coulter] NATURE-STUDY AND SCIENCE TEACHING II 



involved, such as botany or zoology, but that it stands as 

 the rather unfortunate name of an educational device or tool 

 through which it is sought to accomplish very definite results. 

 It is regarded as a movement to relate education to daily life, to 

 make education a part of life instead of something apart from 

 life. It seeks to accomplish this end by a wise training of the 

 senses, using for its material the natural objects or phenomena 

 surrounding the child. This training of the external organs of 

 relation if properly done, involves a knowledge of the develop- 

 ment of the child-mind in order that the successive steps may 

 follow in a perfectly natural and, therefore, perfectly logical 

 sequence. Some of these steps may be indicated as follows: — 

 perception of things; continued perception; perception of kin- 

 ship; of relationship to surroundings; of parts to their functions ; 

 of protective devices; of economic relations. Evidently dif- 

 ferent educational values are involved in these groupings and 

 their proper arrangement and emphasis does much to determine 

 the educative results of nature-study work. It is plain that a 

 clear-cut conception of the significance of the pedagogic steps in- 

 volved is of infinitely more importance than even a fairly wide 

 range of knowledge of material suitable for nature-study work. 

 Indeed, it is evident that the intellectual end, the pedagogic 

 result, can be reached by the use of the most varied material; 

 that the material in a certain sense is but an incident, the 

 intellectual end supreme; not only can varied material be used, 

 but it must be used if nature-study reaches its true educative 

 values. 



The daily life of a boy is not altogether related to birds and 

 flowers, it may at certain points at least, touch cattle and vege- 

 tables. In other words the material should be as varied as the 

 surroundings demand. But training in seeing things definitely 

 and clearly, in seeing them in relation to each other and their 

 surroundings, in seeing them in their economic relations, this can 

 be secured by the use of any one of a hundred material objects, 

 provided, always provided, that the object is in some way re- 

 lated to the daily life of the child. A teacher in Brooklyn once 

 wrote asking advice as to how to present the "blue bird" to her 

 school in which not one of the pupils had ever seen a blue bird. 

 Not the least of her difficulties lay in the fact that the blue bird 

 was to serve as nature-studv material for an entire month. Of 



