82 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW (17:2— Feb., 1921 



a bit of guidance in the selection of material will possibly produce 

 better results than if we are allowed perpetually to follow our own 

 inclinations. This idea of "guidance" is not new. Too fre- 

 quently, however, it has been carried to such extremes that it has 

 developed into "requirement." Requirements are often more or 

 less odious and frequently seriously besmirch an otherwise inter- 

 esting field of knowledge. 



The requirement that we teach in nature-study five certain birds 

 a year, for example, may make it easy for the teacher to dish out an 

 allotted amount of information to the pupils without much diffi- 

 culty. The fulfillment of this requirement too frequently leads to 

 book study rather than nature-study. This same practice also has 

 the disadvantage that nearly every bit of information which goes 

 to the children must in some way come through the teacher. 

 Teachers should find their work much easier if instead of trying to 

 teach nature-study to the children, they let the children teach 

 nature-study to themselves. With the leaflets which have been 

 and will be published at hand this should not be difficult in the 

 rural schools of New York State. 



It has been brought to my attention by one teacher that the 

 teachers think that they are required to teach everything which is 

 published in the Leaflet and that they must know everything which 

 appears in the Leaflet. This is no more so than that they should 

 teach everything which appears in a dictionary and should know 

 the definition of every word in the dictionary. No one would deny 

 that a dictionary is one of the most useful of books and it is hoped 

 that the Leaflet may prove to be a more or less attractively organ- 

 ized nature-study dictionary with the ideas expressed in terms which 

 may be understood and appreciated by individuals as young as the 

 youngest school child. The "cut-out-pictures" and story sections 

 of the Leaflet for example can teach to the younger children in a 

 simple way the more serious minded facts which the life history 

 chart presents in a more orthodox manner to the older children. 



Graded Nature-Study 

 There is one danger which may arise from an attempt to grade 

 nature-study work arbitrarily. Some teachers may think they 

 should teach only the work outlined for the third and fourth grade 

 whether or not the children in these grades had had the work on the 

 same subject for the lower grades. In most cases it would seem 

 wise to start the whole school with the work outlined for the first 



