Thursday, June 10, 2004

Run for your lives! It's the return of ... The Book of the Day! Anna Botsford Comstock wrote this 900-plus-page three-pound textbook in 1911. This is a 1944 printing of an edition revised in 1939. "The author feels apologetic that the book is so large," Professor Comstock writes in her preface. "However, it does not contain any more than any intelligent country child of twelve should know of his environment; things that he should know naturally and without effort, although it might take him half his life-time to learn so much if he should not begin before the age of twenty..." Later she adds, "Nature-study is, despite all discussions and perversions, a study of nature; it consists of simple, truthful observations that may, like beads on a string, finally be threaded upon the understanding and thus held together as a logical and harmonious whole.... First, but not most important, 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. 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 regard for what is true, and the power to express it...." The list of the value of "nature-study" to the child goes on and on, so poetically and touchingly I have a hard time not typing in the whole two pages of reasons. 11:05:37 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Shirley Mills. Last update: 8/9/05; 3:16:29 PM.