V
ON NATURE STUDY
Since the most beautiful and ideal way of presenting the facts of the renewal of life is through nature-study, a few words as to the handling of this interesting topic may be helpful to some mothers.
In all nature-work with the child, the subjects treated should be made interesting and beautiful. This cannot be too strongly insisted upon. The child has a right to the pleasure, the elevation of sentiment, the play of imagination which the contemplation of nature is able to give in such a peculiar degree. He has a right to the romance of the flower, cloud, bird, fish, animal life, plant life, in all their ramifications. It is a part of his soul-development. Consequently, whatever is done for him should be done in such a way as not to hurt his sensibilities. His pleasure in nature should be increased, not lessened, as a result of his study.
As his knowledge expands his interest should deepen. This will almost never be the case where the first instruction is purely technical. Nothing, for instance, has deadened the interest of children in plant life so much as the study of botany. This is because the school methods have been wrong, the work being almost always approached from the wrong end. It is because the learner's mind is dammed up by difficult and to him empty technical terms. As a consequence, the course of its flow in this direction is stopped, and instead of a clear stream leaping joyfully through the woods and meadows finally to reach the great goal of the boundless ocean, it resembles rather a motionless pond, the surface of which is covered with lifeless and unlovely debris. Naturally the child seeks to escape from this uninteresting and dead pool by turning his mental energies in other directions, and too often he loses interest forever, and with it the pleasure and the vast profit that might have come to him from a different conception of the subject.
Facts about the life of the plant should be abundantly presented, and the facts as collected and told to-day are well-nigh inexhaustible as well as fascinating. True stories of plant life can be, and should be, as interesting as any other stories. Technical terms should be used at first with great restraint, and, as a rule, only where they are obviously convenient or of such universal application that they are a distinct help in developing a sense of the continuity of living things. Those that are used should be so skilfully introduced, and their meaning so thoroughly digested, that they do not seem like technical terms.
Perhaps an illustration will make this point clearer. A child who loves flowers goes to school; he is given one of his favorites and told to pull it to pieces, look at its different parts, and label them with such words as petals, sepals, pistil, stamens; to these are presently added calyx, corolla, monopetalous, polypetalous, innate, adnate, indehiscent, etc., until the child's mind resembles a lumber room of senseless rubbish, in which the flower is buried and lost. To a sensitive child this process is exceedingly painful. He often feels as though he were murdering some helpless thing he had loved, and conceals his tears and his heartache for fear of being laughed at. Less sensitive children are soon wearied and disgusted, and the love for nature which might have been aroused in them, to the sweetening and steadying of their whole after-life, receives a fatal check.
While the child's love for flowers, and his sentiment concerning them, should not be harmed by his plant work, on the other hand a certain tendency to weak sentimentality wherever encountered should be restrained. He should not be a mere receptacle for dry ashes nor yet a mush of sentimentality. The wise leader will discover the broad middle course where love of the flower shall be deepened, and, as it were, broadened, by knowledge of its wonderful structure and functions. These can be well understood without so much as one technical term, though the skilful introduction of a few helpful words will not detract at all from the pleasure of the study, and will be most convenient.
The Anemone or Wind-Flower