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“A Better Crop of Boys and Girls”: The School Gardening Movement, 1890–1920
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
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In the 1890s progressive educators like John Dewey proposed expansive ideas about integrating school and society. Working to make the boundaries between classroom learning and pupils' natural environment more permeable, for example, Dewey urged teachers to connect intellectual and practical elements within their curricula. Highly visible and widespread examples of this integrative goal were the school gardens that flourished from the 1890s well into the twentieth century. Evidence of their presence is recorded in newspapers, national magazines, and annual school reports whose illustrations typically portrayed well-dressed children cultivating large gardens next to impressive urban school buildings. Whether in large cities or country settings, school gardens were expressions of modern and progressive education of the sort encouraged by Dewey. Gardens were encouraged in theory and in practice not only at the laboratory school affiliated with the University of Chicago but also in normal schools across the country (Figure 1).
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References
1 School and Society (1899) was written at a time of optimism and high productivity for Dewey, John, and he argued eloquently for schools in which children's social and natural environments were connected to intellectual and practical instruction. He suggested, among many other things, that object lessons presented for the sake of processing information were no “substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden acquired through actually living among them and caring for them.” See Dewey, John, The Middle Works, 1899–1901, ed. Boydon, JoAnn, 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 33–35; quote on 8.Google Scholar
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117 Her stories and many other accounts are found in a large scrapbook of School Garden Army newspaper clippings, Historical File, 1870–1950, OCE, USNA.Google Scholar
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129 Lawson, , “Urban-Garden Programs in the United States” devotes chapter seven to urban gardens in general during the depression of the 1930s.Google Scholar
130 Bullough, , Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age, 22–23.Google Scholar
131 Anna Botsford Comstock noted that the Cornell education program was going in this direction in “American Nature-Study Society.” Science 57 (February 1923): 184. For a description of such efforts see Arthur Newton Pack, The Nature Almanac: A Handbook of Nature Education (Washington: American Nature Society, 1927).Google Scholar
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