L. L. MAY & CO. 
ST. PAUL, MINN. 
The Meaning of 
The School Garden 
The dominating thought of the teaching of all great edu- 
cators, from the Ancients to those of the present day, has 
been the bringing of the child into closer relationship with 
nature. 
The Greek schoolmaster made long tours of the country 
side with his pupils, instructing them as he went along. From 
this on, through the Christian era, to Froissart and Froebel, 
we find the leading minds in science of pedagogy advocating 
these outdoor schools and the teaching of abstract truths 
through the concrete medium of nature and nature study. 
Every teacher's ideal is to teach in this practical way, 
to use nature, and her divers forms, to point out the lessons 
that were, otherwise, incomprehensible to the little mind, that 
can think only in terms of what it already knows. Every true 
teacher would love to have her school under the oak or in the 
open field, but the exigencies of our modern school system, 
the number, and diverse character of our public school pupils, 
the hesLVj tax on the energies of the ordinary public school 
worker, preclude all possibility of this divine leisure, that is 
necessary for the perfect unfolding of the infant conscious- 
ness, and throw us back into the dry routine, which every- 
one of us recognizes as deadly, and which, yet, none of us, 
has the courage to break away from. 
Happily, a rather 
delightful inspiration was vouchsafed, not long since, to sev- 
eral good women interested in education. The idea of school 
gardens seemed to them a practical and useful way of getting 
back to nature for the city child. They experimented, and 
found that the merest suggestion met with response that out 
did their greatest expectations. 
