THE PLACE OF FORESTRY IN THE SCHOOL 513 



A separate course of forest study is not advocated, except in technical and 

 agricultural schools ; the curricula of our ordinary schools are already crowded. 

 The subject should rather be taken up as part of courses already established, 

 and it fits admirably and logically into many of them. American history, 

 civics, and economics, physical and commercial geography, botany, manual 

 training, nature study, and agriculture are in this day incomplete unless they 

 give attention to the forests, their uses and influences, their exploitation, and 

 the methods being advanced for their perpetuation and saner use. To begin 

 with the elemental, the forest holds for nature study a wealth of material ; 

 the study of leaves and twigs, the identification of trees in winter and summer, 

 the life of the tree and of the forest, and its influences upon the soils and 

 waters and vegetable and animal life, all furnish sources of delightful study. 

 Many of the most interesting lessons of botany can be learned from the trees. 

 They present a great variety of plant life, and many botanical phenomena can 

 be found nowhere else but in the forest. Then there is the further advantages 

 that trees show many features of plant life on a large scale and that they are 

 always accessible at all seasons of the year and are as full of interest in winter 

 as in summer. Geology and geography, if they be adequately treated, must 

 teach of the forest's influence upon land formation, soil fertility, the fixation 

 and disintegration of sand, and the regularity of stream flow. Industrial and 

 commercial geography should include a consideration of lumbering and of the 

 many other wood-using industries which form so large a bulk of the country's 

 business. Our forest areas, besides their direct control of lumbering, the 

 fourth greatest of the country's industries, of the pulpwood and cooperage 

 stock manufacturing and of the other wood-using industries and the influence 

 which their supply of wood exerts directly or indirectly upon the innum- 

 erable other great commercial pursuits, affect also every industry which 

 depends upon a regular supply of water, equable climate and fertile soils upon 

 the slopes. The influences which the forests have had upon our civilization, 

 first as an obstacle to be overcome, then as a prominent asset in the develop- 

 ment of our wealth, and today as the most important factor in the conservation 

 movement give them a definite place in the history and economics of the 

 country. The need of a knowledge of woods in wood-working courses scarcely 

 requires mention, and as for the place of forestry in agricultural studies, it 

 is a decadent and obsolute form of the science of agriculture which excludes 

 it. Forestry bears an intimate relation to agriculture and no agricultural 

 course is complete unless it treats of the place of the woodlot in its relation 

 to the farm, its value in Supplying wood for farm uses and even for the market, 

 its usefulness as a shelterbelt to the crops, the stock, and the dwellings, its 

 ability to grow on tracts of land not suited to other farm crops and the prob- 

 lems of its care and management.* 



The acknowledged tendency in the schools today is toward a judicious 

 combination of theory and practice, toward the concrete and away from the 

 abstract, toward investigation of original material rather than of reproduc- 

 tions and representations, and parallel with this tendency is an effort to get 

 the pupils more into the open air and into field work. The study of the forest 

 and of forestry as it is being generally presented for the consideration of 

 teachers admirably satisfies both of these tendencies. It is essentially an 

 out-of-door subject, it brings the student right into the woods and fields; it 

 puts him in intimate contact with real things in nature, where he can study 

 at first hand, and it makes him familiar with nature in her most beautiful 



Outlines of the study of forestry for different courses can be found in Forest Service 

 circular 130, "Forestry in the Public Schools," which may be obtained from the U. S. 

 Department of Agriculture, Washington, D C. 



