i 7 o THE NA TU RE-STUD Y RE VIE IV U ■ e— sept., 1908 



sider the educational process." The effect on the child or the 

 student should always remain the end and aim of nature-study 

 work. 



The schools at present seem to lack motive power. They do 

 not train in leadership. They are largely static. They do not 

 seem to be able to send pupils out to take hold of the first things. 

 They do not seem to develop the desire or power to put pupils to 

 work in city improvement societies, civic organizations, farmers' 

 clubs, or other homely and common necessary work for the com- 

 munity. They are dominated very much by regularity and by 

 system. They are also far too much dominated by colleges. 

 The formal literary college entrance requirement is not an ex- 

 pression of the best activities of living. The nature-study motive 

 which takes hold of the objects and affairs next to the individual 

 and which develops spontaneousness, should have great influ- 

 ence in changing all this. Nature-study is merely a free, natural 

 and direct educational process: various kinds of subject-matter 

 are the means, but we must always be on guard that the means 

 do not become the ends. 



It is, of course, very important that all work in nature-study, 

 as in anything else, should be accurate; but the end after all is 

 not mere accuracy. We are so intent in some cases, I fear, on 

 the importance of mere verbal accuracy that we develop in our 

 students a depressing fear of making mistakes and the student is 

 likely to lack starting-power. Nothing can be more deadening 

 than mere insistence on accuracy in details. Of course the desir- 

 able thing is to have accuracy in all details at the same time that 

 we develop point of view and the vigor of a personal initiative. 

 We seem to be drifting into a kind of artistic idleness due, in part, 

 to the change of modes of living, and to the fact that children 

 are not brought up to the responsibility of work so much as they 

 once were, and also to some of our educational methods; it should 

 be the intent of all of us to overcome this growing tendency. 



I have said on more than one occasion that the nature-study 

 movement is an affair of the public schools. I am more and more 

 convinced that the nature-study idea is very much needed in 

 colleges. From a long experience I am convinced that a good 

 deal of our college physics, botany, zoology and chemistry is 

 very poorly taught if we are to consider its effect on the pupil; 

 and this effect is, of course, the end of teaching. A pupil may 



