GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 
38 
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 
