Nature study

The nature study movement (alternatively, Nature Study or nature-study) was a popular education movement in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nature study—closely related to natural history—emphasized first-hand appreciation of nature and its beauty, rather than an analytical understanding of the natural world. The movement was led by Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey, and often associated with girl's education as a replacement for more formal science training. Cornell University, where Anna Comstock and her husband John Henry Comstock taught , was the center of the nature study movement.

Nature study can be described as “conceiving of the movement as a loose coalition of communities composed of individuals, societies, and institutions able to find some common ground in the study and appreciation of the natural world.”^[1] The Nature Study movement changed many of the ways science was taught in North American schools in a number of regions in the late 19th century. Scientists and naturalists such as Louis Agassiz, Wilbur Jackman, and Anna Botsford Comstock brought about the first sign of this mid-to-late nineteenth century movement.^[2]

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Definitions of nature study

In "Leaflet I: What Is Nature-Study?" from a 1904 collection nature study lessons, Bailey presented the following description of nature study:

NATURE-STUDY, as a process, is seeing the things that one looks at, and the drawing of proper conclusions from what one sees. Its purpose is to educate the child in terms of his environment, to the end that his life may be fuller and richer. Nature-study is not the study of a science, as of botany, entomology, geology, and the like. That is, it takes the things at hand and endeavors to understand them, without reference primarily to the systematic order or relationships of objects. It is informal, as are the objects which one sees. It is entirely divorced from mere definitions, or from formal explanations in books. It is therefore supremely natural. It trains the eye and the mind to see and to comprehend the common things of life; and the result is not directly the acquiring of science but the establishing of a living sympathy with everything that is.

Comstock defined the idea extensively in her book Handbook of Nature Study: “Nature Study is for the comprehension of the Individual life of the bird, insect or plant that is nearest at hand.”^[3] It is said to aid “both discernment and in expression of things as they are” by Comstock.^[4] The movement came at a time when society was concerned with the future of the next generation^[5] and with nature conservation itself^[6], and because of this was met with high regard and high expectations.^[7] Though many efforts had come before 1890 by some naturalist and scientists to teach and expand the movement, the nature-study movement really did not gain momentum with the public until the late 19th century, early 20th century.^[8] The Nature Study changed the curriculum for children in many of areas of the country^[9], and it also affected the way young and teenage girls were able to learn and find job placement.^[10] The movement was often related to creating a less extensive or formal science training for females.

"Study nature, not books."

Before the 1890’s, the idea was around, but the “efforts had been sporadic and piecemeal.”^[11] Naturalist Louis Agassiz wanted to capture “learners in studying the natural world.” His students who where influenced by this went on to provide the nature study knowledge in public schools.^[12] He coined the phrase “Study nature, not books.”^[13]

Many scientists, teachers, and leaders among communities agreed on the nature study idea and it became an important part of how the natural world was examined in many areas of the United States by the beginning of the 20th century.^[14] Scientists gave public support of the study and added to the creation of the courses.^[15] The movement was popular in the Northeast, the West, and the Midwest. The Southern region of the country found some use for the idea of natural science in their agriculture schools. It was also used in the institutes of Tuskegee and Hamptom.^[16] The Nature Study could be found in urbanized, highly populated cities and in rural school systems due to the involvement of scientists in designing and implementing the movement.^[17]

The movement seemed to hit the country at a time when some teachers were thinking about changing the curriculum inside the school systems. Geography and history were additions along with revamping many original topics such as mathematics or reading.^[18]

Many scientists had a hand in the contents of the curriculum inside the school systems. Wilbur Jackman created an outline of nature study with “life and its phenomena” which examined how the study of plants and animals would consist of zoology and botany (under biology), physics, chemistry, meteorology, astronomy, geography, geology, and mineralogy.^[19]

Lucretia Crocker along with women’s clubs and other help in the Boston area, created a “Teachers’ School of Science” in Back Bay at the New museum of the Boston society. Along with a woman named Ellen Swallow Richards, Crocker created a mineralogy course for teachers. Teacher found such education in the Boston area because of area scientist that would teach their courses.^[20]

The American Nature Study Society was founded in 1908, and it still exists today.^[21] The society was an important aspect as well in helping to bring about the Nature-Study movement. Anna Botsford Comstock is one of the societies’ past presidents. It is considered to be America’s oldest organization for environment.^[22]

Anna Botsford Comstock studied and worked as the head of the Department of Nature Study at Cornell University with her husband, John Henry Comstock.^[23] Cornell University was considered to be a major hub for the Nature Study movement. She wrote the Handbook of Nature Study, which includes sections on how to teach the subject and how to teach the courses to children, and also includes sections from different species of animals and plants to even the skies.

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.”^[24] 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.^[25] 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.”^[26] The nature study became the way younger students learned of their natural world.^[27] 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.^[28]

Anna Botsford Comstock, a Cornell Graduate and large part of the movement, says 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.”^[29] Comstock also felt that the nature study did not begin with books, but through the observations of life and form from the first naturalists.^[30] The point of the system being to “give pupils an outlook over all the forms of life and their relation one to another.”^[31]

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 1800’s.^[32]

A study in Kim Tolley’s the Science Education of American Girls showed that of 127 public schools 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 0% didn’t offer it at all in 1925.^[33]

Women in the Nature Study

Women played many roles in this movement on American society. Some were able to find supervisor jobs or jobs as professor in natural history at school districts or institutions of higher learning. Some women helped to create the movement itself, like Anna Botsford Comstock, and also teachers were able to “[implement] nature study to varying degrees in their classrooms and occasionally modified the curriculum created by male professionals so that it favored the life sciences.”^[34]

The percentage of men and women high school science teachers in Wisconsin increased for women in biology from 1915-16 to 1919-20 from 50% to 67%. The number for physics increased from 3% in 1915-16 to 7% in 1919-20.^[35]

The nature study movement gave a new outlook to the education of young women in the United States. Opinions started to change about the movement, in its decline in the later 1900s. By some male critics it was seen as “romantic” or “sentimental.” This creates a gender issue that was put upon the nature-study movement.^[36] Young women seemed to attract more to the natural history by the beginning of the 1900’s.^[37]

The Science Education of American Girls by Kim Tolley gives an explanation of high schools in America for females. “Higher schools for females served as important centers for the dissemination of the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, institutions commonly located in small towns and in rural rather than urban areas. The ideology prevailed in antebellum southern institutions serving elite girls who never expected to work for wages outside the home, in northern schools that explicitly south to prepare teachers for the nation’s growing common schools, and in catholic academies on the western front.”^[38]

See also

• History of education
• Natural history
• Outdoor education
• Women in science

Notes

References

• Comstock, Anna Botsford. Handbook of Nature Study, Comstock Publishing Associates, Ithaca and London 1967
• Herrick, Glenn W. and Ruby Green Smith, eds. The Comstocks of Cornell, Comstock publishing Associates Ithaca and New York, 1953
• Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. "Nature, Not Books : Scientists and the Origins of the Nature-Study Movement in the 1890s," Isis, Vol. 96, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 324-352
• Tolley, Kim. The Science Education of American Girls, RoutledgerFalmer, New York, 2003