PLAN OF ORGANIZATION FOR NATURE-STUDY FACTS* 



BY JOSEPH S. TAYLOR, Pd.D. 

 District Superintendent of Schools, New York City 



The defects which the writer has found in nature-study teach- 

 ing may be roughly divided into two classes : Defects of organiza- 

 tion and defects of expression. 



(i) Errors of Organization — The syllabus of nature-study in 

 the New York public schools calls, in the first five years, for a 

 mass of facts, of which the following for Grade i A is a sample : 



"Four-footed Animals: Cat, mouse, rabbit. Recognition 

 and name; observation of their characteristic movements and 

 actions; their color, covering, food, uses, and care of young." 



There is no suggested organization of the facts, and the conse- 

 quence is that when a supervisor enters a class-room and asks for 

 a recitation or a lesson on any given animal or plant, the follow- 

 ing procedure is the rule : There is attempted a mere enumera- 

 tion or heaping up of actions, qualities, parts, and uses, without 

 regard to rhyme or reason. If the animal under consideration be 

 the duck, for example, one pupil says the duck is a bird, another 

 says she has a bill, another that she has feathers, another adds 

 that the bill is yellow, and still another that the bill is broad. 

 But there is no attempt at orderly sequence, no separation of 

 significant from trivial facts, no effort to relate facts of structure 

 to facts of function. Every fact is an isolated, unrelated thing, 

 which has to be mastered by sheer force of memory. The conse- 

 quence is that in a few days the information slips away, and when 

 children are asked to tell what they remember of an animal, they 

 stare at you in bewildered silence. They can't remember which 

 of the hundred or more independent facts that were told to them 

 comes first. In fact, there is no necessary first or last ; one could 

 begin anywhere to recite the long catalogue of names without 

 doing violence to the arrangement. 



(2) Defective Expression — The second error of teaching which 

 the writer has found almost universal is lack of drill in the correct 

 expression of facts taught. Perhaps it were more accurate to say 



Copyright by Joseph S. Taylor, 1907. 



