LEAFLET II.
THE NATURE-STUDY MOVEMENT.[3]
By L. H. BAILEY.
The nature-study movement is the outgrowth of an effort to put the child into contact and sympathy with its own life.
It is strange that such a movement is necessary. It would seem to be natural and almost inevitable that the education of the child should place it in intimate relation with the objects and events with which it lives. It is a fact, however, that our teaching has been largely exotic to the child; that it has begun by taking the child away from its natural environment; that it has concerned itself with the subject-matter rather than with the child. This is the marvel of marvels in education.
Let me illustrate by a reference to the country school. If any man were to find himself in a country wholly devoid of schools, and were to be set the task of originating and organizing a school system, he would almost unconsciously introduce some subjects that would be related to the habits of the people and to the welfare of the community. Being freed from traditions, he would teach something of the plants and animals and fields and people. Yet, as a matter of fact, what do our rural schools teach? They usually teach the things that the academies and the colleges and the universities have taught—that old line of subjects that is supposed, in its higher phases, to lead to "learning." The teaching in the elementary school is a reflection of old academic methods. We really begin our system at the wrong end—with a popularizing and simplifying of methods and subjects that are the product of the so-called higher education. We should begin with the child. "The greatest achievement of modern education," writes Professor Payne, "is the gradation and correlation of schools, whereby the ladder of learning is let down from the university to secondary schools, and from these to the schools of the people." It is historically true that the common schools are the products of the higher or special schools, and this explains why it is that so much of the common-school work is unadapted to the child. The kindergarten and some of the manual-training, are successful revolts against all this. It seems a pity that it were ever necessary that the ladder of learning be "let down;" it should be stood on the ground.
The crux of the whole subject lies in the conception of what education is. We all define it in theory to be a drawing out and a developing of the powers of the mind; but in practice we define it in the terms of the means that we employ. We have come to associate education with certain definite subjects, as if no other sets of subjects could be made the means of educating a mind. One by one, new subjects have forced themselves in as being proper means for educating. All the professions, natural science, mechanic arts, politics, and last of all agriculture, have contended for a place in educational systems and have established themselves under protest. Now, any subject, when put into pedagogic form, is capable of being the means of educating a man. The study of Greek is no more a proper means of education than the study of Indian corn is. The mind may be developed by means of either one. Classics and calculus are no more divine than machines and potatoes are. We are much in the habit of speaking of certain subjects as leading to "culture;" but this is really factitious, for "culture" is the product only of efficient teaching, whatever the subject-matter may be. So insistent have we been on the employing of "culture studies" that we seem to have mistaken the means of education for the object or result of education. What a man is, is more important than what he knows. Anything that appeals to a man's mind is capable of drawing out and training that mind; and is there any subject that does not appeal to some man's mind? The subject may be Sanskrit literature, hydraulics, physics, electricity, or agriculture—all may be made the means whereby men and women are educated, all may lead to what we ought to know as culture. The particular subject with which the person deals is incidental, for
"A man's a man for a' that and a' that."
Is there, then, to be no choice of subjects? There certainly is. It is the end of education to prepare the man or woman better to live. The person must live with his surroundings. He must live with common things. The most important means with which to begin the educational process, therefore, are those subjects that are nearest the man. Educating by means of these subjects puts the child into first-hand relation with his own life. It expands the child's spontaneous interest in his environment into a permanent and abiding sympathy and philosophy of life. I never knew an exclusive student of classics or philosophy who did not deplore his lack of touch with his own world. These common subjects are the natural, primary, fundamental, necessary subjects. Only as the child-mind develops should it be taken on long flights to extrinsic subjects, distant lands, to things far beyond its own realm; and yet, does not our geography teaching still frequently begin with the universe or with the solar system?
In the good time coming, geography will not begin with a book at all, as, in fact, it does not now with many teachers. It may end with one. It will begin with physical features in the very neighborhood in which the child lives—with brooks and lakes and hills and fields. Education should begin always with objects and phenomena. We are living in a text-book and museum age. First of all, we put our children into books, sometimes even into books that tell about the very things at the child's door, as if a book about a thing were better than the thing itself. So accustomed are we to the book-route that we regard any other route as unsystematic, unmethodical, disconnected. Books are only secondary means of education. We have made the mistake of considering them primary. This mistake we are rapidly correcting. As the book is relegated to its proper sphere, we shall find ourselves free to begin with the familiar end of familiar things.