ABSTRACT
During the early years of the twentieth century, nature study entered the curriculum offered to children in Australian primary schools. Its endurance as concept and practice, its explication over the course of the century and its inevitable change in new contexts needs examination. In the United States, nature study was largely displaced by elementary science in the 1920s and 1930s. In other English-speaking countries, nature study survived as a distinctively named subject beyond its currency in the United States. This chapter shows that it was part of the formal primary school syllabus for New South Wales until 1952 and even then, when the syllabus referred to "natural science", teachers in schools overwhelmingly continued to use the term "nature study" into the 1960s. In considering the legacy of nature study to recent educational curricula, successive documents relating to environmental education are relevant.
