NATURE-STUDY AND ELEMENTARY AGRICULTURE 



By C. H. ROBISON 

 Montclair, N. J., State Normal School 



[Discussion at meeting of American Nature-Study Society, Baltimore, 

 Dec. 29, 1908.] 



The preceding speakers have so ably covered practically all 

 the points touched upon in the remarks which I have written, 

 that I think the time allotted to nie on the program can be more 

 profitably used in considering certain questions suggested by 

 the tabulated summary of Mr. Crosby's tentative course of study 

 which he has placed on the blackboard before us. His plan is 

 suggestive, and the topics for practical plant work he has outlined 

 in the third column are admirable. However, I wish to point out 

 the necessity of avoiding repetition, when the details are worked 

 into this outline. The nature-study movement has suffered 

 from the lack of the organization of its materials more than 

 from almost any other cause. What organization has been 

 attempted has often failed to proceed according to pedagogical 

 principles. Other studies in the elementary curriculum have 

 progressed in efficiency only as they have done this. This lack of 

 organization of the abundant materials brings about a sameness 

 from grade to grade that threatens the same disastrous results, 

 pedagogically, that we find in the common school physiology 

 required by law. 



I believe it is sound to maintain that the purpose of having 

 nature-study in the lower grades, certainly in the first and 

 probably in the second, is not for the intrinsic value of the facts 

 learned from observation, nor necessarily for a supposed training 

 of the so-called faculty of observation, but that its function there is 

 to help widen the experiences of the child for the express purpose 

 of aiding the work in English, in expression, which is the chief 

 work of the lowest grade, and of contributing to the eflficiency 

 of the number work begun in the first or second grade. The 

 same planting of radishes and lettuce year after year, even 

 though the process become more perfect and the crop better, is 

 quite sure to cause that same paralysis of interest which our 

 presiding officer once aptly illustrated in an address by citing the 

 universal habit of trotting out the venerable milkweed pod in the 



103 



