SPECIAL FEATURES Botany with Spirit: Cornell Rural School Leaflets and Gardening the trouble that they seemed to be in. The economic depression in the early 1880s resulted in chronic low produce prices and increased costs to farmers. As farming communities fought against rising debt, many farms were lost and rural migration to cities soon followed. In New York, this migration proved so worrisome that the state formed a Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture. Anna Comstock was an early committee member who suggested that Cornell’s Department of Agriculture develop a naturestudy program for rural schools (Doris, 2002). Comstock and others feared that children and teenagers moving to urban areas would soon lose touch with nature, and along with it, an abandonment of their appreciation for the green world.
Nature-study is not science. It is not knowledge. It is not facts. It is spirit. It is concerned with the child’s outlook on the world. -L. H. Bailey, 1903
In a recent Plant Science Bulletin issue, author
Karen Penders St. Clair (2019) introduced us to several early botany instructors at Cornell University. Several of these instructors, namely Liberty H. Bailey, Anna B. Comstock, Alice G. McCloskey, and John W. Spencer, were profoundly important in making Cornell University synonymous with that of early-1900s nature-study education. One of the factors that helped establish Cornell’s nature-study program was farm kids and
In the United States, the idea of studying nature in an outdoor setting did not first appear at Cornell, but in Chicago, essentially at the same time that the United States was struggling with economic depression. Teacher educators such as John Dewey made the University of Chicago a hub for progressive education. One of Dewey’s ideas that quickly took hold in the upper Midwest was the idea of hands-on study and using the outdoors for
By Karen Wellner Chandler-Gilbert Community College Email: karen.wellner@cgc.edu 4
