tellectual discipline is simply the means employed by the State to determine who shall and who shall not practise medicine; in other words, to separate medical practitioners from other persons. The State's chief concern in the licensing of its physicians is not in its own examinations which admit to practice but in the sound preliminary schooling of the candidate and in his four years of systematic study of medicine in an approved medical college. The examination is the State's label and not its fundamental concern.

Thus it can hardly be too strongly urged that any system of examinations, however constituted, should be a means and not an end of teaching. The examination never ought to be of itself alone a court of last resort to determine the knowledge and power of a student; it should be only one of the many useful agencies employed by a wise teacher incidentally to impart knowledge and fundamentally to develop power. Wisely used and properly controlled, a soundly conceived system of school examinations may do unmeasured good; allowed to dominate teaching and to control schools, it may become a positive menace. school, or the system of schools, is safe which uses examinations and does not become possessed by them.

The

HARLAN H. HORNER,

Dean, State College for Teachers, Albany, N. Y.

SCHOOL GARDENS. In America, school gardens originated in the city. The children of congested living show a marked loss in certain broad educational attainments. Training in the care of living plants and of animals will supply in a large measure this necessary development. This training will give sympathy, love for the beautiful, ability for self-support, physical vigor and moral stamina.

The high cost of living, and particularly the intensive necessity for food production brought on by the World War of 1914, has greatly emphasized the school-garden work. The potentiality of the backyard garden in suburban parts of cities and towns, and the great value of the garden at the school as a model and as an incentive, has been increasingly accepted since 1914.

The school garden is a term used to cover the agricultural operations conducted under the auspices of the school. The garden may be at the home of the child, on a vacant lot, in a park or on school grounds. It is still a school garden so long as the school controls or directly influences it. Children's gardens conducted by other agencies than the school, such as gardens conducted by commercial institutions, welfare associations and private individuals, are properly called school gardens in the sense that the agencies operating those gardens for children are undertaking an educational function. This work is, therefore, properly the school-garden work of the conducting agency.

Valuation. Almost every possible educational value has been given to school gardening. It is undoubtedly of the greatest physical benefit for growing children to work in the open. Children must also learn much of natural phenomena, growing plants and the living organisms given to their care. A full discussion of these more evident values could be carried on profitably at great length, but the particular

necessity of school gardening for city children lies in the following_comments:

Background of Experience.- Before the child can learn to talk and write and compute with forcefulness, he must have come into intimate knowledge with things, and especially with animate things, in order that he may have something to talk about, or to write about, or to calculate upon. He must live the life. He must come into the experiences of his race. The city child is peculiarly denuded of these human experiences. The child that trains a plant from seed to fruit must learn not only to love the plant but he must acquire the skill to grow plants.

Idealization of Best Living Conditions.The school garden that does not blossom in the home garden is a poisonous weed. The child will never do at home that which is beneath his teacher at school. When there is a garden at the school and the teacher works with the child, then gardening becomes positively worth while; it has its social valuation. Father, mother, and child alike, become proud of the home garden. If they have no home garden, they move into less congested quarters, where they can have a home garden. This is the result of the idealization of garden work under the auspices of the school. The school and the church naturally establish the ideals of any_community.

Self-Support Emphasized. The school garden, when managed properly, must tend toward teaching self-support. The child soon learns that he can grow something of value and that that value is real food. He learns responsibility and his place in the world as a worker and a supporter. He comes into a feeling of ownership and of positive individuality. He differentiates himself from his fellow. He thinks in terms of freedom. He acquires high incentives of attainment, and higher ideals of sympathy, love and brotherhood.

History. In America, the school garden movement had its beginning in the city of Boston in 1891, when Henry L. Clapp, principal of the George Haven Putnam School, established a wild-flower garden at his school. This beginning was formally published as a school garden, and the efforts in the schools of the country, which have been more or less regular, doubtless originated from this beginning. It is notable that in this effort in Boston, and in all the efforts that have followed it, the education of children has been the great aim. America has not taken up school gardening so much by way of increasing agriculture as to increase the potentiality of education. The school garden has been considered everywhere the laboratory of natural science, and has been further looked upon as a valuable all around means of child training. This motive was verv different in the inception of school gardening in Europe. We find that as early as 1869 Sweden and Austria passed laws requiring the wide establishment of school gardens. France did so in 1880, Russia, Belgium and England followed with school garden requirements. In Switzerland, however, we find that education by means of school gardening was a large motive in the work, but in all other countries of Europe it appears to have been undertaken to promote agriculture as an industry. This

motive materially affected the method of teaching school gardening in Europe so that little has been gained by those teachers in America, who have gone abroad to study school gardening, that could be directly adapted in this country.

In 1904 Sir William Macdonald, of Montreal, Canada, established some 20 gardens in the various provinces of Canada. This became the initiative.of a great interest in elementary garden work in Canada, and large grants on the part of the Dominion government have been made to encourage the work since that time.

In 1897, John H. Patterson, of Dayton, Ohio, founded a boys' garden at the National Cash Register Company grounds. This was the first and most successful children's garden known in America. Nearly all of the children's gardens, especially those conducted by welfare organizations and private individuals, have imitated this endeavor in Dayton, Ohio. For more than 20 years Mr. Patterson's effort there has grown and has become more thoroughly established with each season. Early in the century a number of normal schools established school gardens, notably the one at Hyannis, Mass., and it is reported that the Cook County Normal College, in Chicago, had a school garden in 1885. In 1900, the Cleveland Home Garden Association sold penny packets of seeds through the schools to the children of Cleveland. This originated a plan of seed distribution which has been taken up by a number of other cities as well as commercial houses and has greatly facilitated the movement. In 1902, Mrs. Henry Parsons, of New York, started the Children's Farm in the De Witt Clinton Park. This farm and three other large farms have been maintained by the Park Department of Manhattan ever since that time.

Cleveland, Ohio, and Philadelphia, Pa., were the first cities to formally accept school gardening as a part of the regular school work. These cities have conducted regular school garden work for more than a decade.

The United States Bureau of Education, in 1914, established a school garden department. It emphasized the home garden side, and termed it "School Supervised Home Gardens." This work has grown, and has lately been given a large Federal grant to operate the United States School Garden army, so that in the last 25 years the school garden movement in America has become a distinct educational factor and a distinct economic gain in accelerating love and interest in garden work in thousands of schools and millions of homes in the United States.

School Garden Types. The Garden at School - Indoors, the school can support the schoolroom window box and schoolroom flowerpot. The greenhouse on the roof of school buildings is the most practicable, and it may serve as the laboratory for nature study and the natural sciences as well as in part for physical science. Plants may be planted at school by the children and then taken to their homes to be grown, and later exhibited at the school. Class lessons in care of plants, planting seeds, transplanting, watering and other exercises can be easily conducted in the schoolroom. The outdoor garden at the school should be as near to the school building as possible.

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It should be on school property and large enough to contain 40 plots, each plot not smaller than 50 square feet. This will accommodate one class, or grade, and presupposes that all children may have direct work in the school garden, at least during one grade of their school course. One teacher in a given city school should be the teacher of gardening, and preferably a teacher of elementary sciences as well. The garden work should be part of the curriculum, and credit for it should be given as for any other subject.

The best vegetables to begin with in school garden work are evidently the hardy, short season varieties. Beans, beets, kohl rabi, radish, Swiss chard, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, corn, are undoubtedly the best. The best flowers for school garden work are likewise the hardy annuals and long blooming varieties. Sweet alyssum, nasturtium, marigold, asters, zinnia and cosmos are leading varieties.

It is always best to fence the school garden, if not to protect against petty thievery, then it should serve to keep out dogs, cats and other small animals. The school garden should be supplied with running water; should have good drainage; should be in the sunlight and should be richly fertilized. The work may be done with few tools, but a hoe should be supplied for every pupil. Rakes, watering cans, hand weeders, spading forks and garden lines are the principal additional tools required.

The Garden at Home.-The garden at the home of the child has hardly been operated by the school long enough to develop acceptable standardization. There is a general agreement, however, that a home garden, managed by the schools, should be visited by teachers, or those who understand gardening, as frequently as possible. The child should keep a complete record of his garden work according to acceptable standards, and his record should be examined and rated. His garden should be rated at each visit, and instruction should be given in the garden, as far as possible, but the major part of the instruction must of necessity be given at the school garden, if the expense of home garden work is to be kept within the possible appropriation. It would, therefore, seem that the school garden and home garden must go hand in hand if any high attainment in gardening is to be accomplished.

Management of School Gardens. In the management of school gardens the point of view is important, and on account of agricultural demands the education of the child is very liable to be subordinated. The child is greater than the produce. In other words, it is much better that a child plant a row of radish seeds with his own hands, and cover it with his own hoe, than it is to have the teacher plant that row while the child looks on. The radishes planted by the teacher would undoubtedly do better than the radishes planted by the child, provided the skill of the teacher is what it should be, but the child is undoubtedly taught much better by doing every possible agricultural act himself in the school garden.

Individual Project. This is undoubtedly the very best means of facilitating successful school garden work. Every child who is able to do garden work should work out his own individual project or problem in agriculture on a plot of ground assigned for his sole use.

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This individual plot of ground may vary in size according to the age, sex and experience of the child, as well as neighborhood limitations, from 50 square feet to 800 square feet. As a rule it is best that no individual worker grow less than five vegetables, presupposing that these five vegetables may be followed by four or five others at a second planting. This produce provides for educational experience and also for a continuity of interest. For example: If a child were to plant his entire plot to lettuce, he might take the entire crop of lettuce out on the 20th of June, and his interest, of course, could not be retained in his work during the rest of the

season.

Produce for the Child.- Each child should have the produce which he raises on his own individual plot. This gives educational experience and retains interest. When conducted by the school, the direct collections of money for produce is most objectionable. It, therefore, should not be undertaken. However if funds are greatly needed by a given agency undertaking school garden work, it would seem as if each individual worker might be taxed a certain percentage of his produce to maintain the common garden.

Course of Study. One of the greatest hindrances to school garden work is that it has found such slow acceptance in the regular course of study of the school. This has doubtless been due to the fact that the schools are not in session during the chief growing season, which is summer. Shop work, cooking and other manual arts have been placed in the curriculum, and credit for attainment has been given to pupils. But not so generally with school gardening. School gardening can never come into its own until it is placed in the curriculum, either as an industrial art or as a natural science. Pupils who attain the desired standards should be given credit.

School Program. Another thing that has hindered gardening in schools has been the fact that the work can be done outside of what are termed the regular school hours, so that many schools have failed to program school gardening at all as a regular exercise. It, therefore, loses value with teacher and pupil alike. It should be done continuously or not at all. Consequently, the movement has suffered greatly from gardens not properly attended to, which have grown up to weeds.

Garden Teacher.- The school garden teacher should be one of the regular teachers in a given school. The departmental plan of teaching provides for sufficient specialization, The teacher of the sciences, as a rule, should have charge of school gardening.

then it is worth regular public support. The school appropriation for a given city should carry the school garden work. It is indeed unfortunate that welfare organizations have too frequently been entrusted with a burden too great for them to carry long, and hence valuable and devoted effort have frequently ended in dismal failure. Every city in the land with a population over 100,000 should employ a school garden director to administer this work.

The possibilities of food production in large cities where great suburban tracts have been divided up into partly improved city lots have grown out of the school garden development. In many cities large community gardens have been successfully managed. The people have formed a garden club and the nearest vacant lots have been divided into family plots of from 800 square feet to 12,000 square feet each. The features of the Community War Garden have been a number of small family gardens in one group, and these gardens have been upon vacant lots. Some few communities have been able to maintain the gardens in walking distance of homes. A great variety of management has resulted. A city department for food production and conservation should follow these food gardens in our cities. The growth of school gardens has been most striking. Nearly every city in the United States and Canada now has some form of school gardening. The United States School Garden army reports an army of 1,500,000 children gardeners for 1918. VAN EVRIE KILPATRICK, Director of School Gardens, Department of Education, City of New York.

SCHOOL LUNCHES. See RETARDATION OF PUPILS.

SCHOOL NURSES. See RETARDATION OF

Support and Control.- If school gardening is worth while as an integral, educational factor,

glonde Amount de of deposits 30 June 1922

3,054,375 87

Middle Western States..

1,445

Total United States.

4,735

2,206, 144

1,295,607

$6,518,170 66