[2] Led by progressive educators and naturalists such as Anna Botsford Comstock, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Louis Agassiz, William Gould Vinal, and Wilbur S. Jackman, nature study changed the way science was taught in schools by emphasizing learning from tangible objects, something that was embodied by the movement's mantra: "study nature, not books."
That is, it takes the things at hand and endeavors to understand them, without reference primarily to the systematic order or relationships of objects.
It trains the eye and the mind to see and to comprehend the common things of life; and the result is not directly the acquiring of science but the establishing of a living sympathy with everything that is.Anna Comstock defined the idea extensively in her book, Handbook of Nature Study, supplying that: "Nature Study is for the comprehension of the Individual life of the bird, insect or plant that is nearest at hand.
[14] Nature Study could be found in both urbanized, highly populated cities and in rural school systems because of the involvement of scientists in designing and implementing curriculum.
[22] Carver published a series of materials on nature study from 1897 until at least 1910 to promote the integration of hands-on and outdoor education.
[23] Carver particularly advocated for building gardens at schools, and for simplifying some broad academic concepts like mutualism and other ecological interactions into the "language of the masses".
[25] Sciences were expanding in colleges and universities, and scientists felt "that students needed more and better preparation in secondary and primary schools".
[26] With a growing population due to immigration and other reasons, young people could be taught useful skills for life and academia in order to "share fundamental civic values and enlarged view of their world".
"[9] Comstock also felt that the nature study did not begin with books, but through the observations of life and form from the first naturalists.
[8] Because of the importance placed on the new generation, the surrounding public watched the schools carefully with high expectations of the students in the late 19th century.
[32] The nature study movement gave a new outlook to the education of young women in the United States.
[33] The Science Education of American Girls by Kim Tolley gives an explanation of high schools in America for females.
"Higher schools for females served as important centers for the dissemination of the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, institutions commonly located in small towns and in rural, rather than urban, areas.
The ideology prevailed in antebellum southern institutions serving elite girls who never expected to work for wages outside the home, in northern schools that explicitly south to prepare teachers for the nation's growing common schools, and in Catholic academies on the western front.