98 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [13:3— Mar., 1917 



and on designating the profession, were advised to take a classical 

 course. Whether the high school principal gave the advice with 

 the approbation of the normal school principal is a question. 

 But the result is evident. Many of them were born with the 

 idiosyncracies of my farmer friend. No skillful incitement 

 to interest, no well developed lesson, no generalization, no formu- 

 lation, no application, no drill could have made them close 

 observers of natural phenomena or could have brought them 

 near to nature's heart with anything but a literary or philosophic 

 appreciation of her influences. 



There is, in many school systems, nature-study at the bottom, 

 and science at the top, but a vacuum in the middle. The kinder- 

 garten and first grade have much work with plants and birds, 

 and insects, and domestic animals; the second grade has an appre- 

 ciable amount ; there is a diminution in grade three, and a trace 

 in grade four. But the grammar grades are bare of everything 

 but the deleterious effects of alcohol and the rotation and denuda- 

 tion of the earth. And this is largely due to the lack of scientific 

 knowledge among teachers. 



But the chief reason of the teacher's reluctance is her common 

 sense. She has in every class pupils like the young college 

 graduate. He has gone now where his ignorance of mathematics 

 can do no harm. For the same reason which causes heated air 

 to rise, he has become a superintendent. And now he hires a 

 business college girl at ten dollars a week to calculate for him. 

 But every teacher knows how he got his degree. He has the 

 intellectual maturity, so far as mathematics go, of a Tierra del 

 Fuegian, but he has a diploma. And he got it by bluffing, by 

 cheating, by remembering, and by taking chances. His neighbors 

 from the third grade up, all boosted him with kindly common 

 sense, and his professors overlooked errors, ignored audible 

 promptings, gave credit for vicarious class efforts, and made out 

 fool-proof questions — all as palliatives for the preposterous 

 conditions which systematizations of the unsystematizable 

 produce. 



Now a teacher who has to teach Newton's principles to a 

 Tierra del Fuegian, Adam Smith's economics to a direct descendant 

 of Ashurbanipal, Myron's sculpture to a Hungarian peasant, 

 and the morality of Jesus to congenital Hotentots doesn't want 

 to add the interpretation of Thoreau and Theodore Gill to the 



