Real gardens for city nature study. (Public School 45, Indianapolis.)
The work in the Chicago public schools has not been organized as it is in Indianapolis, but in some districts of the city a great deal of emphasis is put on nature study work through gardens. Many of the schools have school gardens where all the children get an opportunity to do real gardening, these gardens being used as the basis for the nature study work, and the children getting instruction in scientific gardening besides. The work is given a civic turn; that is to say, the value of the gardens to the child and to the neighborhood is demonstrated: to the child as a means of making money or helping his family by supplying them with vegetables, to the community in showing how gardens are a means of cleaning up and beautifying the neighborhood. If the residents want their backyards and empty lots for gardens, they are not going to throw rubbish into them or let other people do so. Especially in the streets around one school has this work made a difference. Starting with the interest and effort of the children, the whole community has become tremendously interested in starting gardens, using every bit of available ground. The district is a poor one and, besides transforming the yards, the gardens have been a real economic help to the people. With the help of one school a group of adults in the district hired quite a large tract of land outside the city and started truck gardens. The experiment was a great success. Inexperienced city dwellers, by taking advantage of the opportunities for instruction which the school could offer, were able to plan and do the work and make the garden a success from the start. The advantage to the school was just as great, for a large group of foreign parents came into close touch with it, discovered that it was a real force in the neighborhood, and that they could coöperate with it. This element of the population usually stands quite aloof from the school its children go to, through timidity and ignorance, or simply through feeling that it is an institution above them.
The impetus to “civic nature study” in Chicago, aside from the district just described, has come largely from the Chicago Teachers’ College, where the teacher of biology has devoted himself especially to working out this problem. In addition to the familiar gardening work, with especial attention to the organization of truck gardening, plants are grown in the classroom for purposes of developing appreciation of beauty, scientific illustration, and assistance in geography. But plants are selected with special reference to local conditions, and with the desire to furnish a stimulus to beautifying the pupils’ own environment. For it is found that the scientific principles of botany can be taught by means of growing plants which are adapted to home use as well as by specimens selected on abstract scientific grounds. By making a special study of the parks, playgrounds, and yards of their surroundings, the children learn what can be done to beautify their city, and secure an added practical motive for acquiring information. They keep pets in the schoolroom, such as white mice, fish, birds, and rabbits. While these are utilized, of course, for illustrating principles of animal structure and physiology, they are also employed to teach humaneness to animals and a general sympathy for animal life. This is easy, for children are naturally even more interested in animals than in plants, and the animals become real individualities to the children whose needs are to be respected. As the effect of conditions upon the health and vigor of their pets is noted, there is a natural growth of interest in questions of personal hygiene.
It will be observed that while nature study is used to instill the elements of science, its chief uses are to cultivate a sympathetic understanding of the place of plants and animals in life and to develop emotional and æsthetic interest. In the larger cities the situation is very different from that of rural life and the country village. There are thousands of children who believe that cement and bricks are the natural covering of the ground, trees and grass being to them the unusual and artificial thing. Their thoughts do not go beyond the fact that milk and butter and eggs come from the store; cows and chickens are unknown to them—so much so that in a recent reunion of old settlers in a congested district of New York one of the greatest curiosities was a live cow imported from the country. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to make the scientific problems of nature study of vital interest. There are no situations of the children’s experience into which the facts and principles enter as a matter of course. Even the weather is tempered and the course of the changing seasons has no special effect upon the lives of the pupils, save upon the need for greater warmth in winter. Nature study in the city is like one of the fine arts, such as painting or music; its value is æsthetic rather than directly practical. Nature is such a small factor in the activities of the children that it is hard to give it much “disciplinary” value, save as it is turned to civic ends. A vague feeling for this state of affairs probably accounts for much of the haphazard and half-hearted nature study teaching which goes on in city schools. There is a serious problem in finding material for city children which will do for observation what the facts of nature accomplish in the case of rural children.
A valuable experiment with this end in view is carried on in the little “Play School” taught by Miss Pratt in one of the most congested districts of New York City. Nature study is not taught at all to these little children. If they go to the park or have pets and plant flowers it is because these things make good play material, because they are beautiful and interesting; if the children ask questions and want to know more about them, so much the better. Instead of telling them about leaves and grass, cows and butterflies, and hunting out the rare opportunities for the children to observe them, use is made of the multitudes of things which the children see about them in the streets and in their homes. The new building going up across the street furnishes just as much for observation and questioning as does the park, and is a much more familiar sight to the children. They find out how the men get the bricks and mortar to the upper floors; they see the sand cart unloading; possibly one child knows that the driver has been to the river to get the sand from a boat. They notice the delivery man going through the streets, and find out where he got the bread to take to their mothers. They see the children on the playground and learn that besides the fun they have, the playing is good for their bodies. They walk to the river and see the ferries carrying people back and forth and the coal barges unloading. All these facts are more closely related to them than the things of country life; hence it is more important that they understand their meaning and their relation to their own lives, while acuteness of observation is just as well trained. Such work is also equally valuable as a foundation for the science and geography the pupils will study later on. Besides awakening their curiosity and faculties of observation, it shows them the elements of the social world, which the later studies are meant to explain.
The Elementary School at Columbia, Missouri, has arranged its curriculum according to the same principle. All the material from nature which the children use and study they find near the school or their homes, and their study of the seasons and the weather is made from day to day, as the Columbia weather and seasons change. Even more important is the work the children do in studying their own town, their food, clothing, and houses, so that the basis of the study is not instruction given by the teacher but what the children themselves have been able to find out on excursions and by keeping their eyes open. The material bears a relation to their own lives, and so is the more available for teaching children how to live. The reasons for teaching such things to the city bred child are the same as those for teaching the country child the elements of gardening and the possibilities of the local soil. By understanding his own environment child or adult learns the measure of the beauty and order about him, and respect for real achievement, while he is laying the foundations for his own control of the environment.