The Study of Nature

Do schools teach earth science anymore? Is there discussion in the classroom about nature and all the things one sees when outdoors?

"Anna Botsford Comstock 1854-1930" by USDAgov is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Nowadays, it seems we hear more about what CAN'T be taught in schools or what should not be allowed to be taught in schools than about what IS taught in schools. (I am not a teacher and do not have children, so I don't know.)

During the administration of George W. Bush, in 2002, the U.S. enacted the "No Child Left Behind" law. At that time Bush was quoted as saying:

"We're gonna spend more money, more resources, but they'll be directed at methods that work. Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work." (emphasis mine)

According to Brittanica, that meant "states were required to administer yearly tests of the reading and mathematics skills of public school students and to demonstrate adequate progress toward raising the scores of all students to a level defined as 'proficient' or higher by 2014. Teachers were also required to meet higher standards for certification. Schools that failed to meet their goals would be subject to gradually increasing sanctions, eventually including replacement of staff or closure."

Rather than helping students, the rules forced teachers to concentrate more on offering enough learning to live up to the testing standards than to actually educate the primary and secondary school kids. (Earth science was not considered worthy of mention.) The rules were eventually eased during the Obama administration.

Back around the turn of the last century, the concerns were different. There was no TV or internet to distract children and keep them indoors. The people at Cornell University's agricultural college thought teachers should have a guide to explain how children should see the outdoors - basically everything animal, vegetable or mineral except humans. 

Another difference: Back then it was much more common to see farms, and agriculture was a major part of the U.S. economy. According to Statistica, in 2022 there were just over 2 million farms in the U.S., compared with 2.2 million in 2007, and the average size has been steadily decreasing. 

But farmland was decreasing long before 2007 as post-World War II population increases prompted an explosion in housing on what used to be crop-growing fields, such as the famous Levittown development in Garden City, Long Island, NY.

Back before suburbs took over farmland, Cornell wanted a "Handbook of Nature Study" to be available for teachers. To write it, the university turned to the only woman on staff, Anna Botsford Comstock. She had been a student at Cornell - one of the first - and met her husband, John Henry Comstock, there. She eventually made engravings for illustrative plates for her husband's books on insects and butterflies, as well as for her own books on nature studies, including bees.

It was when she was appointed to the New York State Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture in 1895 that she planned and conducted an experimental course of nature study for public schools, which resulted in her "Handbook."

The book has never gone out of print. The used copy my husband recently bought was the 22nd edition of the 1974 printing, with a new introduction written in 1986. It is even available for download.

You could say Anna Botsford Comstock was the original ecologist, though the word was not in existence in 1911. 

The first part of her guide explains teaching nature study, why such learning is important and what to do (and not do) to get a child interested. The next sections cover animals (including mammals, fishes and birds), plants (including wildflowers and weeds) and earth and sky (including soil, rocks, water and, most interesting to me, climate and weather).

(Margo D. Beller)

Nature study gives a 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," she writes. "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 affects his imagination as much as does fairy lore..."

And here's something to consider in these days of social media, artificial intelligence and not being able to tell what is true from what isn't: "Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. Nature-study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are."

Think about that the next time you read an article about how children are spending more time inside on TikTok than they are on their studies.

Within each section are lessons for teachers, and sometimes interesting quotations. For instance, in the section on the woodchuck, the teacher is encouraged to take students outside to find a woodchuck burrow and, if the animal appears, study it. The teacher can discuss such things as when young woodchucks are born, how many can live in the same burrow and the animal's physical characteristics.

At the end of that section was a long excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Journal, including: "I think I might learn some wisdom of him," he says of a woodchuck he encountered during a walk and stayed to study. "His ancestors have lived here longer than mine. He is more thoroughly acclimated and naturalized than I."

Thoreau spent his life being outside as much as he could, observing nature and writing down his findings. He did not need a handbook to tell him what he could see around him, but not everyone is a Thoreau.

In the urbanized, suburbanized, commercialized, technology-driven world we now live in, where climate change is altering the way we interact with the world, it is heartening when we read of young people who are angry about what is happening in the world they've inherited, and are trying to do something about it.

But they may be the exception. You have to have an interest in the outside world to care anything about it. Which brings me back to my original question: Is earth science (or ecology or whatever you want to call it) taught in school anymore?

Anna Comstock gets the last word: "When it is properly taught, the child is unconscious of mental effort or that he is suffering the act of teaching. As soon as nature-study becomes a task, it should be dropped; but how could it ever be a task to see that the sky is blue, or the dandelion golden or to listen to the oriole in the elm!"

Baltimore oriole (Margo D. Beller)