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Gallery
Robin G. Schulze on "Prize Plants"
| THIS PHOTOGRAPH originally intrigued me because, growing up in the public schools in suburban southern Connecticut in the 1970s, I learned absolutely nothing about plants. The only thing I remember growing in biology class was mold in a plastic Petri dish. The various lab sciences I took in college—physics, aerodynamics, astronomy—did nothing to dispel my ignorance of the flora that permeated my daily life. Only in my thirties, when my husband and I bought a home with some land and I became a passionate gardener in central Pennsylvania, did I learn anything about plants. My purchase of a pickax and a small azalea (which I came very close to killing) led to lessons in climate zones, soils, root systems, pruning, drainage, mulch, compost, insects, earthworms, and birds. I also learned a great many lessons in humility in at least one protracted struggle to outwit a groundhog. |
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The failings of my formal education were not unique. Neither would most public educators of the 1970s have conceived of my lack of nature knowledge as in any way troubling or problematic. Not so at the turn of the twentieth century. The photograph reprinted here from Clifton F. Hodge's 1902 book, Nature Study and Life, bears witness to at least one important period in American history when what children knew and did not know about animals and plants became a matter of national concern. As Ralph Lutts has noted, some form of nature education had been present in American public schools throughout much of the nineteenth century, taught either in the name of the spiritual uplift of natural theology or the abstract scientific rigor of Linnaean classification.1 In the Progressive era in America, however, Nature Study took on a new life as a means of vital educational and national reform. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American school children planted and tended gardens, watched polliwogs develop into frogs, tamed and bred animals, and learned to identify trees. They were encouraged, both boys and girls, to get their hands dirty. |
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The notion of just how such activities functioned as "reform" in the minds of Progressive educators, scientists, and civic leaders is a complex issue. In part, the enthusiasm for Nature Study sprang from cultural anxieties about the growing "virtual" quality of modern American life. As more and more people abandoned the country for the city and traded the nature-centered rhythms of rural life for the rush of industrial urbanity, white middle-class Americans began to sense that their lives were becoming increasingly artificial. The ever-advancing "conquest" of nature that Progressives heralded as the basis of American achievement brought with it a widening array of distinctly unnatural consequences. Lit streets and factories turned night into day and times of rest into times of work. Refrigeration and railroads outstripped the limitations of agricultural seasons. For the first time in American history, urban dwellers could consume goods without any direct contact with the original ecosystems that made them possible or the environmental costs that attended their production. Urban Americans of the late nineteenth century increasingly became creatures of what William Cronon has dubbed "second nature," the industrial metropolis's organized commercial facsimile of the original ecosystems it imported and exploited to support its life.2 |
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