AMONG SCHOOL GARDENS 



are similar;"* while the underlying purpose of the 

 teaching is threefold, educational, industrial, and 

 social — or moral, since it is only in relation to 

 others that moral conduct or character exists. 



As the founder of the children's school farm in 

 DeWitt Clinton Park, New York, wrote in her 

 first report: 



" I did not start a garden simply to grow a few 

 vegetables and flowers. The garden was used as 

 a means to show how willing and anxious children 

 are to work, and to teach them in their work some 

 necessary civic virtues; private care of public 

 property, economy, honesty, application, con- 

 centration, self government, civic pride, justice, 

 the dignity of labor, and the love of nature by 

 opening to their minds the little we know of her 

 mysteries, more wonderful than any fairy tale."f 



The virtues here enumerated can best be taught 

 in the school garden with the individual plot and 

 ownership, because there the interest is greater, 

 the rewards are more desirable, and cause and 

 effect are more frequently and clearly demon- 

 strable. The cultivation of such virtues is at the 

 minimum when the garden of a school is only a 

 bit of decorative planting in the care of which the 

 children have no part. School-ground decoration 

 of this type is better than none, for like pictures on 

 the schoolroom walls, it sends out a daily influence 



* Weed and Emerson: The School Garden Book, p. 3. 

 t Mrs. Henry Parsons in Report of the First Children's School 

 Farm in New York City, for 1902-1904. 



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