14 NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



adapted to local conditions than to invite their freest 

 possible expression. If we cannot find a nature study 

 worth while, a nature study so full of human good that it 

 will meet and overcome all such objections, then we should 

 devote the time to other subjects. But from several years' 

 experience the writer is confident that all reasonable objec- 

 tions can be met, and that we can find a nature study so 

 good that this attitude of parents can be completely 

 reversed and their interest and enthusiasm so thoroughly 

 aroused that they will say : '* We had no chance to learn 

 these things, but we wish our children might be given the 

 opportunity and teach us." 



When this is accomplished, we shall have a nature 

 study that shall bind home and school together as noth- 

 ing in the curriculum does at present. Instead of giving 

 over our entire school system to passive book learning, we 

 shall have at least one subject that shall keep alive in the 

 child the spirit of research, under the impetus of which 

 he makes such astounding progress in learning the great 

 unknown of nature around him during the first three or four 

 years of life. This matter of original research in hand-to- 

 hand contact with nature ought to be made the breath of 

 life in an educational system. It will form perhaps the 

 most essential feature in every lesson in this book, and will 

 be treated more fully under a special heading. By its means 

 we may reinstate childhood in the function for which it was 

 designed and created. John Fiske has pointed out that 

 infancy was developed as a prolonged period of plasticity, 

 by which "the door for progressiveness was set ajar." ^ 



I John Fiske. The Meaning of Infancy, ^x<;ttruons of an EvpliitiQnisU 



