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by George William HunterFOREWORD TO TEACHERS
A course in biology given to beginners in the secondary school should have certain aims. These aims must be determined to a degree, first, by the capabilities of the pupils, second, by their native interests, and, third, by the environment of the pupils.
The boy or girl of average ability upon admission to the secondary school is not a thinking individual. The training given up to this time, with but rare exceptions, has been in the forming of simple concepts. These concepts have been reached didactically and empirically. Drill and memory work have been the pedagogic vehicles. Even the elementary science work given has resulted at the best in an interpretation of some of the common factors in the pupil's environment, and a widening of the meaning of some of his concepts. Therefore, the first science of the secondary school, elementary biology, should be primarily the vehicle by which the child is taught to solve problems and to think straight in so doing. No other subject is more capable of logical development. No subject is more vital because of its relation to the vital things in the life of the child. A series of experiments and demonstrations, discussed and applied as definite concrete problems which have arisen within the child's horizon, will develop power in thinking more surely than any other subject in the first year of the secondary school.
But in our eagerness to develop the power of logical thinking we must not lose sight of the previous training of our pupil. Up to this time the method of induction, that handmaiden of logical thought, has been almost unknown. Concepts have been formed deductively by a series of comparisons. All concepts have been handed down by the authority of the teacher or the text; the inductive search for the unknown is as yet a closed book. It is unwise, then, to directly introduce the pupil to the method of induction with a series of printed directions which, though definite in the mind of the teacher because of his wider horizon, mean little or nothing as a definite problem to the pupil. The child must be brought to the appreciation of the problem through the deductive method, by a comparison of the future problem with some definite concrete experience within his own field of vision. Then by the inductive experiment, still led by a series of oral questions, he comes to the real end of the experiment, the conclusion, with the true spirit of the investigator. The result is tested in the light of past experiment and a generalization is formed which means something to the pupil.
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