38 GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 



The Lend-a-Hand motto has proved an inspiring guide 

 for life at home and out in the world ; but is it a suitable or 

 safe motto for the routine of the grade school ? Or would it 

 be necessary to slightly adapt it ? Twist it, for instance, into 

 something like this : " Look down, not up ; look in, not out ; 

 and don't — as you value your rank — lend a hand." Yet 

 however well this version might have suited the model scholar 

 of the old days, it will not do for one of the new. Surely no 

 cooperative fish could swim in such a sea of isolation. 



Hundreds of teachers and parents would gladly banish 

 most forms of competition that still haunt the schoolroom ; 

 but many of these very persons hesitate lest, deprived of in- 

 centive, a school might, like fatigued, flabby muscle, lose what 

 is known as tonicity. Comparatively few seem to have con- 

 sidered whether, on the contrary, a school might not regain 

 tone and even more vigorous health by adopting methods of 

 cooperation. Some have not been afraid to try. 



Stationed on the frontiers of the educational world on both 

 sides of the Atlantic there are pioneer schools working on 

 distinctly cooperative lines. In these the pith and core of a 

 part, at least, of the instruction consists of practice in the art 

 of cooperation, technically called self-organized group work. 

 That the cooperative method in study is a life principle, and 

 not a device to exploit certain pet subjects, is shown by the 

 fact that its value is not limited to any selected studies. 

 Whether it is applied to the dramatization of a fable in an 

 English class by a group of six-year-olds, on the one hand, 

 or to Roman history in a high school on the other, it works 

 equally well. 



As has already been hinted, a garden makes a most effective 

 stage setting for the drama of cooperation. A very spirited 

 comedy of this sort was recently enacted in a school for older 

 girls. Here a class numbering seventy-five recently conducted 



