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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 85

Science Teaching in the Elementary School

Science Teaching in the Elementary School.

For the great mass of our working population, who must necessarily begin to earn their livelihood at an early age and from whom our foremen will be mostly selected, it is essential that instruction in the rudiments of the sciences bearing upon industry should form a part of the curriculum of the elementary schools, and that instruction in drawing, and more especially in drawing with rule and compass, of a character likely to be useful to them in their future occupations as workmen and artisans, should receive far greater attention than it does at present. The importance of the first of these subjects has so far been acknowledge by the education department that in all infant schools lessons on objects and the more commonly occurring phenomena of nature have been made obligatory. This System of instruction, if property illustrated by the exhibition of the object itself, or of diagrams or models of the same, or by the simplest kinds of experiments, is an excellent foundation for the subsequent teaching of elementary science.

When, however, the child enters the elementary school the teaching of science practically ceases until it reaches the upper division, inasmuch as the arrangement of the class subjects in the lower division is found in practice to exclude science from that division; only two subjects being allowed, of which "English" must be one and "geography" may be another, this latter being generally preferred to the alternative is a branch of elementary science." It appears to us that geography, if properly taught is a branch of elementary science which need not be separated from science generally, and can well be taught along with the other branches of science by means of the object lessons which are described in the code. Thus there would be only two class subjects instead of three, and in this way the connecting link which is now wanting between science as taught in the infant school and in the higher division of the elementary school would be supplied.