CHAPTER XIII 
THE NEW AGRICULTURE 
We are beginning a new agriculture, not continuing an old one. 
Liberty H. Bailey 
The best thing school gardening does for children is to 
help prepare them for their larger life in the world ; and 
gardening will have accomplished this if only they have mas- 
tered one single lesson : how to attack a simple problem in 
scientific fashion and work it out cooperatively. To thus 
.work out such a problem demands far more skill than would 
at first appear. It means, above all, that children will have 
been strictly schooled in leadership and in loyalty to leaders. 
The power so gained can be applied in after life a dozen 
times a day. 
Next in importance comes enthusiasm for the soil itself. 
This, once aroused in the hearts of children, will continually 
bubble up. Children love their school garden, and they work 
in it like bees; but the real test of a good school garden is 
the good home garden. Its season’s work can never be more 
genuinely measured than by the dozens — possibly the hun- 
dreds — of little home gardens that spring up within a short 
radius of the parent plot. These may be the means of 
waking up a whole neighborhood, for they will show con- 
clusively how the use of odd moments — one short half-hour 
a day — will afford armfuls of fresh vegetables for the family 
table, and often a supply besides for neighborhood sale. 
But a teacher does not content himself with accompany- 
ing children to the boundaries of the wide world and there 
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