Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/384

370 No one but the teacher knows how hard it is to dispossess the minds of some students of the old inherited ideas of learning from books. They take as naturally to memorizing a page of text as young ducks to water. In fact, they come to us with no other ideas of education. Like many other mammalia, they are born blind—to the world of natural objects—and, worse than all, they learn to read before they acquire the power of sight. But, thanks to the Kindergarten system, object-teaching is coming slowly forward, and before many generations pass we may hope to have a natural method of education, because then the youth will have grown up under its vitalizing influence. Until then it may be that each teacher will strive to fit his abilities and notions to those of his pupils, and methods will vary and opinions widely differ. It seems all the more important that the ways and means of instruction should have a place in the journals which deal particularly with the subjects taught.

During the past two years the writer has attempted to lead large classes in the direction which it was hoped would develop individual research. The results have been sufficiently satisfactory to warrant a mention of the plan—not for its newness, but that it may draw out criticisms to be used in improving the method, and to suggest a similar trial by those who are similarly situated. The point, in short, of this paper is to show how a sophomore class of thirty-seven members, in an agricultural college, was, the past year, carried through a term of botany lasting seventeen weeks, and reaching from July 20th until near the middle of November. Three class-room exercises of an hour were held each week, and one afternoon weekly was spent in the botanical laboratory. The class had already taken one full year of botany, with recitation exercises occurring twice per week, and among other work each pupil had made a herbarium of fifty species, collected, pressed, mounted, and labeled by himself. The class was fully up to the average for colleges of this sort, in both years and ability, and contained fourteen ladies and twenty-three gentlemen. No text-book was used, and all formal lectures were dispensed with. The work assigned for the term was placed under five heads, namely: 1, herbarium; 2, economic subjects; 3, orders; 4, topics of research; 5, laboratory work. In the first place, fifty species, neatly mounted on standard herbarium paper, were added to the herbarium of the previous term. Each student in the lecture-room was assigned a chair with a broad table-arm for holding specimens, hand-lens, etc. During the first six weeks the class exercises were devoted to plant analyses. The specimens were collected in abundance by the students, in turn, and from three to five species were classified during the hour. Dried specimens of the several genera under consideration were brought