22 
GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 
bringing offerings of fruit and flowers for the whole school’s 
admiration and enjoyment. The bonds of brotherhood in a 
school are further tightened by the lively exchange in sugges- 
tions and requests which goes on between those who belong to 
the garden class and the rest. The head class in commercial 
geography, for instance, sends a message that in a certain 
month it will need for its lessons samples of the different 
grains, or perhaps of cotton or tobacco, which it begs the 
gardeners to plant for their use. 
It may seem that quite too much is being said about the 
activity of the children, and too little about the duties of the 
teacher. The teacher’s part is indeed important, but it reminds 
one a little of the share sometimes taken by a ” grown-up ” in 
a chorus of children’s voices. He may not audibly join in the 
song at all, until some harmony needs a deeper, richer note, 
quite beyond the range of a child, to fill out the chord. When 
this has been added, the music, by its very completeness, sat- 
isfies and thrills them all. And so it happens that oftentimes 
the part of the teacher is as inconspicuous as it is indispen- 
sable. A teacher who realizes this knows that the more nearly 
the school approaches, functionally, to the living organism, 
made up of organs, tissues, and cells, — each for all and all 
for each, — the greater pity it is for him to work it like a 
mechanical toy. The more wholesomely active all the mem- 
bers are, the sounder, of course, the organism. And so 
teachers are coming to believe that to deprive youngsters 
of the discipline of at least helping to map out a project is 
to do them a positive wrong. 
Other teachers go still farther. They believe in passing over 
to the children, come what may, the responsibility of working 
out the whole garden scheme. No situation, they urge, will 
present itself to a self-organized team of active, wide-awake 
girls and boys, occupied with problems of their own, that 
