children's garden conference. 183 



but a small number of places are undertaking this work, there is not a 

 county in the state in which there are not school gardens and the towns 

 and cities are already taking up the work with increased interest. They 

 are going about it with increased intelligence; year by year it is better 

 organized and better related to the other school work than at the start; 

 and yet there is room for development. 



There seem to me to be three strong educational reasons why the school 

 garden movement should spread until it becomes universal, for it is my 

 own personal feeling that the time is coming when the school garden will 

 be considered as important in the equipment of any public school as the 

 library. The first educational reason is that the garden appeals to the 

 interest of the children in seeing something happen and in watching the 

 development of the plant life in their gardens. In watching, too, the 

 development of animal life, insect life, and bird life in connection with 

 their gardens. There is always .something for the child to look forward 

 to, always something to excite his curiosity and his wonder, and we know 

 how profound those feelings are in interesting the child. He is expecting 

 something to happen and is inclined to be eager to see whether it does 

 happen and if so when and how, and by and by, why it happens. This 

 is the feature of it which gives the garden its chief educational value in 

 that it appeals to the child more directly than any other form of school 

 work. We have had nothing before which satisfied those feelings ; all the 

 school acti\'ities in the past connect themselves very slightly with life of 

 any sort. Most of them have been in the air rather than on the ground 

 and the advantage is that this work is on the ground. It keeps the child 

 where he is and is within his reach. That is the first educational advan- 

 tage. 



The second reason is that it allies itself with the other school activities 

 as perhaps no single school activity does. That is true of any form of 

 manual school work but this touches at more points than anything else 

 we can think of and it brings an air of reality and vitality to the other 

 school exercises. It allies itself directly with what we call the language 

 work, taking it out of the air into the ground, out of the theoretical into 

 the real, out of the scholastic atmosphere into the atmosphei'e of real life. 

 The opportunities for developing both the oral and written language of 

 the child through the school garden seem to me almost endless. It allies 

 itself not only with the literaiy work but with the drawing. It brings 

 that too into the realm of reality. It gives the child a reason for doing 

 the work that is set for him to do and it adds life and interest to every 

 feature of the drawing work, every department of it. It connects itself 

 and may connect itself much more than it has in the past, as Mr. Baldwin 

 has shown in his Hyannis work, with the nimiber work. He has shown 

 what it does for the arithmetic work. Children find in connecting their 

 arithmetic with their gardening work they are dealing with real things in a 

 real way and for a purpose which is their own, for every problem has an 

 end. They are doing these because there is something there that they 



