EXPERIENCES OF THE NATURAL WORLD

The first experiences the child gains from the world of nature are those of beauty, of sound, colour and smell.  Flowers at first are just lovely and sweet-smelling; the keen senses of a child are more deeply satisfied with colour and scent than we have any idea of, unless some faint memory of what it meant remains with us.  But he begins to grasp real scientific truth from his experiences with the elements which have for him such a mysterious attraction; by the very contact with water something in the child responds to its stimulus.  Mud and sand have their charms, quite intangible, but universal, from prince to coster; a bonfire is something that arouses a kind of primeval joy.  Again, race experience reproducing itself may account for all this, and it must be satisfied.  The demand for contact with the rest of nature is a strong and fierce part of human nature, and it means the growth of something in life that we cannot do without.  We induce children to come into our schools when this hunger is at its fiercest, and very often we do nothing to satisfy it, but set them in rooms to look at things inanimate when their very being is crying out for life.  “I want something and I don’t know what to want” is the expression of a state very frequent in children, and not infrequent in grown-up people, because they have been balked of something.

How, then, can we provide for their experience of this side of life?  We have tried to do so in the past by object and nature lessons, but we must admit that they are not the means by which young children seek to know life, or by which they appreciate its beauty.  We have been trying to kill too many birds with one stone in our economic way; “to train the powers of observation,” “to teach a child to express himself,” “to help a child to gain useful knowledge about living things,” have been the most usual aims.  And the method has been that of minute examination of a specimen from the plant or animal world, utterly detached from its surroundings, considered by the docile child in parts, such as leaves, stem, roots, petals, and uses; or head, wings, legs, tail, and habits.  The innocent listener might frequently think with reason that a number lesson rather than a nature lesson was being given.  The day of the object lesson is past, and to young children the nature lesson must become nature work.

It is in the term “nature lesson” that the root of the mischief lies:  nature is not a lesson to the young child, it is an interest from which he seeks to gain more pleasure, by means of his own activity:  plants encourage him to garden, animals stir his desire to watch, feed and protect; water, earth and fire arouse his craving to investigate and experiment:  there is no motive for passive study at this juncture, and without a motive or purpose all study leads to nothing.  Adults compare, and count the various parts of a living thing for purposes