734 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



but too subtle to be pictured either in words or in illustrations. I 

 mean the sweet, unconscious influences of nature and of one's native 

 environment. By taking care that the child's associations with home 

 are rich and full, we provide for the man an inexhaustible source of 

 inspiration. 



The reader will have observed that all that I have spoken of so far 

 is really history — the history of nature and of man; and he will have 

 seen how impossible it is entirely to separate these two things in any 

 natural treatment of them. This is because they are not so much 

 two separate things as two aspects of the same thing. Does not the 

 reader see the application of this truth to education ? Does it not sug- 

 gest to him the thought that in taking his children away from nature, 



Studying the Natural History of Beechwood. 



away from their natural environment, and shutting them up all day in 

 a schoolroom, chained to desks and books, he is doing violence to all 

 that makes boyhood precious — to its naivete, to its love of all out-doors, 

 to its instinctive craving for activity, and he is depriving it of the most 

 natural means of its own development? 



I wish to guard against a possible misapprehension. I am not 

 laying down a school course for teachers. My school was situated in 

 Ottawa, and the choice of culture material was governed largely by 

 that fact. If I were to teach in Halifax, or Toronto, or Calgary, or 

 Vancouver, I should deem it my first duty to study the conditions 

 existing there. For I hold that the teacher will find in the locality, 

 in the environment in which he lives and in which his pupils live, the 

 most appropriate and the most educative material of instruction, far 

 exceeding in value that found in any text-book or in all the text-books. 



