8 PREFACE. 



ing out of the gardens, and to the opposition of many 

 communities to any new enterprise, but chiefly to the 

 miserable lack of instruction in the training schools of 

 teachers, which again points back still farther to the 

 miserable lack of earlier school legislation. 



On another side, it cannot be overlooked that even in 

 the latest times there was no clear conception of the 

 school garden on German ground in anybody's head, 

 so that no one could come forward with any striking 

 propositions which would interest experts or persuade 

 communities to offer the place and the means to lay out 

 such gardens in reference to local needs, or demand 

 from the teachers the capacity to deduce them from the 

 actual means of instruction and education, without dis- 

 turbing the corporate organism of the public schools 

 (volksschulen). 



Whoever wishes to make plans for founding suitable 

 school gardens must certainly be an idealist and have a 

 heart for the people ; but he must also possess the neces- 

 sary technical knowledge required ; he must know life, 

 and be acquainted with the public demands by his own 

 inward observations and insight j he must have had in- 

 tercourse with all classes of the population, and must 

 especially be acquainted with teachers, and be himself 

 a school man, in order to be able to meet the question 

 whether his plans can reckon upon general sympathy 

 and furtherance. When the author endeavors five years 

 after the first appearance of his pamphlet to give him- 

 self an account of his success, whereby he, setting aside 

 his individual views, has won the general confidence in 

 the correctness and practicability .of his plans, he finds 

 that a concatenation of circumstances has enabled him 

 to solve such a problem. His studies had the ideal and 



