Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/33

Rh graduate who has a training worth while in the conduct of life is also well fitted to enter college for further training. In general, too, the high school must consider its individual students. A well-rounded training for one is a very lop-sided discipline for another, and the development of special interests must not be overlooked. For these reasons a considerable range of choice is necessary in a good high school. This does not, however, imply an elective system such as the colleges have found necessary. In an ideal high school system the election should be mainly in the hands of the teachers. But at the same time the wise teacher makes sure that the student maintains a continuous interest in something. The lack of such sustained interest is the main reason why most of the boys drop out of the high school to get where they will be doing something dealing with things, not words.

It is clear that even yet with all the advances or encroachments the sciences have made, the study of words still fills too large a part in our secondary schools. The traditional college education was a training in words. It is easier and cheaper to teach language than anything else. The average child learns words by rote, while other subjects demand a more complex method, and the tendency is to fill the child with words regardless of the dyspepsia and disgust the abnormal diet may produce.

In my judgment, with the average student and especially the average young man, some study of natural science ought to go with every year in the school. The child is surrounded by a world of actualities, each producing a definite effect on his senses. In an out-of-door world, he recognizes that external things are real. He knows that the sun rises in the east, and he soon learns the various phases of woodcraft and fieldcraft—how to comport himself in the presence of realities. The constancy in these relations gives to him a kind of moral training, and the knowledge he obtains he wins at first hand. It is acquired in terms of his own experience and in such terms all real and helpful knowledge must always be stated.

In our cities we can not replace the training of the farm, the knowledge of the woods and hills, but we can continue to give in some degree, the essential part of it—contact with realities and extension of knowledge in terms of experience. This is through real contact with animals, plants, rocks, chemical compounds and physical instruments, and a well-conducted scientific laboratory has the same value as out-of-doors experience, with the great addition that it can be made systematic and therefore effective for power. The value of genuine nature study, study of science in out-of-door laboratories is of the very highest order. Not so the imitation nature-study, the study of sentimentalisms about nature, of nature words smothered in painted adjectives, now popular in some quarters. Of still less value are the nature books written as pot-