I04 THE NATURE-STUDY REriElV [ju-apr., .939 



successive grades. I believe this garden work should be so 

 varied in its character, at least after the first two or three grades, 

 that it should stand for a distinct idea each year, and that there 

 should be sufficient contrast in successive years to insure the 

 work against the deadening tendency just referred to. Thus 

 the work of one grade, as the fourth, might abandon work with 

 vegetables or decorative plants, and be devoted to small plots 

 illustrating various staple crops, even though they be not 

 typical of the locality. This would give concreteness to the 

 work in geography just at a time when a connection is being 

 made between the home geography and the wider outside world. 

 Such diversity and contrast should characterize not only the 

 garden work, but also the work with weeds, birds, trees, and 

 insects. 



It might be well also to raise the question whether there is any 

 such difference in the learning process as seems to be indicated in 

 the second column, which assigns observation to the first three 

 grades, observation and comparison to the next three, and adds 

 judgment to these in the seventh and eighth grades. Child 

 studies would seem to indicate that children have a capacity for 

 forming judgments and for correcting them by comparison from 

 a very early age. One great defect, until very recently, of our 

 system of elementary education has been that we have not given 

 small children opportunities for forming judgments, and have 

 not encouraged initiative. Perhaps w^e should regard these 

 mental abilities as differing only in degree from year to year, and 

 base our procedure on that assumption. 



In one sense elementary agriculture is the rural phase of 

 nature-study, which is the same in the earlier years for both 

 rural and urban localities, but which in the higher reaches of 

 elementary school work becomes somewhat differentiated as to 

 material rather than in method. In another sense, elementary 

 agriculture is the rural phase of industrial education, of which 

 manual training is at present a very imperfect and unsatisfactory 

 urban expression. For really manual training is but a method 

 without a content of its own, and a method w^hich elementary 

 agriculture itself is making use of in the public schools. In this 

 sense, elementary agriculture is broader than nature-study in the 

 upper grades. 



