MccKKAm] RELA TION OF XA TURE-STUDY AND SCIENCE 47 



From the teacher's standpoint, three views are essential for 

 normal procedure: (i) the realization that schools, school- 

 classes, school-books, school-studies and even school-teachers 

 are artificial things imposed upon children by civilization's 

 necessities; (2) that after school days there is "a life to be lived 

 and a living to be made;" (3) that a large and important part of 

 an individual's education comes from his contacts with in- 

 numerable out-of-school experiences. 



The school has divorced itself from this influence. Nature- 

 study is a call back to these touches with Nature and to a 

 resulting natural education. It is no new thing. Every good 

 teacher has taught nature-study. It is essentially good teaching. 

 It is that good teaching — good pedagogy if you will — that selects 

 and emphasizes right and essential things for the training of 

 children while rejecting or minimizing the importance of non- 

 essentials, even if time-honored in their use. The nature- 

 lesson may be taught everywhere and anywhere in the school 

 program; it may be contained in a word or story, a nod, a smile, 

 a pat on the shoulder, a thank-you, a reprimand, a suggestion; 

 indeed bv anv of the kind old nurse's methods of instruction. 

 It isn't a thing apart from arithmetic ; it is realized there when 

 new views of common out-of-door operations or transactions 

 are brought into the life's experiences; it isn't a thing apart 

 from any subject. 



From my three years' experience in the training of Mac- 

 donald scholarship teachers. I have concluded that this contro- 

 versy between nature-study and elementary science is confusing 

 and needless. The schoolmaster is too pedagogical -for the 

 teacher who is to bring her children and nature into intimacies. 

 The prime need is to become an ardent lover of some phase of 

 nature, willing to woo and win by pursuit and search. It doesn't 

 make so much difference what the special interest is in. One 

 taste of nature makes an appetite for the wider interests that 

 may be needed for a full sympathy with a schoolroom of children 

 from different homes. The need is to acquire a hobby after the 

 old naturalist's manner rather than after that of the scientists; 

 at our school of agriculture it may be chickens, cattle, sheep; 

 fruit growing, tree growing, vegetable growing; gardening, 

 plant-experiments, weather, soils and rocks, or what you will. 



