General Methods 77 



4. THE TEXT-BOOK AND RECITATION METHOD is 

 too familiar to need any extended notice. It consists 

 in assigning lessons in a book, and in due course of 

 time calling on the pupils to repeat what they have 

 learned. This is virtually reading about nature, and 

 then often merely repeating what the author has said 

 on the subject. On the part of the teacher the reci- 

 tation consists in asking questions on the various chap- 

 ters assigned; or else in merely asking the pupil to 

 discuss such and such a topic labeled in the book 

 with its appropriate title. 



In this form it is the crudest way of teaching nature 

 study. When we consider that a text-book is at best 

 only a collection of the thoughts about natural objects 

 of some one individual, we must feel that this is not 

 nature study at all. It is book study. The word 

 comes before the idea, and the pupil is either merely 

 interpreting symbols, reading his own confused thoughts 

 into the author's language, or else merely repeating 

 words which mean nothing to him. Nature study is 

 reacting to the real object, coming face to face with 

 the thing, and getting ideas, or the elements of ideas, 

 through actual sensation. Before this has been 

 done the text-book is merely a riddle, taxing the 

 pupil's ingenuity to guess what it all means. It is 

 very much like asking a child to tell all about a thing, 

 but insisting before doing so that he must not see, 

 hear, touch, taste, smell, or handle it. 



The best that can be said of this method is that it 

 is better than nothing at all, especially if the text is 

 illustrated and the meaning of the illustration explained 

 by the teacher. Pupils often consider figures in text- 

 books as mere ornaments, not realizing that the figures 

 are intended to explain the text. Manifestly nature 

 study, in this form, cannot be introduced before the 

 pupil has learned to read. This again is reversing 

 the order of nature. For one important object of 



