modern School, "by Abraham Flexner. I quote 

 several sentences from various parts of President Eliot's paper 

 which, coming as they do from so matured and revered an educa- 

 tor, are valuable commendation for the purposes of our Society. 



"The most important part of education has always been the 

 training of the senses through which that best part of knowledge 

 comes." 



'The difference between a good workman and a poor one in 

 farming, mining, or manufacturing is the difference between the 

 man who possesses well-trained senses and good judgment in using 

 them, and the man who does not." 



"It follows from these considerations that the training of the 

 senses should always have been a prime object in human educa- 

 tion at every stage from primary to professional . . That prime 

 object it has never been, and is not today." 



"Many an elderly professional man, looking back on his educa- 

 tion and examining his own habits of thought and expression, per- 

 ceives that his senses were never trained to act with precision, that 

 his habits of thought permit vagueness, obscurity, and inaccuracy, 

 and that his spoken or written statement lacks that measured, 

 cautious, candid, simple quality which the scientific spirit fosters 

 and inculcates. Such a deplorable result ought not to have been 

 possible; but it has been unavoidable by the individual, whether 

 child or parent, because the programmes of secondary schools still 



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