Bringing Education to Life and Life to Education: Contemporary Relevance of Bailey’s Nature-Study

Over a century ago, Liberty Hyde Bailey resisted the then-emergent and tantalizing trappings of the industrial revolution that uprooted rural communities with the lure of urban life in the name of progress. He saw an increasing disconnection of children from place, community, land, soil, and nature at a time when science teaching was just emerging in the lower grades and was becoming an indoor activity mediated and controlled by lifeless models, stuffed specimens, and books to the detriment of direct bodily and hands-on experiences with and in nature outdoors. Equally disconcerting for Bailey was the growth of lifeless school and