The Ecological Method in Teaching Botany 99 
exceptional, as well as desultory and unchecked. Certainly it cannot 
be gainsaid that the serious faults of current university and college 
teaching are due to the failure not only to realise that teaching is 
as proper a subject for investigation as botany, chemistry, or psy¬ 
chology, but also to recognise that it will cease to be a mass of 
undigested opinions only when the methods and criteria of research 
are consistently applied to its reconstruction. 
It is not the purpose of this paper to deal with the fetishes and 
traditions that cluster so thickly about university teaching. These 
are among the most serious obstacles to its progress, since they are 
so often employed as substitutes for actual thinking about the 
matter. They are exemplified by the threadbare statements that 
any method gives satisfactory results in the hands of a good teacher 
and that the content suited to a special student is equally good for 
a general one. Even more unfortunate is the custom that demands 
for the lecture the ablest and most experienced members of the 
staff, and assigns to the laboratory the newest and most callow of 
assistants, because of the prestige of the one and the so-called 
drudgery of the other. While these and other shibboleths are unim¬ 
portant to the teacher who approaches his problem in th$ spirit of 
research, they do serve as touchstones by which to recognise the 
forward-looking men on whom the burden of making teaching a 
science must fall. 
To those who regard teaching as dependent upon experimental 
and quantitative investigation, the problem is essentially one in 
ecological research. This is equivalent to saying that it is a problem 
involving responses to stimuli, which can be adequately studied 
only by means of measurement and experiment. The essence of this 
is the community or group consisting of the teacher and students, 
in which response, reaction, and correlation can be measured in an 
environment that also permits of measurement. From the stand¬ 
point of the teacher investigation can be directed specially toward 
environment, methods, content and materials, or results, but each 
must receive its proper attention in a successful system. While the 
value of the final product can be determined only by the measurement 
of results, the desired results can be secured only by the experimental 
treatment of environment, method, and content. Although the 
student is much more of an individual than the plant or animal, his 
individual and community responses are susceptible of fairly accurate 
study and measurement. 
The scrutiny of objectives is the first and perhaps most difficult 
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