304 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [10:8— Nov., 1914 



One little girl was seen bringing hands full of grains from her fath- 

 er's bam. 



Her father: "What are you doing with that?" Girl: "Teacher wanted 

 me to bring samples of grains to school for our lesson in nature-study." 



Father: "You take that stuff right back into the bam and leave it there, 

 and you tell your teacher that I don't send you to school for any such tomfool- 

 ishness." 



In the same neighborhood the question : * * What kinds of insects 

 and how many will a toad eat for a meal?" set the child popula- 

 tion studying and protecting toads, and the good work restored 

 nature-study to public favor. 



So here the aim of education is not stuffing the memory with use- 

 less information but developing common sense, mental resource- 

 fulness, to study out and work out whatever it is worth while to 

 teach and to learn. The intelligent part of the public, at least is 

 ready entirely to relieve the teacher of the impossible task of try- 

 ing to know it all, if only he will teach the children in common 

 sense fashion how to find out what they really need to know. 

 ..We have purposely not stopped, till now, to differentiate be- 

 tween nature-study and civic biology. The sphere of nature-study 

 is the life and needs of the child in the home. Civic biology consists 

 in those problems that require united action of the community to 

 solve. The two fields are naturally very closely related — i. e., if 

 the life of all the homes were ideal the life of the community would 

 be. The nature-study point of view is to teach the child what he 

 needs to know. The scientific point of view is to teach the sub- 

 ject. If the scientific student cannot master the subject, he has 

 no call to study science. This line of cleavage is thus perfectly clear 

 between educating citizens and instructing specialists, and even 

 specialists ought to be men and good citizens before they become 

 specialists. The line between nature-study and science ought to 

 fall clearly between the high school and the college. It is an ad- 

 vantage, however, to change the name of the course in the high 

 school to "Civic Biology" in order to emphasize preparation for 

 active citizenship. 



The trouble with our high school biology in the past has been, 

 and, I fear, still is, that the teachers are trained in college and uni- 

 versity and, knowing nothing else, attempt to adapt the college 

 course to the high school. Indeed, most of the text -books written 

 by college or university men for the high school fall into the deep 

 old ruts and turn out to be college texts. Here is a clear point of 



