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the future. Our women had lost the art of using their hands—they had never learned how to use the needle. They have learned now. Our children are learning now, and I hope that every child in America will join this Junior Red Cross, not only for what the organization can do now, but for what it will mean for the future. I am glad that we have 100 per cent membership in the schools of our city.

I might mention other ways and other means of teaching thrift, for there are many others. The ones I have mentioned are important and also successful. The important thing is to teach thrift in its broad sense in the schools. We cannot have too much of it. We should try constantly to have our children practice the habit of self-denial. The feeling that they have something in reserve will take away much of the nerve strain that is common to the "high-strung" American people. This reserve can be obtained only by systematic saving and strict economy. We should keep these ideas before our children if we want to bring up a nation of strong and independent individuals.

C.

INCREAST FOOD PRODUCTION—HOME GARDENING

ELMER C. SHERMAN, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ENGLEWOOD, N.J.

A great war, a great national emergency, has served to discover to us that some things urged as war measures have an educational value of which we are not aware or of which we have not made use. It can hardly happen that after the war we shall not profit by the lessons we are now learning. I find myself unable to consider gardening as a war problem except as the war has emphasized its importance and has revealed it to us as an economic and educational problem worthy of serious consideration among the permanent phases of school work.

The first of the many activities in which the schools were askt to aid in the conduct of the war was that of increasing the food supply of the country. With no experience to guide them and with little time to formulate plans, educational administrators, with the hearty cooperation of teachers and pupils, attackt the problem with earnestness and with no small measure of success. Boys and girls in many states were excused from school and set to work to aid the farmers and the market gardeners; here and there patriotic cities and towns undertook community gardening in which the labor of children unable to leave home was utilized; the cultivation of back yards and vacant lots was increast manyfold, partly by adults, but in very large degree by children; and canning, the necessary corollary of this back-yard gardening, was revived or learned for the first time by many thousands of housewives and their children helpers, and became an important household industry everywhere. Of all the ways in which the schools aided in increasing the food supply of the nation, the two last-named-home gardening and

canning bid fair to increase greatly while the war lasts and to become a permanent and valuable phase of school training.

If gardening as a school subject is to be a success, whether from an economic or an educational standpoint, it must be organized as other school work is organized; it must be recognized as a legitimate and desirable subject of the school curriculum. Garden clubs have their places in arousing interest and enthusiasm, in demonstrating what can be done by boys and girls, in giving this new field of school effort a start. But they reach as a rule only those who have a natural interest in the matter-those who have the greatest amount of enthusiasm, of perseverance, and of imagination. They will not serve to make a practical knowledge of gardening the possession of all boys and girls any more than geography clubs would give to all school children an adequate knowledge of the earth on which we live. Successful gardening means something more than the possession of a plot of ground and some seeds. The assumption that anyone can raise a garden is a mistake. The cultivation of the soil is both a science and an art. It requires knowledge and skill based upon the application of that knowledge.

In the organization of gardening there is needed first a supervisor. This should be a man or a woman with practical knowledge of the subject, with initiative, with contagious enthusiasm, with teaching power. Such a person should be employed for the entire school year with a vacation of a month or two in midwinter instead of in midsummer as in the case of other teachers. Any town of ten thousand people or upward, and even some smaller cities, can profitably employ a garden supervisor on such a basis. No other teacher will be able to show such direct results of his work in dollars and cents.

Three very distinct phases of the training of pupils in gardening must be distinguisht. These are instruction, demonstration, and supervision of the home garden. Each of these is an essential part of an efficient plan.

1. Instruction.-Classroom instruction should be given thruout the school year to all pupils of Grades V to VIII with one lesson, or better two lessons, per week. A course in gardening should be offered in the high school as a part of the science course. In smaller places most of this instruction will be given by the supervisor; in larger places it must be given wholly or in part by class teachers or assistants, but under the direction of the supervisor, who will plan most carefully the course in respect to both content and method. This course will consider plant life, soil, fertilizers, rainfall and irrigation, birds and insects, in their relation to the farm and garden. The course will correlate with drawing in laying out the garden and drawing to scale a diagram; with arithmetic when children are taught to keep their garden accounts neatly and accurately and to estimate profit and loss; and with shopwork in the construction of hotbeds, cold frames, and germination beds. Thus classroom instruction carefully and wisely planned, laying the foundation for the actual out-of-doors work and linkt closely to other

subjects of the curriculum, is essential to any permanent success in making gardening a worth-while school subject.

2. Demonstration.-There should be attacht to each school a plot of ground to be cultivated as a demonstration garden. If possible it should be on the school grounds or adjacent to them. If not, a vacant lot should be obtained for the purpose as near as may be to the school. When the time for making gardens comes many of the indoor lessons will be transferred to this garden where the children will be shown how to prepare the soil, how to plant the seeds, and how to care for the young plants. All this will have for its ultimate purpose, not the demonstration garden itself, but the hundreds of back-yard gardens scattered about the community, which the children are about to cultivate for themselves.

In addition to the demonstration garden and for a similar purpose other equipment is needed for the winter when out-of-door work cannot be done. Hotbeds and cold frames should be constructed. Wherever possible a room should be set aside as a sort of garden laboratory-a workroom where winter planting could be done in connection with the hotbeds, where germination could be studied, where experiments with soils and with fertilizers could be conducted. Such work, even of the most elementary character, would be of the greatest value as a part of the instruction in this subject. A greenhouse would of course be the ideal equipment for this course.

3. Supervision of the home garden. We must not assume that after the child has received instruction at school he will proceed to cultivate a successful garden without further oversight, advice, and encouragement. We ought to know children too well to believe anything of the kind. The seeds will not come up, the weeds will get ahead of him, his dog or his neighbor's chickens will scratch up a part of the garden. He doesn't know what to do when something unexpected happens. He gets discouraged and quits. All the effort that has been made to teach him is thus lost. He suffers morally too from the fact that he has failed to persevere and has abandoned a project undertaken perhaps with much enthusiasm. His garden, therefore, should be regularly visited by a sympathetic, helpful inspector who will encourage him when he is getting discouraged, spur him on when he is getting careless, help him when he is in difficulty. Such visits should be made once a week until the garden is well under way. As gardening is assumed to be a school subject for which regular school credit is to be given, the inspector will at each visit give a mark to indicate the faithfulness of the work done and the appearance of the garden.

The matter of inspection furnishes the most difficult problem in carrying out our plan. The difficulty is of two kinds: (1) Where shall we find the inspectors and (2) can we afford the cost? The most valuable persons to employ would be the teachers who know the children and know how to deal with them. It seems probable that teachers could be found in almost every school who would undertake this work with enthusiasm. There are in every

community people of comparative leisure who are ready to help in a project promising so much of value as this, and who might therefore be used for inspectional work.

The cost of properly organizing the work in gardening so that it may produce the maximum amount of food and have the maximum educational value is considerable. But it will pay. If we are to help the nation to the fullest extent of our ability in increasing the food supply, if we are to train our children in a valuable way thru this work, and if we are to make a knowledge of gardening function in a useful way in their lives as men and women, we must adopt a serious plan, we must organize it thoroly, we must, in short, devote as much thought, as much care, and relatively as much money to it as we do in the case of the older and better-recognized subjects of instruction.

D. A PRACTICAL PROGRAM OF PATRIOTIC INSTRUCTION FRANCIS G. BLAIR, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION,

SPRINGFIELD, ILL.

It is as impossible to define patriotism as it is to paint a picture of your mother. In a sense patriotism is an atmosphere. It is an emotion, a habit of thought, an attitude of mind. We may, by pedagogic device, create the atmosphere, but the thing itself must spring from within. In this war crisis there are some well-meaning persons who, impatient with the slow processes of education, seem to think that patriotism can be called forth by command, by fiat-that our emotions and spiritual attitudes can be commandeered like our physical properties. They seem to think that patriotism of the right brand can be manufactured by some special plan or method of instruction. To be sure, a right attitude toward it and a proper appreciation of it can be aroused, but it can hardly be compelled. One may be encouraged to see and think and feel and act patriotically, but it can hardly be thrust upon him.

Fortunately, in a time like this, when the very air we breathe quivers with national emotion and national spirit, we have our best motive and our best condition for creating thru education the atmosphere of patriotism in the home and the school. How may we use the mighty impulse of this great hour in our national life to beget in our children a deeper and sounder love for our own country without engendering a hatred for other countries? How may we arouse an appreciation of, and a faith in, the ideals and purposes of our own institutions without firing them with a bigoted zeal to thrust these institutions upon other peoples?

The purpose of such work is a noble one and the prospect is full of hope, altho hardly free from difficulties and dangers. What educational devices may we use to arouse patriotic emotions and translate these emotions into

habits of thought and deeds? Flag raisings and salutes, flag drills, patriotic music and songs, addresses and readings presenting national ideals in an appealing form, all these have been tried and have proved their power to stir deeply the emotions of children. Too often, however, we have filled them with feeling without furnishing them with practical means for expressing it in thought and deeds.

The flag drills and salutes and the singing by the children offer agreeable and worth-while expressions of their emotions. The committing to memory of good selections and reciting them has distinct values. A high-school girl at the opening exercises tells the story of Alan Seeger, the English poet who, as a volunteer soldier, gave his life on the battle front. In conclusion she refers to the poem he wrote while in the trenches entitled, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death." When she concludes a high-school boy dressed in khaki stands forth and recites those lines:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath

It may be I shall pass him still.

But I've a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death,

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

An eighth-grade boy, after telling how he thought this war was going to reunite the North and South and stating that the grandson of General Grant and the grandson of General Lee were both fighting side by side on the battle front in France, recites the following lines:

Here's to the blue of the wind-swept North,

As they meet on the fields of France!

May the spirit of Grant be over them all
As the sons of the North advance!

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