22 GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 



bringing offerings of fruit and flowers for the whole school's 

 admiration and enjoyment. The bonds of brotherhood in a 

 school are further tightened by the lively exchange in sugges- 

 tions and requests which goes on between those who belong to 

 the garden class and the rest. The head class in commercial 

 geography, for instance, sends a message that in a certain 

 month it will need for its lessons samples of the different 

 grains, or perhaps of cotton or tobacco, which it begs the 

 gardeners to plant for their use. 



It may seem that quite too much is being said about the 

 activity of the children, and too little about the duties of the 

 teacher. The teacher's part is indeed important, but it reminds 

 one a little of the share sometimes taken by a " grown-up " in 

 a chorus of children's voices. He may not audibly join in the 

 song at all, until some harmony needs a deeper, richer note, 

 quite beyond the range of a child, to fill out the chord. When 

 this has been added, the music, by its very completeness, sat- 

 isfies and thrills them all. And so it happens that oftentimes 

 the part of the teacher is as inconspicuous as it is indispen- 

 sable. A teacher who realizes this knows that the more nearly 

 the school approaches, functionally, to the living organism, 

 made up of organs, tissues, and cells, — each for all and all 

 for each, — the greater pity it is for him to work it like a 

 mechanical toy. The more wholesomely active all the mem- 

 bers are, the sounder, of course, the organism. And so 

 teachers are coming to believe that to deprive youngsters 

 of the discipline of at least helping to map out a project is 

 to do them a positive wrong. 



Other teachers go still farther. They believe in passing over 

 to the children, come what may, the responsibility of working 

 out the whole garden scheme. No situation, thev urge, will 

 present itself to a self-organized team of active, wide-awake 

 girls and boys, occupied with problems of their own, that 



