CHAPTER XIII 



THE NEW AGRICULTURE 



We are beginning a new agriculture, not continuing an old one. 



Liberty H. Bailey 



The best thing school gardening does for children is to 

 help prepare them for their larger life in the world ; and 

 gardening will have accomplished this if only they have mas- 

 tered one single lesson : how to attack a simple problem in 

 scientific fashion and work it out cooperatively. To thus 

 work out such a problem demands far more skill than would 

 at first appear. It means, above all, that children will have 

 been strictly schooled in leadership and in loyalty to leaders. 

 The power so gained can be applied in after life a dozen 

 times a day. 



Next in importance comes enthusiasm for the soil itself. 

 This, once aroused in the hearts of children, will continually 

 bubble up. Children love their school garden, and they work 

 in it like bees; but the real test of a good school garden is 

 the good home garden. Its season's work can never be more 

 genuinely measured than by the dozens — possibly the hun- 

 dreds — of little home gardens that spring up within a short 

 radius of the parent plot. These may be the means of 

 waking up a whole neighborhood, for they will show con- 

 clusively how the use of odd moments — one short half-hour 

 a day — will afford armfuls of fresh vegetables for the family 

 table, and often a supply besides for neighborhood sale. 



But a teacher does not content himself with accompany- 

 ing children to the boundaries of the wide world and there 



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