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Updated: June 4, 2025
The programme needed to unite rural school and farm community is then, first, to enrich the course of study by adding nature-study and agriculture, and about these co-ordinating the conventional school subjects; second, to encourage the co-operation of the pupils, especially for the improvement of the school and its surroundings; third, to bring together for discussion and acquaintance the teachers and the patrons of the school; fourth, so far as possible to make the schoolhouse a meeting-place for the community, for young people as well as for older people, where music, art, social culture, literature, study of farming, and in fact, anything that has to do with rural education, may be fostered; and fifth, to expect the teacher to have a knowledge of the industrial and general social conditions of agriculture, especially those of the community in which her lot is cast.
Merely to describe the work that is being done through nature-study and agriculture in the public schools, through agricultural schools, through our magnificent agricultural colleges, through farmers' institutes, and especially through the experiment stations and the federal Department of Agriculture in agricultural research and in the distribution of the best agricultural information merely to inventory these movements properly would take the time available for this discussion.
In too many elementary schools the children are engaged either in laboriously doing nothing, in listening, for example, with ill-concealed yawns, to lectures on history, geography, nature-study, and the rest; or in doing what is only one degree removed from nothing, working mechanical sums, transcribing lists of spellings or pieces of composition, drawing diagrams which have no meaning for them, and so forth.
The chapter lived long enough to admit the children of at least one of its original members, and only died because Saturday morning, the only morning in the week when children are free, had important business engagements for the librarian, who feels that "Nature-study," too, plays an important part in schools now-a-days, and that in the language of "My Double", "there has been so much said, and on the whole so well said," that there is less need than there used to be of such a club, although it is a great deprivation not to have the long country walks and the Saturday readings and talks with the children.
Association with these, under right direction, will build up a habit of truthfulness, which the lying story of the cherry-tree is powerless to effect. If history is to be made an agency for moral training, it must become a nature-study. It must be the study of original documents. When it is pursued in this way it has the value of other nature-studies. But it is carried on under great limitations.
And she should not let him forget that he is not to seek information from outside sources, such information being unreliable. 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.
Thus the vegetable and animal kingdoms are mutually dependent upon each other. Neither could exist, at least in its present condition, without the other. Not only will such facts as these be interesting to most children, they will deepen the dawning consciousness of the fundamental unity of all forms of life, which it should be the province of nature-study to develop.
Biology for the young readily degenerates into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-for-the-best claptrap about adaptation, but a sure remedy is the strong tonic of agnosticism, teaching one of the best lessons science has to offer, the resolute rejection of authority.
That a young correspondent of mine entertained a contrary view was evident from a letter I received a few weeks ago from an inexperienced boy enthusiast, who was a member of a newly formed nature-study class. Here is the exact wording of the communication: "Dear Sir: 10 A. M. Wind East. Cloudy. Small bird seen on ground in orchard. Please name. P. S. All the leaves have fallen." Reporting Blanks.
To those who must consider the problem of masturbation in boarding schools, I recommend Hime's "Schoolboys' Special Immorality." Morley's "Renewal of Life," March's "Towards Racial Health," and Hall's "The Doctor's Daughter" suggest the main lines of the nature-study approach to sex-education. The Biological Foundations
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