mead] birds AXD DEFICIEXT CHILDREX 295 



is tame. Sometimes she scolds me but I would not touch her 

 nest, for I love the birds." — Thos. Lee D. 



The above story is one of many written by school children 

 of the Indiana School for Feeble-Minded Youth at Fort Wayne, 

 Indiana. Twenty pages of original bird and nature experiences 

 of these children were given in the "Indiana Arbor and Bird 

 Day Annual'' of State Superintendent Cotton in 1907-8. This 

 material furnished the basis of an institution "Reader" now in 

 the hands of the state printer for publication. The State Superin- 

 tendent in his preface of the Annual to the teachers and pupils 

 of Indiana said : "Late in the autumn I visited the school at 

 Fort Wayne and found teachers and children so mucli interested 

 in birds and nature in general that I decided to place as much 

 space at their disposal as they wished. The result is more than 

 gratifying."' 



It is a great privilege for one to be so fortunate as to come 

 in contact with the sometimes keenly perceptive powers of a 

 child to whom book learning comes with pain. What the bird 

 and bee and flower and nature rambles have done for the ordi- 

 nary boy, they have done for his slower brother. They have meant 

 just as much to the deficient child if he has been allowed to see 

 them. 



The education of the past has been too much the training 

 of the intellect, for with it crime and vice, grief and bitterness 

 have gone. Today, more than ever before, this intellect training 

 is being balanced by a moral and an aesthetic teaching. Hand 

 work serves its means rather than finds its end. but nature work 

 goes to the heart. Not the nature work of the high school botany 

 and zoolog)- of past days, taking the object to study its petals, it's 

 feathers, or its bones, but the nature work in the school of "feel- 

 ing" ajid the school of "seeing." This is the spirit of the nature 

 work in the Indiana School and it has carried its benediction into 

 the heart of the child as well as into the heart of the teacher. 



Xot so much is made of nature "study" as nature "feeling" 

 and nature "seeing." The father of Greek education said, "knowl- 

 edge" was the thing. "Know thyself." His pupil and disciple, 

 the best educated man the world has ever seen, inspired the 

 present-day teaching by answering that mere "knowledge" of 

 good was nothing, but a "functioning" of that knowledge, a 

 "living" and a "feeling" and a "doing" of that good. These chil- 

 dren never heard of a dentate, stipulate, palmate leaf or leaf 

 arrangement but they have "seen," in the sticky horse chestnut 

 bud, order, symmetry, and protection. They do not know and 

 • 



