Practical School Gardening

Abstract

FEW educational movements of recent years have produced a more copious crop of text-books, hand-books, readers, and so on, than what is called nature-study. This result is not quite in harmony with the spirit of the movement, which is to avoid the book and study the thing. The child is to use his own eyes, to observe the thing itself in its proper habitat, and in relation to its ordinary surroundings; from these observations he is to make deductions, and thus he is to be trained to think. Of course, the scheme has to be modified to suit the exigencies of the time-table, but it has been shown to work and to give country children a living interest in their surroundings, besides providing the teacher with a powerful engine for education. The final success of the method depends, however, on how far the teacher himself possesses the proper habit of mind, and how far he has overcome the dependence on text-books which has been fostered by his training and the habit, born of tradition and the old method of education, of looking a thing up in a book rather than discovering it by observation. One of the consequences of the movement, and one which we hope will prove permanent, has been the establishment of school gardens. Anyone who knows village schools where gardens exist knows the pride that teachers and scholars alike take in them, and their great value from every point of view. A school garden can be made to furnish a vast amount of matter for school lessons, and in addition it instils into the boys that love of gardening so characteristic of the English life of to-day.

Practical School Gardening.

By P. Elford Samuel Heaton. Pp. 224. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909.) Price 2s. net.