THE EDUCATION OF THE COTTAGE AND MARKET GAKUENEII. 117 



At one school I asked how deep the soil was, what the stones were, 

 and whether they were any good (they were chalk stones), what the 

 name of the principal weed was (it was bindweed) and why it was 

 so difficult to eradicate, why they sowed their beans deeper than 

 their turnip seed? To not one of these questi.ns could I get an 

 intelligent reply. " Their teacher had not told them." In the other 

 school it was quite different, and even if the boys couldn't always give 

 a correct reply to my questions they tried to ; they liked to have the 

 questions discussed; they had learnt to use their brains. Now I don't 

 believe in gardening which is merely telling how to do things. In 

 the first place, the object of education is to turn out better men with 

 more active brains, m:re ready to bring intelligence to bear on any 

 problem that may meet them in their daily work— whether it is farming. 



Fig. 2-5. — A School-garden Exhibit at a CorxTRY Fair ix America. 



or gardening, or shepherding, or any other employment. In the second 

 place, the men who have learnt to garden as they were told, to trench, 

 to sow, to single, to hoe as their teachers showed them, without thinbing 

 for themselves, when they go to other places, with different soil, different 

 climate, different market requirements, will find themselves failures. It 

 has happened, indeed, that more than one of our horticultural experts — 

 men who were appointed to a new county because of their splendid work 

 as gardeners in the old — in attempting to carry out the same system of 

 gardening under entirely different conditions, untrained to think about 

 the fundamental principles underlying every operation, have come badly 

 to grief. 



This side of school gardening is the side which is unsatisfactory in 

 this country. In America it is the reverse. There, as practical gardening, 

 it is almost ridiculous ; but as training the children to exercise their intelli- 

 gence about the things that form their surroundings, and thus acquiring 



