The Ecological Method in Teaching Botany ioi 
The basic principle of the process-inquiry system is to make the 
student as independent of the teacher as companionship in learning 
will permit. Nothing should be done for the student that he can do 
for himself, and under the sympathetic encouragement of a research 
teacher he can do everything that a course should ask him to do. 
This means that he should have an active share in planning a course 
that will suit his interests and need, in selecting and organising the 
processes and materials to be used, and in testing methods and 
measuring results. Teachers and students should be partners in the 
business of fashioning the best training possible, and of carrying its 
values over into everyday life. When this is once fully appreciated, 
the detailed methods of research teaching and learning readily be¬ 
come evident. Every method that promotes initiative, independence, 
and insight is to be encouraged, while every one that permits leaning 
upon the teacher, in the form of lecture, textbook, or notebook, is 
to be discouraged. The contention that lectures and textbooks are 
necessary because the student cannot possibly touch all the essentials 
of a course at first-hand is at fault for several reasons. It assumes 
that what a student writes in an examination represents mastery 
and not memory, and also that a set examination furnishes reliable 
evidence of what he remembers. Moreover, it is based upon an 
entire ignorance of what students can do where their initiative and 
independence are encouraged, as well as of the effect of predigested 
knowledge upon mental fibre. The teacher can quickly demonstrate 
the relative value of lectures and textbooks by means of unexpected 
tests of various sorts, of which the written examination is the least 
valuable. In most elementary and many advanced courses in botany 
the laboratory notebook belongs properly in a course of drawing, 
were it not for its indifferent quality. Many notebooks indeed 
contain nothing but labelled drawings made under the eye of the 
instructor with much docility but little understanding. Here again 
it requires but little investigation to demonstrate that what is given 
to the notebook is taken from the memory, and that a sturdy mental 
independence is not thus to be secured. 
The results obtained by the students working independently are 
compared and checked at the time by the method of group dis¬ 
cussion. In this the teacher takes just as small a part as possible, 
and the ideal is approached when the group is able to find its own 
way readily and accurately with but occasional questions or sug¬ 
gestions from him. Group discussions should always be held on the 
actual spot where the work is being done, whenever the class is 
