Thammasat University students interested in education, botany, genetics, agriculture, rural sociology, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
The Nature-Study Idea: And Related Writings is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501772634/
The TU Library collection includes a number of books about different aspects of nature study.
The new book is by the American botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey.
Liberty Hyde Bailey made a systematic study of cultivated plants, transforming U.S. horticulture from a craft to an applied science.
He had a direct influence on the development of genetics, plant pathology, and agriculture.
He was considered the father of rural sociology.
He also helped popularize nature study, a popular education movement that originated in the United States and spread throughout the English-speaking world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Nature study attempted to reconcile scientific investigation with spiritual, personal experiences gained from interaction with the natural world.
Liberty Hyde Bailey presented the following description of nature study:
NATURE-STUDY, as a process, is seeing the things that one looks at, and the drawing of proper conclusions from what one sees. Its purpose is to educate the child in terms of his environment, to the end that his life may be fuller and richer. Nature-study is not the study of a science, as of botany, entomology, geology, and the like. That is, it takes the things at hand and endeavors to understand them, without reference primarily to the systematic order or relationships of objects. It is informal, as are the objects which one sees. It is entirely divorced from mere definitions, or from formal explanations in books. It is therefore supremely natural. It trains the eye and the mind to see and to comprehend the common things of life; and the result is not directly the acquiring of science but the establishing of a living sympathy with everything that is.
In The Nature-Study Idea (1903), Liberty Hyde Bailey proposed adding the study of nature to school curricula not just to instill knowledge about the natural world but as a method to awaken the child’s spirit and inform their worldview
The aim was to enable the children to develop a thoughtful and competent love for nature that grew from their curiosity about the natural world.
“The first essential,” he wrote, “is an intense love of nature,” and all else would follow in due course, including scientific knowledge and ethical awareness.
That intense love of nature grew best out of doors and on the child’s terms.
The nature-study movement aimed to enable an individual to use their senses, keep their eyes open, and awaken to “the beauty as well as to the wonders which are there.”
The author observed about the educational process:
The tendency is to go too far afield for the subject-matter. We are more likely to know the wonders of China or Brazil than of our own brooks and woods.
If the subject-matter is of such kind that the children can see the objects as they come and go from the school, and collect some of them, the results will be the better. As the pupil matures, he should be taken out to the world activities.
It is a sound educational principle that the child should not be taught mere dilutions of science. The young child cannot understand cross-fertilization of flowers, and should not be taught the subject. It is beyond the child’s realm. When we teach it to young children, we are only translating what grown-up investigators have discovered by means of faithful search.
At best, it will only be an exotic thing to the child. Pollen and stamens are not near and dear to the child.
There are three steps in the teaching of nature-study:
(1) The fact,
(2) The reason for the fact,
(3) The interrogation left in the mind of the pupil.
It is impossible to find a natural-history object from which these three factors cannot be drawn, for every object is a fact and every fact has a cause, and children may be interested in both the fact and the cause. It may be better, of course, to choose definite subjects, taking pains, at least
at first, to choose those having emphatic characters.
But even in the dullest days of winter sufficient materials may be found to keep the interest aflame. A twig or a branch may be at hand. There should be enough specimens to supply each child. Let the teacher ask the pupils what they see. The replies will discover the first factor in the teaching— the fact.
However, not every fact is significant to the teacher or to the particular pupils. It remains for the teacher to pick out the fact or answer that is most significant. The teacher should know what is significant and he should keep the point clearly before him. One pupil says that the twig is long; another that it is brown; another that it is crooked; another that it is from an apple tree; another that it has several unlike branchlets or parts. Now, this last reply may appeal to the teacher as most significant.
Stop the questioning and open the second epoch in the instruction—the reason why no two parts are alike. As before, from the great number of responses the significant reason may be developed: it is because no two parts have lived under exactly the same conditions. One had more room or more sunlight and it grew larger. The third epoch follows naturally: are there any two objects in nature exactly alike? Let the pupils think about it.
Choose a stone. If similar stones are in the hands of the pupils, you ask first for the observation or the fact. One says that the stone is long; another, it is light; another, it is heavy; another, that the edges are rounded.
This latter fact is very significant. You stop the observation and ask why it is rounded. Some one replies that it is because it is water-worn. Query: Are all stones in brooks rounded? Numberless applications and suggestions can be made from this simple lesson. What becomes of the particles that are worn away? How has soil been formed? How has the surface of the fields been shaped and molded?
It is not necessary that the teacher always know the reason. He may propose that they all find out and report. It is the strong teacher who can say: “I do not know.” […]
Knowledge begins in wonder. The consciousness of ignorance is the first result of wonder, and it leads the pupil on and on: it is the spirit of inquiry.
These illustrations are given merely as examples. They may not be ideal, but they show what can be done with very common material. In fact, the surprise and interest is often all the greater because the objects are so very common and familiar.
To my mind, one of the best of all subjects for nature-study is a brook. It affords studies of many kinds. It is near and dear to every child. It is an epitome of the nature in which we live. In miniature, it illustrates the forces that have shaped much of the earth’s surface. It reflects the sky. It is kissed by the sun. It is rippled by the wind. The minnows play in the pools. The soft weeds grow in the shallows. The grass and the dandelions lie on its banks. The moss and the fern are sheltered in the nooks. It comes one knows not whence; it flows one knows not whither. It awakens the desire to explore. It is fraught with mysteries. It typifies the flood of life. It “goes on forever.”
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)