THE 



NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



Vol. 18 March, 1922 No. 3 



School Garden Work in 1922 



Ellen Eddy Shaw 

 Curator of Elementary Instruction, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens 



If all the garden teachers and supervisors of the United States 

 of America could and would this year unite on a purely educational 

 campaign, the future of garden work would be assured in our 

 country. Our garden work has suffered, as everything else has 

 suffered, not only from its own sins of omission and commission, 

 but from the effects of the war. The garden interest was high and 

 the greatest mistake ever made in its movement up to the present 

 time was this: that we failed to consider our children's garden 

 work during the war as an educational matter, but put it on 

 a utility basis forgetting that if we had used our soundest educa- 

 tional principles and worked from that end the results would 

 have been not only as good as those obtained the other way, but 

 overwhelmingly better. Then too, if children's gardening is 

 a subject which can be taught just as well by an untrained per- 

 son whose great grandfather once happened to pass by a farm in 

 early youth, and thus handed the feeling for a farm down through 

 generations, if such people were as well able or were even considered 

 competent to teach children gardening, then indeed the subject 

 of gardening had better be dropped from our curriculum. Garden- 

 ing is but one phase of nature-study. Educators have endeavored 

 to take it apart from nature-study and set it aside as a thing by 

 itself. No subject can live when isolated. Gardening is only 

 a valuable phase of nature-study when used to supplement and be- 

 come a part of other subjects in our school curriculum. The great- 

 est educational point to bear upon as an argument for the value 

 of the school garden is this : in a school garden a child experiences 

 real things under real conditons. I do not look upon the school 

 garden as a nature laboratory, purely and simply. I look upon 

 it as a place of reality where one is not performing experiments 

 to solve a problem as he would do in a laboratory, but where one 



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