Cornell Nature-Study Leaflets: Being a selection, with revision, from the teachers' leaflets, home nature-study lessons, junior naturalist monthlies and other publications from the College of Agriculture, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1896-1904New York State College of Agriculture
History
Cornell Nature-Study Leaflets: Being a selection, with revision, from the teachers' leaflets, home nature-study lessons, junior naturalist monthlies and other publications from the College of Agriculture, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1896-1904
New York State College of Agriculture
Natural history; Nature study
Likewise, the subjects selected for our nature-study work must be
governed by conditions and not wholly by ideals. We are sometimes asked
why we do not take up topics more distinctly agricultural or economic.
The answer is that we take subjects that teachers will use. We would
like, for example, to give more attention to insect subjects, but it is
difficult to induce teachers to work with them. If distinctly
agricultural topics alone were used, the movement would have very little
following and influence. Moreover, it is not our purpose to teach
technical agriculture in the common schools, but to inculcate the habit
of observing, to suggest work that has distinct application to the
conditions in which the child lives, to inspire enthusiasm for country
life, to aid in home-making, and to encourage a general movement towards
the soil. These matters cannot be forced. In every effort by every
member of the extension staff, the betterment of agricultural conditions
has been the guiding impulse, however remote from that purpose it may
have seemed to the casual observer.
We have found by long experience that it is unwise to give too much
condensed subject-matter. The individual teacher can give subject-matter
in detail because personal knowledge and enthusiasm can be applied. But
in general correspondence and propagandist work this cannot be done.
With the Junior Naturalist, for example, the first impulse is to inspire
enthusiasm for some bit of work which we hope to take up. This
enthusiasm is inspired largely by the organization of clubs and by the
personal correspondence that is conducted between the Bureau and these
clubs and their members. It is the desire, however, to follow up this
general movement with instruction in definite subject-matter with the
teacher. Therefore, a course in Home Nature-study was formally
established under the general direction of Mrs. Mary Rogers Miller. It
was designed to carry on the experiment for one year, in order to
determine whether such a course would be productive of good results and
to discover the best means of prosecuting it. These experimental results
were very gratifying. Nearly 2,000 New York teachers are now regularly
enrolled in the Course, the larger part of whom are outside the
metropolitan and distinctly urban conditions. Every effort is made to
reach the rural teacher.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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