120 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [7:5— May, 1911 



to enable the children to gain sufficient experience to make pos- 

 sible a reasonably adequate interpretation or imaginative recrea- 

 tion of the subject-matter. It is doubtful if nature-study would 

 ever have been introduced in the curriculum as a separate sub- 

 ject if teachers had not neglected to provide the children with 

 these so-called illustrative. experiences. To the degree in which 

 nature-study is mere talk about nature, instead of experiences of 

 all sorts, first of all, with nature and nature materials, its illus- 

 trative or correlative value for other subjects is still slight. 

 Education at present suffers from the lack of these illustrative 

 experiences, and the school museum may be made extremely 

 valuable to all subjects of study in this connection. 



Third. The school museum should not be a collection of 

 formal or stereotyped apparatus, or plant and animal material 

 to be used in the place of that which the children can reason- 

 ably be expected to make or collect for themselves. It should 

 rather be a storeroom for the raw material from which things 

 can be made or found out. I know there are those who have 

 the opposite view, but they fail to see the real purpose of the use 

 of material in education. Knowledge gained from material 

 should come through as many senses and employ as many activi- 

 ties as possible, and the getting of knowledge so should necess- 

 itate, wherever possible, the acquiring of useful skill. Such an 

 end can seldom be attained with formal, purchased apparatus. 

 As David Starr Jordan expressed it recently in regard to excess- 

 ive equipment in scientific laboratories, "students are strength- 

 ened by endeavor, not by facilities". 



Fourth. The purpose of the museum is not to provide ma- 

 terial concerning which the teachers may merely talk and perform 

 demonstrations before the pupils. I do not mean that this should 

 never be done, but I mean that it should seldom be done. A 

 scientist connected with one of the local institutions expressed 

 to the writer grave regrets that such a slightly educative use as 

 the one I have just condemned was made of materials which he 

 took the trouble to place at the disposal of some of the teachers. 

 This gentleman thinks that individual effort and responsibility 

 on the part of the pupils concerning some definite end to be at- 

 tained, or in other words, "experience, is the best school master". 



To be affirmative, I hope I have just made it clear in con- 

 nection with the above negations that the school museum above 

 all in large cities should be an unostentatious scheme for pro- 

 viding children with material for some of the activities of which 

 city life tends so to deprive them. All of the efforts of the busy 



