The Nature-Study Idea: Toward a Relationship and Sympathy With Nature

In the 1870s the noted Harvard University zoologist Louis Agassiz created the Anderson School of Natural History, which set out to teach natural history from the direct observation of natural phenomena. ‘Nature-study’ took this idea and aimed it at the elementary level. Colleges in the U.S. designed new nature study programs that focused on instructional classes for rural schools. One such program was developed at Cornell; designed and taught by Anna Botsford Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey. Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote that the “Nature Study Idea” will not only teach science but for a child will: “open the child’s mind to his natural existence, develop his sense of responsibility and of self-dependence, train him to respect the resources of the earth, teach him the obligations of citizenship, interest him sympathetically in the occupations of men, quicken his relations to human life in general, and touch his imagination with the spiritual forces of the world.”