Nature-Study for the City Child 



Anna Allex Wright 

 Ithaca X. Y. 



It is in the grammar schools of our large cities that there is the 

 greatest need for work in nature-study. Furthermore, it is the 

 child in the crowded sections of the city that most needs this help 

 in his life. The country child has the beauties of nature always 

 around him, and he who wants to know can readily find means of 

 learning about the buttercups or the fringed gentian, the sheep or 

 the cows, the bluebird or the chickadee. The city child sees so 

 little of such life, and this little so superficially amidst the noise 

 and clamor, that he is likely to grow up without a thought on 

 these matters, and, in fact, with real thoughts on but very few 

 subjects. 



Our parks are few, widely separated, poorly located for school 

 purposes, and often appropriated for public buildings. Our 

 open spaces, once grass- covered, have become either sites for 

 monuments or concrete passage-ways. Especially is this true 

 in the crowded sections where a park could best accomplish the 

 most. The open lots, when they. do occur, are so badly beaten 

 by passing workmen and the baseball enthusiasts that almost 

 nothing can grow. The school grounds are gravel; the trees 

 are few; the flowers fewer; and in most places hardly a "weed", 

 dare show its head. No open vista or distant sky line here — just 

 street cars, telegraph poles, and grocery wagons. 



Let us broaden this outlook: Comparatively few city children 

 know what such common things as toads and grasshoppers are. 

 It is rather pathetic to see those who want to watch them, catch 

 them in some distant "vacant lot" and cany the grasshoppers 

 home in a jelly glass or the toads in a paper bag (with unlooked 

 for effect on the bag). Something is fundamentally wrong, 

 when the old fashioned aquarium, changed into a terra-aquarium — 

 with water, fish and a turtle in one side and in the other large 

 ferns — elicits the remark, "It looks like somebody was dead." 

 Did the aquarium look like a coffin or was the most intimate 

 knowledge of plants gleaned from funerals? It would be hard 

 to say just why the childish mind associated thsse things, but 

 such was the condition — a rather dampening one to the teacher's 

 ardor. 



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