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
The future course of education will develop many means of training the
child mind. Heretofore these means have been few and the result has been
narrow. We shall see agricultural, commercial, social subjects put into
pedagogic form and be made the agencies whereby minds are drawn out.
These will be at least as efficient as the customary methods that we
happen thus far to have employed. How much of one or how much of another
is a detail that must be left to the future. Nor does it follow that the
old-time subjects are to pass away. They will be an important part of
the system, but not the whole system. These new subjects are now coming
into the schools as rapidly, perhaps, as they can be assimilated. It is
a general feeling that our schools already are overcrowded with
subjects; and this may be true. The trouble is that while we are
introducing new ideas as to subjects, we are still holding to old ideas
as to curriculums and courses of study. We will break up our schools
into different kinds; we will employ more teachers; we will not endeavor
to train all children alike; we will find that we may secure equal
results from many kinds of training; we will consider the effect on the
pupil to be of much greater importance than the developing of the
particular subject that he pursues; there are many men of many minds;
some system will be evolved whereby individual capabilities will be
developed to the full; the means will be related to the pupil: one of
the factors will be subjects making up the environment of the pupil that
lives in the country.
My plea, therefore, is that agricultural and country life subjects
become the means of educating some of the pupils of at least some of the
schools. To be sure, we have already introduced "natural science" into
many of the schools, but, for the most, part, this has worked down from
the college and, necessarily, it usually stops at the high school. We
need something much more vital for the secondary schools than science as
commonly taught. The great nature-study movement is an expression, as
yet imperfect, of the feeling that there should be some living
connection between the school life and the real life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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