102 THE NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [su-apr., 1909 



more than curiosity or even observation and record, how they 

 reach out and take hold of the very life of the boy, and how they 

 connect the affairs of the school and the school-room with those of 

 his home and the neighborhood and the world into which he is 

 already anxious to plunge and make himself known and felt. 



One of our problems in education is how to give the child in- 

 formation and teach him methods of acquiring more without 

 destroying his creative instinct; how to compensate in the 

 school for some of the damage we have done in taking him out of 

 real life during the educative process. Now nature-study in 

 itself is good. It is more than that, it is excellent. It stimulates 

 a love for the material that is around us. It stimulates observa- 

 tion as to what is going on, and it gives practice in making ac- 

 curate records of what is seen ; but if nature-study can extend into 

 the realm of the useful, into the region of the productive, into 

 the realm where human relations are involved, then so much the 

 better. 



This is the possibility of agriculture as a subject for study in the 

 grades. The large question is the teacher. To what extent can 

 the grade teacher know the field well enough to use it to ad- 

 vantage for thest purposes? The only answer is that all. too 

 often the teacher is unable to make proper use of this mass of the 

 best material in the world for teaching processes and that lies 

 close at hand, which is the old story over again of looking afar off 

 for the things that after all are close by; but in this, as in many 

 other things, even though the ideal cannot be attained, an 

 honest attempt is well worth while, and if the teachers can be 

 induced to combine, along with observation and record, the 

 elements of usefulness and the human relation, then it will be 

 well worth all it costs to stimulate as much as possible the teach- 

 ing of agriculture in the grades of the public schools. Moreover, 

 as this subject makes its way into the high schools and the 

 normal schools the time will not be long until teachers will be 

 developed with the training and the material to go out into the 

 world of the children and hold up to them a fairly true picture 

 of the world in its industrial activities. 



