of experience. Mr. Wirt in the Gary, Ind., schools has found this so true that the regular English required by the state curriculum has been supplemented by “application periods in English.” In these hours the class in carpentry or cooking discusses the English used in doing their work in those subjects, and corrects from the language point of view any written work done as part of their other activity. A pupil in one of these classes, who had been corrected for a mistake in grammar, was overheard saying, “Well, why didn’t they tell us that in English?” to which her neighbor answered, “They did, but we didn’t know what they were talking about.”
In some schools as in the Francis Parker School, Chicago, and in the Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., English is not taught as a separate subject to the younger grades, but the pupils have compositions to write for their history lessons, keep records of their excursions, and of other work where they do not use text-books. The emphasis is put on helping the child to express his ideas; but such work affords ample opportunity for the drill in the required mechanics of writing. Grammar no longer appears as a separate subject in the Chicago public school curriculum; the teacher gives a lesson in grammar every time any one in the classroom talks and with every written exercise.
The pupils build the schoolhouses. (Interlaken School, Ind.)
However, grammar can be given a purpose and made interesting even to eleven-year-old children, if the pupils are helped to make their own grammar and rules by doing their own analyzing as the first step instead of the last. This is being done with great success in the Phœbe Thorn Experimental School of Bryn Mawr College. Grammar had no place on the curriculum, but the pupils asked so many questions that their teacher decided to let them discover their own grammatical rules, starting from the questions they had asked. A few minutes were taken from the English hour two or three times a week for their lessons. At the end of three months the class could analyze any simple sentence, could tell a transitive from an intransitive verb instantly, and were thoroughly familiar with the rules governing the verb to be. The grammar lesson was one of the favorite lessons; the teacher and pupils together had invented a number of games to help their drill. For example, one child had a slip of paper pinned to her back describing a sentence in grammatical terms; the class made sentences that fitted the sentence, and the first pupil had to guess what her paper said. No text book was used in the work, and the teacher started with the sentence, called it a town, and by discussion helped the pupils to divide it up into districts—singular, plural, etc. Starting from this, they developed other grammatical rules. The general tendency in the progressive schools to-day, nevertheless, seems to be toward the elimination of the separate study of grammar, and toward making it and the remainder of the English work (with the exception of literature) a part of other subjects which the class is studying.
The motto of the boys’ school at Interlaken, Ind., “To teach boys to live,” is another way of saying, “learning by doing.” Here this is accomplished, not so much by special devices to render the curriculum more vital and concrete, and by the abolition of text-books with the old-fashioned reservoir and pump relation of pupil and teacher, as by giving the boys an environment which is full of interesting things that need to be done.
The school buildings have been built by the pupils, including four or five big log structures, the plans being drawn, the foundations dug and laid, and the carpentry and painting on the building done by boy labor. The electric light and heating plant is run by the boys, and all the wiring and bulbs were put in and are kept in repair by them. There is a six hundred acre farm, with a dairy, a piggery and hennery, and crops to be sowed and gathered. Nearly all this work is also done by pupils; the big boys driving the reapers and binders and the little boys going along to see how it is done. The inside of the houses are taken care of in the same way by the students. Each boy looks after his own room, and the work in the corridors and schoolrooms is attended to by changing shifts. There is a lake for swimming and canoeing, and plenty of time for the conventional athletics. Most of the boys are preparing for college, but this outdoor and manual work does not mean that they have to take any longer for their preparation than the boy in the city high school.
The school has also bought the local newspaper from the neighboring village and edits and prints a four-page weekly paper of local and school news. The boys gather the news, do much of the writing and all of the editing and printing, and are the business managers, getting advertisements and tending to the subscription list. The instructors in the English department give the boys any needed assistance. They do all these things, not because they want to know certain processes that will help them earn a living after they are through school, but because to use tools, to move from one kind of work to another, to meet different kinds of problems, to exercise outdoors, and to learn to supply one’s daily needs are educating influences, which develop skill, initiative, independence, and bodily strength—in a word, character and knowledge.
Work in nature study is undergoing reorganization in many schools in all parts of the country. The attempt is to vitalize the work, so that pupils shall actually get a feeling for plants and animals, together with some real scientific knowledge, not simply the rather sentimental descriptions and rhapsodizings of literature. It is also different from the information gathering type of nature study, which is no more real science than is the literary type. Here the pupils are taught a large number of isolated facts, starting from material that the teacher gathers in a more or less miscellaneous way; they learn all about one object after another, each one unrelated to the others or to any general plan of work. Even though a child has gone over a large number of facts about the outdoor world, he gains little or nothing which makes nature itself more real or more understandable.
If nature study is turned into a science, the real material of the subject must be at hand for the students; there must be a laboratory, with provision for experimentation and observation. In the country this is easy, for nature is just outside the school doors and windows. The work can be organized in the complete way that has already been described in the schools at Fairhope and Columbia.
The Cottage School at Riverside, Ill., and the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich, Conn., both put a great deal of stress on their nature study work. At the former, the children have a garden where they plant early and late vegetables, so that they can use them for their cooking class in the spring and fall; the pupils do all the work here, plant, weed, and gather the things. Even more important is the work they do with animals. They have, for example, a rare bird that is as much a personality in the school life as any of the children, and the children, having cared for him and watched his growth and habits, have become much more interested in wild birds. In the backyard is a goat, the best liked thing on the place, which the children have raised from a little kid; and they still do all the work of caring for him. They are encouraged in every way to watch and report on the school pets and also on the animals they find in the woods.
In the Little School in the Woods at Greenwich outdoor work is the basis of the whole school organization. Nature study plays a large part in this. Groups of pupils take long walks through the woods in all seasons and weathers, learning the trees in all their dresses, and the flowers which come with each season. They learn to know the birds and their habits; they study insects in the same way, and learn about the stars. In fact, so much of their time is spent out of doors, that the pupils acquire first hand a large fund of knowledge of the world of nature in all its phases. The basis of this work, the director of the school calls Woodcraft; he believes that experience in the things the woodman does—riding, hunting, camping, scouting, mountaineering, Indian-craft, boating, etc.—will make strong, healthy, and independent young people with well developed characters and a true sense of the beauty of nature. The nature study then is a part of this other training. A teacher is always with the pupils, whether they are boating, walking, or gardening, to explain what they are doing and why, and to call their attention to the things about them. There is no doubt that the children in the school, even the very little ones, have a knowledge and appreciation of nature which are very rare even among country children.
Nature study in
