Gardening as a Part of City Education 



J. L. Randall 



Director United States School Garden Army, Bureau of Education, 



Washington, D. C. 



To be effective, education must concern itself primarily with 

 the child. Too often, educators becoming lost in the maze of 

 programs of the school day, the school year, and in courses of 

 study, and tests and measurements of subject matter, lose sight of 

 the main objective. There is food for thought in so simple a thing as 

 the dismissal of a large city school. Teachers can easily visualize 

 this dismissal time. The children come down the steps or cement 

 walk two or four abreast and the teacher, the drum major, holds 

 the line in step. There is a suppressed excitement, anticipation, 

 almost an abated breath, that was concealed by the sedentary 

 studies of the school room a few minutes before. When all are in 

 line and acceptably quiet, the teacher, casting a stern glance along 

 the line, says "dismissed". What happens? Pupils go up in the 

 air, they roll over backwards, they race, they wrestle they fight, 

 they shout — everybody shouts — even the teacher would like to 

 shout. The whole suppressed biological individual is loosened at 

 once . The safety-valve is off. At schools, on lines of street cars 

 and automobile travel, the city must keep a policeman in front 

 of the school building to prevent the children from being killed by 

 darting in front of passing cars. This action on the part of the 

 pupil is hardly conscious. It is nature's demand for physical 

 development. 



What of these pupils after dismissal ? They go along the paved 

 streets; and, after the first spontaneous outbursts, the conscious 

 must again suppress the unconscious; they must keep out of the 

 way of passing vehicles on the one hand, and "keep off the grass," 

 if there is any, on the other. If it is now the end of the school day, 

 the pupil still has three or four hours of daylight in which to develop 

 the biological being which heredity demands but modern schools 

 suppress. Senses and instinctive interests are all welling up in 

 the child, demanding an outlet with the same explosive, unconscious 

 power as did the physical at the close of school. In the child world 

 at the city home, the broad fields, flowers, birds, and trees, the 

 sense developers of the country, have given place to a city lot 

 that the rush of city life has so often left barren. Modern inven- 



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