8 NATURE STUDY AND AGRICULTURE 



affording opportunity for growth in efficiency, or that the 

 teacher is to work out her plan for it by experimentation 

 only. She must start on safe and certain ground, ground 

 which has not yet been any too clearly mapped out, but 

 she must soon arrive at the point of choosing her own path. 

 Nature study is peculiar in requiring such divergence from 

 a straight course. Its content must be as various as en- 

 vironments are various. 



Encouragement of Initiative. For some time we have 

 sought to discover what method is most serviceable in 

 training working teacher r in this subject. We have dealt 

 with average conditions and average teachers in city and 

 country schools. The problem has been mainly one of 

 fitting the subject to the teacher. The teacher has been 

 the starting point and the subject the goal. The most 

 effective part of a course so worked out has been a body of 

 lesson outlines upon familiar and important materials of 

 the environment. It has been the aim to make these 

 lessons explicit enough to insure definite results, and yet 

 not so explicit as to hinder the birth of the teacher's own 

 initiative. In fact, the type lessons are designed as a 

 means to insure properly controlled and sustained initiative 

 rather than in any way to interfere with it. 



It is a fact that the best nature study teachers we find 

 are the most self-trained. It is well that this is so, for 

 the subject will not wait for the next generation. The 

 demand for ability to teach it, especially in its agricultural 

 aspect, is too insistent and too widespread. The alert 

 teacher perceives that such training is an important ad- 

 dition to her working capital, and to the capital from 

 which she can draw for enjoyment of life as well. In so 



