enumerated below can be secured without it. The acquisition of this knowledge has 

 educational value, in proportion to the method emplo)'ed and the knowledge itself helps to 

 give the child a command over his environment that animals, savages and the uneducated do 

 not possess. Knowledge may be considered worth while that enables the individual to cause 

 two grains to grow where there would be but one, to predict the approach of important 

 weather changes or to ward off an attack of typhoid or blood poisoning. The rich fund of 

 ideas acquired in the Nature work will serve as a basis for the apperception of the thought 

 subjects of the elementary school; science, geography, literature and history. If one 

 attempts to develop either of these subjects in the primary grades the necessity is at once felt 

 for the Nature basis and the historical order of the development of these subjects becomes the 

 pedagogical order. 



4. BASIS FOR EXPRESSION WORK. The greatest distaste which the child has for the 

 school, aside from the restraint imposed, centers about the expression work. An interesting 

 and profitable exercise for any grade teacher would be to have her pupils indicate upon 

 unsigned slips of paper the subject, or subjects, that they are least in love with. Under 

 usual conditions the subjects mentioned most frequently will be expression subjects and the 

 reason for the disfavor will not be difficult to locate. Children are called upon to express 

 themselves in various ways when they have nothing to express and, as Dewey has said, 

 "there is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say 

 something." They must commit so many pages of strange words, fill so man}' pages of a 

 writing tablet, or drawing book and periodically prepare a "composition" upon some subject 

 about which they care little and know less. This will be in large part remedied if the 

 impression is allowed to precede the expression. There must be a certain amount of substantial 

 work done along this line, which the average child will scarcely view with entire favor, but it 

 is wise to secure in its doing the greatest possible interest. These expression subjects are of 

 such a nature that they can be developed most naturally, and hence most easily, by following 

 again the historic order and basing them upon the Nature work and the above enumerated 

 thought subjects. Any attempt to develop expression work entirely independently of these 

 subjects, and it may and is being done, will meet with the disfavor of the pupil and the 

 amount accomplished can not be as great as when pupil and teacher are working unitedly and 

 happily towards a common end. Superintendents and school officers should simply hold the 

 teacher responsible for results and this will probably be done when the teachers have 

 demonstrated that they are experts in their line. This does not mean that any less time will 

 be devoted to the expression work of the school, but simply that its various phases will be 

 developed as the desire arises for the expression of ideas acquired in the Nature Study and 

 thought work of the school. 



5. ETHICAL TRAINING. The disciples of the illustrious Herbart grant to the Nature 

 studies high value in the training of character but claim that the> have no ethical content in 

 themselves. They are to be thought of as ethical instruments to the extent that they make 

 the individual careful, industrious, thoughtful and regardful of the truth (See De Garmo's 

 "Herbart and the Herbartians," pages 121 and 247.) They concern themselves with facts 

 and their explanation, rather than good and bad deeds of men, as narrated in literature and 

 history. This must be admitted to be true for genuine science and geography, which will be 

 developed from the Nature studies, but is not necessarily true for the Nature work that 

 should find its way into the elementary schools. This work is not to cease with the simple 

 observations upon the material but reaches out and establishes vital relations with the child 

 himself. Herein lies the real moral content. Starting with the formidable list of undesirable 

 ethical traits, supposedly inherited from hunting and fishing man, the first higher trait of 

 character to be developed is sympathy. But sympathy for what ? Preferably for other human 

 beings first and then later for animals and plants. If we are correct in assuming that 

 sympathy for animal life was developed first during the pastoral life and then transferred to 

 mankind, then the historical order becomes again the pedagogical order. In the home every 

 child should have one or more pets, not only to play with but to care for. At school there 

 should be moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, ants and bees, frogs and toads, rabbits, birds, 

 plants and trees in the care of which he has his full share. The savage impulse to kill can 

 be fully eliminated only by displacing it with the impulse to preserve and when the process is 

 complete, hunting and fishing can no longer be indulged in as sport. Such a boy will no 

 longer deliberately and gleefully pull the wings from a fly, crush the life out of a toad, wring 



34 



