ganonc] MATURE COURSES AND SCIENCE COURSES 245 



for practicable utilization in our courses, and they ought not to 

 be generally introduced until they are thus worked out. And 

 just here in my opinion lies a rich held for educational endeavor 

 in the immediate future — the organization of important economic 

 topics for practicable educational use; and I regard the two pages 

 of Professor Bigelow's "Organization of Nature-Study Lessons" 

 in the September Review as exactly in this line and worth many 

 pages of indefinite criticism and untested suggestions. 



I have left for the last the most important matter of all, that of 

 training. To this Professor Hodge gives little attention and no 

 emphasis, but it is that for which the scientific courses pre- 

 eminently stand. The practical impossibility of teaching most 

 of our students through field work would make it necessary that 

 most of Professor Hodge's topics be taught from books, (supple- 

 mented of course by diagrams, stuffed specimens, etc.), and his 

 course must necessarily resolve itself, in the great majority- of 

 cases, into a book-and-memory study of nature. Thus he would 

 eliminate from the course the one great distinctive feature which 

 science courses have to offer to education, viz., that training, upon 

 the basis of personal contact with original phenomena, in the 

 correlated use of hand, eye and mind. This training has the great 

 educational merit that its benefits are not confined alone to the 

 subject in which it is acquired but can be felt in any occupation 

 the student may later take up. The results in the case of our 

 science courses are not very striking it is true, for we have our 

 students too short a time to make any great impression upon 

 them; but that impression is nevertheless real and lasting as far 

 as it goes and wholly in a good direction. And we are to do 

 better in the future. Some of the nature-study advocates, and 

 notably Professor Bailey (in the September Review), maintain 

 that the science courses lay too much stress upon training in 

 accuracy of detail, and not enough upon training in generaliza- 

 tions. From this view I wholly dissent, for in my opinion there 

 is no training which the American* youth needs more than that in 

 a power to be accurate in details. Carelessness as to particulars 

 and a tendency towards easy generalities is a chief fault in the 

 American character, and one against which our educational 

 institutions ought to set themselves, even if they must, to use 

 Professor Hodge's expression, "withdraw still farther from the 

 main currents of American life." I do not understand that it is a 



