86 



garden, and field, and the life histories of common household 

 moulds and bacteria. Much of this should coordinate with 

 hygiene, home, and community sanitation, and the great move- 

 ment for national health ; and, if this is done, there will be no 

 danger of interest flagging after once being kindled. 



Local and national forestry problems, timber resources and ^ 

 water conservation and the knowledge of trees in relation to 

 landscape improvement and roadside planting are other blocks of 

 general human interest which the high school course in biology 

 on the plant side should utilize to the full. 



All the above suggests making high school botany strongly 

 biological, and this seems to me to be the tendency both abroad 

 and in this country. Physiological botany, excepting a very 

 few fundamentals related to cultivation and plant breeding, I 

 should think ought to await the college and university courses. 



C. F. Hodge. 



Clark University, 

 Worcester, Mass. 



IV 



It is not easy to answer this question in a few words. There 

 may be several different reasons why the subject of botany does 

 not " more often create a lasting interest," some of which may 

 apply with greater force to one school system than to another. 

 It makes a difference, too, in which year of the high school the 

 subject is taught. In what is said below, it is assumed that the 

 course is given in -either the first or second year of the high 

 school. 



It seems to me that one reason why botany does not arouse a 

 more lasting interest in the pupils lies in the general lack of 

 knowledge on the part of teachers of the nature of the pupils they 

 are aiming to instruct. It is not that the teachers do not know 

 their subject, but that they do not know their pupils. The high 

 school teacher of science fresh from his college training has had no 

 practice in the art of teaching, but this defect time will remedy. 

 He has no adequate knowledge, usually, of psychology, espe- 

 cially child psychology, and without this he is unable to 

 understand the adolescent in his true perspective, as related to 

 the child that was, on the one hand, and to the man or woman 



