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
It is said that nature-study teaching is not thorough and therefore is
undesirable. Much that is good in teaching has been sacrificed for what
we call "thoroughness,"--which in many cases means only a perfunctory
drill in mere facts. One cannot teach a pupil to be really interested in
any natural object or phenomenon until the pupil sees accurately and
reasons correctly. Accuracy is a prime requisite in any good
nature-study teaching, for accuracy is truth and it develops power. It
is better that a pupil see twenty things accurately, and see them
himself, than that he be confined to one thing so long that he detests
it. Different subjects demand different methods of teaching. The method
of mathematics cannot be applied to dandelions and polliwogs.
The first essential in nature-study is actually to see the thing or the
phenomenon. It is positive, direct, discriminating, accurate
observation. The second essential is to understand why the thing is so,
or what it means. The third essential is the desire to know more, and
this comes of itself and thereby is unlike much other effort of the
schoolroom. The final result should be the development of a keen
personal interest in every natural object and phenomenon.
Real nature-study cannot pass away. We are children of nature, and we
have never appreciated the fact so much as we do now. But the more
closely we come into touch with nature, the less do we proclaim the fact
abroad. We may hear less about it, but that will be because we are
living nearer to it and have ceased to feel the necessity of advertising
it.
Much that is called nature-study is only diluted and sugar-coated
science. This will pass. Some of it is mere sentimentalism. This also
will pass. With the changes, the term nature-study may fall into disuse;
but the name matters little so long as we hold to the essence.
All new things must be unduly emphasized, else they cannot gain a
foothold in competition with things that are established. For a day,
some new movement is announced in the daily papers, and then, because we
do not see the head lines, we think that the movement is dead; but
usually when things are heralded they have only just appeared. So long
as the sun shines and the fields are green, we shall need to go to
nature for our inspiration and our respite; and our need is the greater
with every increasing complexity of our lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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