352 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:8— Nov., 1915 



teaching formal science, — ^when he is thinking more of the child he 

 may be teaching nature-study. 



The teachers who depend upon a printed list of lessons for the 

 subjects of their nature-study work are likely to teach about the 

 robin and the grasshopper much as they do about Red Jacket and 

 Martha Washington. They will go to the library for preparation 

 and to the class-room with information supplemented by pictures 

 and dead relics for illustration if they can obtain them. It is yet 

 the commonest misapprehension to confuse information about 

 natural objects with heuristic nature-study. Pedagogically the 

 one may be as different from the other as a horse-chestnut is from 

 a chestnut horse. 



In genuine nature-study, the pupil is an investigator; he is 

 doing to find out or to enjoy. In discovering his environment 

 thru his self-activity he is accomplishing a greater theory — namely 

 discovering himself. His powers and his interests are revealed to 

 himself as well as to his teacher and it is thru these powers and 

 interests that the teacher should view the environment in order 

 to select the most advantageous educational experience for the 

 pupil. 



It does not follow that in making such selection a printed course 

 of study is useless to the teacher. A program of topics in a 

 knowledge subject — arithmetic for example — may very well be 

 rigidly prescriptive — but in nature it should never be other than 

 suggestive. Tl^is difference ought to be made explicit in the direc- 

 tions accompanying any course of nature -study. 



At a certain teachers' convention an afternoon was wholly 

 devoted to nature-study. Three papers were read by as many 

 teachers on plants, birds and insects respectively; three other sub- 

 divisions were to be treated the next afternoon. The discussion 

 on the first afternoon's work was opened vigorously by a teacher 

 declaring that he had taught for thirty-eight years to the satisfac- 

 tion of his patrons but that if he were to be required to inform 

 himself about, and teach, all that had been set forth that afternoon 

 he would prefer to be placed on the superannuation list. His 

 attitude — a too common one — ^is to regard the nature-study work 

 as so much more knowledge to be crammed into the pupils' minds. 

 It is as tho a groom, hired to take care of a prospective racer, on 

 being shown the well-filled mows and granary, should be frightened 

 at the thought of having to put all that "feed" into the colt. The 



