Nature Study - Education For Children

Education For Children

Sciences were expanding in colleges and universities, and scientists felt "that students needed more and better preparation in secondary and primary schools." Not only was the curriculum of schools evolving, but also was the system of education itself. Populations were rising in big urban areas like New York and Chicago, and there was legislation to require students to spend required amounts of hours and days per year in the school system. With a growing population due to immigration and other reasons, young people could be taught useful skills for life and academia in order to “share fundamental civic values and enlarged view of their world.” The nature study became the way younger students learned of their natural world. This also came at a time when legislation was being passed for conservation in the country, which helped gather support from parents and educators in the country.

Anna Botsford Comstock, stated in her book Handbook of Nature Study, "nature-study cultivates the child’s imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affect his imagination as much as does fairy lore, at the same time nature study cultivates in him a perception and a regard for what is true, and the power to express it...Nature study gives the child practical and helpful knowledge. It makes him familiar with nature's ways and forces, so that he is not so helpless in the presence of natural misfortune and disasters." Comstock also felt that the nature study did not begin with books, but through the observations of life and form from the first naturalists. The point of the system being to “give pupils an outlook over all the forms of life and their relation one to another.”

Because of the importance placed on the new generation, the surrounding public watched the schools carefully with high expectations of the students in the late 19th century.

A study in Kim Tolley’s the Science Education of American Girls showed that of 127 public school systems, 49% offered Nature-study in all grades, 25% offered in at least six grades, 11% in at least four grades, 5% in three grades or lower, and 10% didn’t offer it at all in 1925.